Waxing Philosophical, Booksellers Face the Digital

The NYTimes peeks into BookExpo, the publishing industry’s annual convention that ended yesterday, and they say the battering ram of technology was back.
Google and Microsoft both had large presences at the expo at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York, where about 35,000 publishers, booksellers, authors, agents and librarians attended the four-day carnival of promotion for the all-important fall lineup of titles. A panel sponsored by MySpace.com, the social networking site, drew a standing-room-only crowd, as did another discussion on the influence of literary blogs. Vendors offering to digitize books proliferated.