So how to report on BEA?
OK, so I was trying to figure out how to properly report on BEA but not making much real progress. Until I started to read other folks' reports, especially the official ones, with quotes from multiple participants avec soundbites and such. And so many of them were expressing the fundamental pointlessness of the whole endeavor. (I'll skip the links, since some nice people were quoted saying very silly things...)—the LA Times and Publishers Lunch had a chunk of them, if you must know whereof I speak.)
Which made me wonder: are the participants in this business really so solipsistic (autistic, even?!) that they would pass up the primary annual opportunity to lay eyes on one another? To have personal contact? I bloody love BEA. I love giving personal, eyeball-to-eyeball thanks to the bookseller, journalists, writers, sales reps, who keep me in business. I love trying to give them good reason to continue doing so. I love the drinking, dancing, schmoozing, yapping, flirting, ass-kissing, whining that is the massive conversation that is BEA.
So my report will consist of periodic mentions of the people I typically meet only virtually, if that, during the year, but whom, in some cases for the very first time, I got to lay eyes on at Book Expo America last Thursday to Sunday.
Starting with Kassia Krozer, aka Booksquare, (two excellent BEA posts: (Online) Myths Overheard at BEA 2008 and The eBook Problem and The eBook Solution) and the person who turns out to be her husband, Kirk Biglione, of Medialoper. Both seriously wise folks on the future of publishing and new media.