Gutenberg vs The ENIAC

Book Expo America (BEA) is the North American book industry's annual conference. Publishers, authors, book-sellers and a few librarians gather at the Javits Center in New York City for a spectacular show-and-tell of what's new, what's hot and what's coming in the world of books. Generally, more than 25,000 people participate. This year, I was one of them.

So, what's new, what's hot? Justin Cronin's "The Passage" is THE must-read novel of the summer. Cronin's daughter asked him to write a book where a little girl saves the world. So he did: A post-apocalyptic epic with vampires, mutant viruses and a 6-year-old orphan named Amy Harper Bellafonte. This one is guaranteed to keep you up all night.

Book-sellers reading galley proofs predict that the big title of early 2011 will be a debut novel, "The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore" by Benjamin Hale. This one is being published by Twelve. Established in 2005 with the objective of publishing no more than one book per month, Twelve has thus far published 37 titles. Nineteen of these have been on the New York Times Bestsellers list.

These are p-books (the new term for printed books), but the real hot topic at BEA was e-books – e-books and e-readers, both electronic and human. My first session was with the Book Industry Study Group which has been surveying print book readers for decades and is now looking at their attitudes toward e-books.

E-books constitute 5 percent of overall book sales at the moment, but that number grew exponentially in the last quarter surveyed. E-book readers are primarily in the middle to high-income bracket, and they say they like e-books because they are affordable, portable, offer instant access and are environmentally friendly. Nearly half said they are now exclusively reading e-books.

The p-book I brought with me for evening relaxation, "The Book," by M. Clifford, is a near-future dystopia where there are no p-books. In recognition of paper's role in the destruction of the environment, there has been a Great Recycling of printed books, and now everyone reads The Book, the name for the device that provides "books," news and all other information.

The hero of this story is Holden Clifford. A bit of a loser, divorced, absent-minded, unkempt, Holden works installing sprinkler systems and spends the rest of his time reading stories on The Book. He's especially fond of "pre-digital" novels and enjoys quoting Charles Dickens. His eccentricities are tolerated because he's a very good sprinkler fitter.

Holden's only social activity is sharing an occasional beer or two with his childhood friend Shane. The Library, their favorite bar, has walls that are papered with random pages torn from printed books before the Great Recycling. One night, a bit of "wall paper" in the men's bathroom catches Holden's eye. He realizes it is a page from one of his favorite stories, "The Catcher in the Rye," which he has read many times. Except ... it's not quite the same.

He peels off the page and dashes home to compare it to the version on The Book. It has been altered! He shares this with the bar's owner Marion the Librarian, and she spends the night comparing her wall paper pages to The Book. All of them have been changed.

As she shows her findings to Holden, they discover the building is on fire. The Library will soon be nothing but ash and rubble and Holden and Marion fugitives. The Department of Homeland Preservation has one word for those who question The Book: Terrorist.

Back at BEA, I learn that Google plans to bring the world to e-books and e-books to the world. This summer, they are launching a free platform for publishers who want to enter the e-book market. Google will digitize print into a format playable on ANY electronic device. They're betting that smartphones will be the people's choice.

More than 500 authors came to BEA this year; it's a paradise for autograph collectors. You have to wait in line a long time for the big celebrities, but there was no line for Chris Hedges, the author I was after. His "Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle" was the very first book I wrote about in this column.

The final session I attended was on the future of book culture. Publishers, professional critics and bloggers agreed that p-books will not go away any time soon. At the same time, all attention is focused on the e-book. Independent publishers are hopeful that it will level the playing field for them. Most found the "democratization" of criticism on the Internet to be a positive trend. Everyone loves a beautifully designed book, but, hey, have you seen the graphics on the iPad?

"The Empire of Illusion" cites Neil Postman's comparison of "1984" by George Orwell and "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. According to Postman, Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information; Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture; Huxley that we would become a trivial one. In "The Book," Clifford seems to fear both; those I met at BEA, neither. As for me, I am firmly resolved to never use the term p-book ever again.