Old habits are hard to break. With BEA’s switch to a mid-week show and just two days of floor exhibits, a number of veteran fairgoers were confused to learn this morning that the show floor does not open until tomorrow. Sufficiently so that BEA pushed out an e-mail reminder on this point. Today is for conferences only (though the Rights Center is open, and remainders buyers are allowed on the floor.)
But the conference sessions are crowded indeed. With digital publishing very much top of the agenda, the realignment of the IDBF conference to run concurrently with BEA has been a clear success, with a more-than-sold-out crowd over 700 registrants.
At a press conference, show director Steve Rosato said they were seeing a “robust increase” in attendance after last year’s decline, expecting to up between 5 and 10 percent (driven by a surge of registrations within the past week).
Before the floor officially opens tomorrow, look for a late-breaking press scrum at the children’s breakfast–all due to recent notoriety of moderator and children’s book author Sarah Ferguson. While Ferguson is not expected to stray at the all from the bookish agenda, it is her first public appearance since the pay-for-access scandal broke earlier this week.
We’re already getting lots of lovely feedback (and thousands of views) on our BEA mobile app (and a quick heads-up helped us fix the iPhone schedule clock this morning). As announced, we’ve reinvented the “show daily” and show directory for the electronic age.
In yet one more experiment–yes, one more–we have a special Twitter feed @liveBEA that feeds into the app, designed to give you real-time floor intelligence. So we’ll have rapid-fire posts on book giveaways; big authors; lines to avoid (or join); Starbucks, lunch and bathroom line reconnaissance; and more. Have fun with it!
For the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, and Android phones, visit this url:
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/bea
On Apple devices, click the ” + ” sign to put our launch icon onto your screen.
For Blackberries and most other phones with mobile browsers, visit this url:
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/bea/bb
and just bookmark the home page.
And in another app experiment that’s actually not ours, there’s an app that aims to crowdsource voting on which books are capturing fairgoers attention.
It comes from Perseus as an encore to last year’s all-consuming Book: The Sequel BEA project in which they compiled a published a book live during the show.
Attendees can contribute their picks for the 10 most anticipated titles, across 10 different categories of books. Their publishing client The Daily Beast will cover results from the app on their site. And of course if your book is selected and you happen not to have digital distribution yet, Perseus’s Constellation will convert your book and arrange distribution.
The app is available in Apple’s App Store, and it’s supposed to work via other mobile browsers and on the web at www.bea10x10.com, but you can’t enter/submit anything until Wednesday morning.