Book makers unsure the rest is still unwritten

BookExpo Canada took over the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for a few days, and most of the coverage surrounded the potential obsolescence of those very volumes being promoted to sellers, librarians and critics. Yet, the celebrities pushing lowbrow wares for fall don’t provide much of an argument for the preservation of the printing press either – Tommy Chong was there to stir up interest in his jailhouse memoir, Dr. Ruth Westheimer appeared to plug the third edition of Sex For Dummies, and coffee table book U2 by U2 merited a sidewalk chalk mural. BookExpo kicked off with a conference dubbed “Writers to Readers: Linking the Content Creators to the End Users”, the sort of terminology meant to make the publishing industry feel like they’re part of something loftier than words on a page. Famous technophobe Margaret Atwood’s surreal response to digitization, an automated autograph device called the LongPen, also made its local debut – publishers will be charged $3,750 for five virtual signings that would have all the visceral excitement of an encounter with Blinky the Talking Police Car. A party in the Distillery District for the 100th anniversary of publishers McClelland & Stewart earned a recap at Bookninja, as blogging poet George Murray was taken aback by the popularity of his own site, although it’s fairly obvious that online conversations can be more conducive to making a new book seem vital than the stodgy confines of a newspaper review. What’s required are the personalities assertive enough to exploit the potential for a real literary feud – otherwise, internet discussion of the industry will consist of pronouncements of doom, e.g. Books will disappear. Print is where words go to die. But the enthusiasm felt by a first-time author is also capable of being transmitted over the internets – blog vivant James Bow attended BookExpo to shill for his young adult novel The Unwritten Girl, and trudging through the PATH on the way to his Convention Centre duties found him inhaling toner from a location of The Printing House, which made him particularly nostalgic about his own 20-year progress from sci-fi zine publisher to author pressing the flesh at a trade show: “The slightly sulphury smell of the copy machines was the smell of creativity.” Bow will be dropping into Nicholas Hoare Books (45 Front St. E.) on Sunday (June 18) to sign his name in a non-robotic manner while he still can.