BEA 2016: Live Coverage

After 12 years away, BookExpo America returned to Chicago’s McCormick Place last week. Here’s our coverage of the show, from the expo’s hot galleys to its conversation-starting programming on rights, royalties, and the state of digital publishing.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, laid out a sprawling vision for the future of digital publishing at IDPF's DigiCon conference.

A proposed merger of IDPF and the World Wide Web consortium is intended to speed up the development of digital publishing technologies, but not all IDPF members are on board.

Rakuten Kobo CEO Michael Tamblyn notes that readers over the age of 50 drive e-book sales, though they still love their print titles.

The next step for the buy local movement is to move it into the policy arena, said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

Polish publishers see a promising future in the country's billion-dollar book market, but growth will not come without challenges.

A discussion on Wednesday between two publishers, a literary agent, and the executive director of the Authors Guild floated the possibility of a single royalty rate across book formats.

While some attendees, especially booksellers, rejoiced at a more “intimate” BEA, this year's show, in the Windy City for the first time in 12 years, left others concerned about what’s lost when the event leaves its standing locale of New York City.

Building relationships in one's local community is key to creating productive and profitable events, a panel of four veteran booksellers told an audience of 50 at BEA on Wednesday.

The Thursday adult author breakfast at BEA mixed humor with difficult subjects like slavery and the continuing divisions within our country.

For the Thursday morning panel called Current Trends in YA, author Daniel Kraus rattled off a few crops of recent strains he’s observed, including books about “body parts, agoraphobia, and strange disease books.”

A panel of three bestselling authors criticized the traditional publishing model and advised writers to maintain as much control over their intellectual property as they can.

“For many, China is a black box,” said Ruediger Wischenbart, director of international affairs for BookExpo America, as part of his introduction to China By the Numbers, a panel discussion which sought to deliver straightforward data to those interested in the Chinese market.

Unit sales of e-books published by traditional publishers fell 13% in 2015 compared to 2014, said Kempton Mooney of Nielsen during a Thursday panel aimed at examining different publishing markets.

While there are always plenty of big books and authors from major publishers at BEA, in talking to frontline booksellers and librarians we found a lot of interest in books from smaller houses as well. Here we present a sampling of the books that especially caught the eyes of conventiongoers.

There are a lot of heavy hitters at this year's BEA, but four titles consistently came up in conversations with book buyers: Colson Whitehead's 'The Underground Railroad,' 'The Nix' by Nathan Hill, 'Commonwealth' by Ann Patchett, and 'The Girls' by Emma Cline.

At the ABA town hall, booksellers raised a range of issues, from paying a living wage to whether cover prices should be removed from books.