Back from BEA

So, I spent last weekend in Los Angeles at the annual Book Expo America. It was exhausting, but one of the most amazing experiences I've had recently.

I had no idea everything there was free; it rocked my world - hard.

Setting aside the super-awesome things that I may or may not have brought home for myself, I had a chance to meet with several of our distributors, some potential printing partners, and even some publisher support professionals.

I was only there for Friday, but I was shocked both by the sheer number of exhibitors at the conference and the astounding number of attendees. I'm used to medical conferences, at which 1500 is a pretty great turnout; this was easily ten to twenty times the size of the San Diego conference in January.

Quite possibly the coolest thing I had a chance to do was talk to one of the Sony reps about their new eReader (it's like Amazon's Kindle) - which has some pretty amazing DPI capabilities and can, apparently, even play music. From the perspective of an STM publisher (that's Science, Technology, and Medicine), unfortunately, it lacks one capability mandatory for us to consider offering our titles through their technology at present: neither the Kindle nor the Sony reader can support color images, let alone color images at 300-600 DPI. When that does happen, I'm certain that we'll be among the first in line to work towards digitizing our content in that format. Sadly, the Sony rep wasn't able to give me an on-the-record timetable for the introduction of those features.

Well, that's about as long as I want a single post to be; you can always drop me or John a note if you have any questions or want to talk about anything mentioned in the blog.