Sometimes amazing things happen when you get out of your crib.

Recently, I was invited by the City of Barcelona to attend and speak at a seminar on "The Future of Publishing." A bona-fide boondoggle, the city council would pay for me to come over and do a one-hour live interview onstage with another publishing journalist, the woman who runs the book section of the Parisian newspaper Le Monde. The organizers told me who some of the other visiting speakers would be: Sonny Mehta, Jane Friedman, Jamie Byng and Andrew Wylie were all on the list.

Oh, poor me.

I expected to have fun and maybe say something somebody might deem useful. What I hadn't counted on was how much I'd learn, both from the 200+ people in the audience for my interview (not bad, but nothing compared to the 500+ SRO crowd who'd come to hear the legendary Mehta the night before) and from the editors and agents with whom I spent much of my 48-hour sojourn.

Stuff like:

European critics and periodicals suffer some of the same pressures that Americans do when it comes to covering books: most papers have cut back on pages allotted to publishing. More surprisingly, pressure from conglomerates to write fonder reviews of books that come from a synergistic enterprise seems an even bigger problem there than here.

Books like The Da Vinci Code have international legs—one editor told me she thought the Dan Brown blockbuster had sold around a million copies in Spain, an enormous number in such a relatively small market. Well over half of the books Spanish editors buy are foreign (and many of those are American). In the States, less than 15% of trade books are translated from another language.

Which might explain why... of the dozen or so publishing people I spent time with, all of them can speak, read and write in at least two languages. (One, a French-Canadian editor in her 30s, moved to Barcelona 11 years ago and now acquires and edits in four languages, including Spanish and Catalan.) I don't have statistics on this, but I suspect there are a few fewer quadralingual editors stateside.

Still, publishing is publishing, and there are some activities that are universal: worrying about Google, for example, which Andrew Wylie intended to speak about on that Friday; worrying over the tastes of the marketplace, although at least the people I spoke with seemed unabashed about admitting their preference for "literary" titles over "commercial" ones; and worrying in general. (I'm now able to say and understand "Doesn't anyone edit anymore?" in at least a couple of idiomas.)

That said, the mood felt optimistic, and several people opined that Jane Friedman's talk (which I missed) was terrific precisely because she was so hopeful and energized about the future. And why shouldn't Spanish publishers be hopeful? Their market may be smaller and they may have the same worries as the rest of us, but they love books and publishing and they live in a culture that loves them, too. Did I mention the two-day event (plus the Year of the Book that preceded it) was sponsored by the city and free to all attendees?

That—and they've perfected one of the skills most important to a successful publishing life.

It's called the four-hour publishing lunch. Salud!