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'How many more BEAs?'

1 June 2009

This weekend the Javits Center in New York has been thronged with the thousands of people attending BookExpo, the biggest annual book show in North America. It's clear from the coverage that a mass of interesting author events and the usual promotional round are making this BookExpo seem as busy as ever, and attendance figures are only slightly down. But behind the scenes questions are being asked about this huge and expensive show.

Time was when the American Booksellers Association (ABA), as it was then called, was a major stop in the publishing year, with the huge American book fair attracting vast attendances as it made its stately progress around the country. It favoured different cities each year, although Chicago was often chosen, its geographical position and status as an airline hub meaning that it attracted both East and West coast booksellers.

But that was before bookselling chains got bigger and many independent booksellers found themselves struggling to stay in business. The ABA in those days was about the big American publishers (who have also got larger and fewer) selling in their fall lists to American booksellers, with what seemed to outsiders like a lot of amazingly expensive but exciting razzmatazz.

The ABA never really made it as a rights fair, although publishers from all over the world did make the trip, and it never had a chance of competing with Frankfurt. For American publishers the focus was always their own gigantic domestic market and in a time of recession it's not surprising that this is still the case. For the rest of the world it's often easier to get to the London Book Fair, which has supplanted BEABookExpo America, commonly referred to within the book publishing industry as BEA. The largest annual book trade fair in the United States as the spring rights gathering for the book world, with Frankfurt still holding its position as the autumn biggie.

There's no doubt though that the American book world is suffering worse than the book trade elsewhere. With the US still in the grip of recession there have been large job losses and not much optimism about the future. The Brits still cling to the idea that books do well in times of recession and, although the ride has been bumpy, the overall picture is not so bad there or elsewhere as it is in the States.

Veteran publishing commentator Mike Shatzkin, with 37 ABAs and BEAs to his credit, thinks that the fair is not going to last much longer. Although the end has been staved off by fixing it in a regular New York venue for the next few years (which saves the publishers huge bills for taking their staff to the fair), the real problem is that booksellers, who used to place orders at the convention, are no longer attending BookExpo in the way they used to do.

His blog concludes: 'The BEA of today isn't the ABA of old. The booksellers are just about gone. The late-night hospitality suites don't exist anymore. And hardly any publisher goes to the show expecting to write orders. 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.'

Publishers Weekly BEA coverage

Mike Shatzkin's blog

International Books Fairs 2009