At first, Book Expo America, the largest annual book-industry event/circus in North America, which opened at McCormick Place Wednesday, seemed like a wonderful dream. I walked into the exhibit hall and saw an enormous banner that read “Harry Potter: It’s Magic”; beneath it, nice people from Scholastic publishing were handing out short, bound excerpts of the new illustrated edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. I walked a little further into the Hachette booth where publicists stood by handing out free books like they were candy—they also handed out tote bags to hold the free books. It was like Halloween, if you are like me and, when given a choice, will almost always choose a new book over candy. (The candy has to be pretty damned extraordinary.)
BEA is, above all, a trade fair. Those lines snaked past secluded meeting areas where people in suits sat at tables and chairs talking about subsidiary and foreign rights and going over the contents of their seasonal catalogs with bookstore owners and librarians. Aside from the galley frenzy, though, a lot of those tables sat empty, even within the special partitioned-off Penguin Random House deal-making area.
