post BEC musings

Tired, so very tired.

After two days in Toronto at the annual Book Expo Canada I'm a bit confused by it all.
On the one hand, there are too many booksellers fixated on dual pricing battles that were red hot last year. It's out of the media now so we rarely hear it anymore. What is in the media is the rise of the e-reader, but I didn't hear too much of it. (Whistling past the graveyard? Who the hell knows? Although if publishers want to get into bed with Amazon, they can damn sure expect things to get more interesting.
Saturday was filled with seminars around independent business acting in concert against the chains and Bill (End of Nature) McKibben was a very inspirational and forceful speaker on our behalf. Most of the reasons for buying local are fairly obvious to most citizens, but McKibben has an enviable took kit to help booksellers educate their own customers and chain store's customers as well. We just need to reach them.
It was an eye opener seeing what some other booksellers are doing to prosper in what can be a tough environment.

Sunday was a day for meeting authors and finding out where the good books are coming from.
I'm particularly pleased that one of my favourite outfits now has Canadian distribution through Penguin Canada.
That means the good stuff (and most of it is damnably good) gets here in three days instead of ten or twelve. I'm content to groove on that for now.

Posted by Dave