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On March 5^th, Linda E. & Scott attended the Baker & Taylor Vendor Fair at the Embassy Suites in Concord, NC. Over 50 publishers were there with booths, though only twelve of them were involved in the presentation session.

The morning presentations were, for the most part, previews of upcoming notable titles or catalog overviews. There were several children’s publishers like Black Rabbit Books, Rourke Publishing, Weigl Publishers, and Lerner Books. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Penguin emphasized their children’s and young adult titles, too. The flavor of the moment for young folks definitely seems to be vampires, witches and ghosts. Repeated emphasis on easy-to-read and “high interest” titles certainly gave one pause to consider the state of our educational system.

Amidst all this, it was almost a relief to hear the Wiley-Blackwell representative expound the virtues of their 12 hottest clinical medicine titles. From the other presenters, there was news of some interesting forthcoming titles worth jotting down. Mayberry fans will be glad to know that Thomas Nelson has an Andy Griffith autobiography in the works. ABC-CLIO were touting various expensive, 5 volume reference sets from Praeger and Greenwood on subjects like hate crimes and the African American experience. They looked a bit paint-by-numbers for college research, except for the “Shakespeare Encyclopedia,” which should be worth looking into when it comes out.

Though it is already several years old, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt were still flogging the 11^th edition of their Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries. They come with a CD-R so you can download the entire text, along with audible pronunciations of the words, onto your computer, making the book itself somewhat superfluous for students like ours who are conjoined to their laptops. If you want to know the difference between the collegiate edition and the one for high-schoolers, they left the dirty words out of the latter.

During lunch, Sydney Stanley and Hugh Levin from Baker & Taylor gave presentations on the publishing entities owned by B&T. They’re obviously focusing on ways to cut out the middle man in a difficult market. Besides Silver Dolphin (children’s books), there’s their value publishing line of quite handsome books by Thunder Bay Press. Although they only publish 30 to 50 titles a year, they provide 80% of the books you see at Costco. Then, there’s the curiously extensive and ponderously successful line of books from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader. The water closet may become the last bastion of literacy in America.

While waiting for the booth areas to open, we got the chance to catch up with our former YBP rep, Anne-Marie Breaux. We also got to chat for a while with a couple of counterparts from Davis Library at UNC. It was a little disconcerting to hear, so soon after expanding our approval program, that they are probably going to have to cut theirs back this year. They’re also going to have to do a serial cutback.

There were other signs of the times. When we asked why Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press were sharing a booth, we were told that it was to save money on the vendor fee. The Penguin Group booth was a doublewide, but they told us they’d had to cut back on the number of titles they were publishing.

The niftiest thing we saw was a little gadget called “Playaway.” Designed to be the next big thing in the books-on-tape (or CD) market, Playaways are little IPOD-like devices that hold one book each. Nearly indestructible, we were told, these things last virtually forever. They gave up testing them after 1,001 playings. Should audio books ever become an interest for us, these doodads would definitely be worth investigating.

All in all, it was an interesting event. While there was some evidence that the economic slowdown is having an impact, it was still abundantly evident that there are still far more worthwhile books coming out that we could ever possibly afford or have room for!

Linda E. & Scott