Melville House Books

Well, it’s that time of year again: time for the muddle of ideas that is BookExpo America, which starts in New York City today. In a post on the IdeaLogical blog, Mike Shatzkin wonders aloud (my lips move when I read) how many more there will be: “It is time to organize a betting pool where the question is: how many more BEAs before, like its Canadian counterpart, it simply ceases? Three? Four? Hard to see more than that.”

He also remembers back to when the American book industry’s major convention still had a fairly clear purpose — for booksellers to meet publishers — and was run by the American Booksellers Association, before it sold the rights to Reed Exhibitions, and he offers a concise history explaining how it got to from that to its current confused state: “Reed set out to expand that aspect of things and to make the show bigger and better. But their timing was terribly unfortunate. The long expansion of the US book trade, which had continued pretty much unabated from World War II until the mid-1990s, stopped and started to reverse in the internet age. Even worse for the industry trade show, consolidation of both big publishers and retailers accelerated. That meant fewer publisher customers to buy the booth space, and fewer retailers walking the aisles to make the booth space valuable … Things had evolved to the point where publishers were paying good money for booth space to be sitting targets for consultants and new tech propositions to put forth their propositions. How long, I wondered, would publishers pay good money to make prospecting for work efficient for me and others like me?”

Meanwhile, an Associated Press wire story says that while “This weekend’s BookExpo America will be a good time for … worrying,” it makes it seem the problem is not the fault of the BEA itself, but rather the impact of the economic crisis: “The show will likely cover 20 percent to 25 percent less space than last year and cocktails, rather than dinners, will be the standard for after-hours gatherings.”

Show director Lane Fensterman puts an even more positive spin on it than that: Reed is getting rid of the riff-raff, he explained in a recent report on Publishers Lunch. “The show is right-sizing,” he says. “The show has been probably too large and some of the presence from the publishers too much…. This a process that probably should have happened and needs to happen. The economy is a catalyst to make this happen faster.”

Hmmm, and here we at Melville House thought we’d opted out because we couldn’t afford it.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.