From Notre Dame Fire to “Fire and Fury” A Year of Covering Books Around the World

In the digital environment, the book world becomes a crowded place.

At last week’s BookExpo in New York City, a panel of journalists and industry analysts who cover books and the publishing markets in Europe and North America were featured in Covering Books Around the World. The group reassembled after a similar BookExpo appearance in 2018.

Bestseller lists in 2019 may one week feature contemporary hacks – and another week showcase a literary giant out of the 19th century, Where the business stands depends on the latest headlines, noted CCC’s Chris Kenneally. Print is dead, then print has made a comeback. Bookstores are vanishing until they are thriving again. Business models and marketing strategies cycle and recycle; authors flirt with every new social media format; and a review in the New York Times remains the gold standard.

A bestselling author in his own day as well as a great editor and the trusted friend of celebrated authors, Oliver Wendell Holmes observed that, “the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.” Andrew Albanese, Porter Anderson, Javier Celaya, Fabrice Piault and Dana Beth Weinberg returned to the BookExpo stage with compass in hand and ready to sail the audience safely to the destination ahead.

• Andrew Albanese is senior writer and features editor at Publishers Weekly and the author of The Battle of $9.99: How Apple, Amazon and the “Big Six” Publishers Changed the E-Book Business Overnight. As a journalist he has covered the publishing and information technology field for more than a decade.
• Porter Anderson ( @Porter_Anderson ) is Editor-in-Chief of Publishing Perspectives, founded and operated by Frankfurt Book Fair New York. He previously reported for CNN and CNN International as well as the Village Voice, the Dallas Times Herald, and The Bookseller. In March at the London Book Fair, Porter received the inaugural International Book Trade Journalist prize from the London Book Fair (LBF) International Excellence Awards
• Javier Celaya is the CEO and founder of Dosdoce.com, as well as the vice president of the Spanish Digital Magazines Association (ARDE) and member of the Executive Board of the Digital Economy Association of Spain. Dosdoce.com was launched in March 2004 for the purpose of analyzing the use of new technologies in the cultural sector and publishes annual studies related to trends in the creative industries.
• Fabrice Piault became editor-in-chief of Paris-based Livres Hebdo in 2015; in 2018, he also became executive director at Electre, a bibliographic database of French media and publishing. Piault joined Livres Hebdo, which reports on the French publishing industry as well as booksellers, in 1987 as a reporter. He is also president of ACBD, the association of critics and journalists covering graphic novels and comic books in France.
• Dana Beth Weinberg is Professor of Sociology at Queens College-CUNY.  A graduate of Harvard University’s doctoral program in Sociology, she is author of “Comparing Gender Discrimination in Traditional and Indie Publishing.”  An indie author, she writes fiction under the pseudonym D. B. Shuster and is author of the Russian mafia crime series Kings of Brighton Beach and the Cold War spy novel To Catch a Traitor.