To sum up: BEA will be your mirror

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Is the HarperCollins meeting room at BEA (above) half empty or half full? That depends on how you see things. In today’s paper, L.A. Times books editor David L. Ulin takes a look back at the 2009 BEA:

The best way to think about this year’s BookExpo America -- the book industry’s annual trade show and convention that concluded Sunday at the Jacob Javits Center -- is as a mirror: What you see reflects who you are.

For major publishing conglomerates such as Random House, which scaled back its presence to nearly nothing, or Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which opted off the floor altogether, there was a sense of retrenchment, a feeling that the business model had irrevocably shifted -- although to what exactly, no one was quite sure.

But for independent publishers -- from the midsized Grove Atlantic to the fiercely iconoclastic Akashic and the up-and-coming Two Dollar Radio -- there was an air of possibility, the belief that the future was very much in play.

A survey of roundups offers just such disparate opinions. Industry trade magazine Publishers Weekly’s reporter heard ‘a lack of digital talk’ and instead found ‘the chatter on the convention floor was largely about books.’ Yet at the New York Times, Motoko Rich tells a different story: ‘publishers seemed to be putting their own stamps on the increasingly frenzied conversation about electronic books that has hijacked the business.’

The back-and-forth between classic publishing’s dour outlook and new media’s enthusiasm led Bob Thompson of the Washington Postto write, ‘BookExpo America was almost guaranteed to make your head hurt.’ Either that or the champagne that was being passed around to celebrate the upcoming memoir from Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, ‘Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?”

-- Carolyn Kellogg