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Publishers, authors, booksellers, and agents are crowded together this week attending the annual BEA (@BookExpoAmerica) (#BEA, #BEA11, #BookExpo) convention in New York City. Read the latest news:

• Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly)
• The Washington Post (@washingtonpost)
• Google News (@googlenews)

Book Business (@bookbusinessmag) reports “preliminary results from an ambitious new book publishing industry survey show growth in both revenues and units sold across the contemporary book publishing landscape.” The "BookStats" survey shows

Growth was seen for publishers of all sizes with medium- and small-sized publishers leading the way. Over 50% of the publishers surveyed were enjoying growth, Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publishing services at RR Bowker, said.

Data is broken down by content categories (trade fiction and non-fiction, juvenile, religious, K-12, higher education, professional and scholarly); formats (physical and non-physical delivery platforms); and distribution channel.

Not surprisingly, hardcover and softcover markets have seen declines, while digital formats such as e-books and apps are growing.

Adult fiction is "a stalwart category" enjoying healthy growth, as are all categories of juvenile titles, Gallagher said. Nonfiction adult, however is "struggling."

While chain bookstores are registering predicable declines, independent bookstores are holding their own, showing stable sales or just slight declines. "I think it's a great story line that the independents are showing some resiliency," Gallagher said.

Book Business also reports on the International Digital Publishing Forum conference at BEA about “surprising new information on consumer and student ebook reading habits.

Of consumers surveyed in January 2011, 77.3% are "satisfied" or "highly satisfied" with the price of ebooks.... The feature sets most desired in ebooks are affordability (seen by 75% of respondents as "very important"), followed by readability, ease of acquisition, portability (all over 70%) and speed (over 60%). Searchability and eco-friendliness were important to 35% of respondents, though the later is growing as a factor.

Among reading devices, consumers are most satisfied with Amazon's Kindle (75%) followed by the Nook (70%) and iPad (60%).

Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) reports on paidContent (@paidContent) about Barnes & Noble announcing a new WiFi-only Nook and Amazon responding with a cheaper 3G edition of the Kindle.

And Shelf Awareness (@ShelfAwareness) covered the American Booksellers Association's annual meeting, where CEO Oren Teicher called for new business models for the trade; he

dispensed with the usual CEO report reviewing the association's activities of the past year and instead gave a wide-ranging talk outlining how booksellers and publishers "can work more closely together in the common goal of selling more books" and maintaining bricks-and-mortar bookstores' role as "the essential showroom in ensuring the sales of a broad spectrum of titles," a browsing experience no one else can offer.

Also read CBA's coverage, "Ebooks command BEA spotlight, but stores still needed, many say." Then read our wrap-up blog post "BEA, Blog World Expo NY, & BookBloggerCon."

According to Sympatico.ca News (@Sympatico), a plastic smartphone as thin and flexible as a credit card has been invented by researchers from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Roel Vertegaal, director of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University, first came up with the idea of using “bend gestures” as a new way of interacting with computers. He envisioned a device that would feel and behave like a sheet of interactive paper, so he named it the PaperPhone.

He expects consumer devices similar to the PaperPhone to hit the market in 5 to 10 years.

Vertegaal will demonstrate the prototype - and the bend gestures used to control it - at the Computer Human Interaction conference in Vancouver May 10 (#chi2011).

Read this in full.

Read the BBC News story.

Read the news release at Human Media Lab.

What are you doing today to prepare for the continuous changes in publishing so that you’ll be ready for the new book formats of the future?

Alberto Vitale was running Bantam Books, the world leader in paperbacks, when the Newhouse family recruited him to become the COO of Random House (@atrandom). In that role, and later as the CEO of one of the world’s top publishing firms, Vitale oversaw huge changes in the publishing industry. In this interview with Stephen J. Kobrin, publisher and executive director of Wharton Digital Press and Knowledge@Wharton (@knowledgwharton), Vitale discusses the rise of digital publishing, the future of bookstores, and the globalization of copyright, among other issues. Among his statements:

Digital technology may allow a lot of individual authors to self-publish. That's the power of digital technology, of the Internet. But still, the role of the publisher will continue [to be] as strong as before. You still have to figure out which book you want to publish. And, how do you want to publish it? There are obvious synergies between paper and digital [media]....

Absolutely [bookstores will survive]. However, they're going to undergo major changes. Three [or] five years from now, up to 70% of the space in [big box bookstores, such as Barnes & Noble] may be dedicated to other products. It makes sense. You have the universe that is digitalized now. You don't need these huge stores anymore....

Everybody's online now. The access to information is tremendously enhanced. But remember, the publishing model will change. And the product will change. The prices of hard cover books are now still $27.95, $26.95, which I find ridiculous. They cannot possibly make ends meet with those prices. They are going to grow to $36.95, $46.95. But the reader will have a much better product to purchase. Better paper, better type, better binding. And so, you will have a book to cherish....

Read the transcript in full, listen to the audio, and watch the video.

Do you agree with his views? Post your comments below.

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (@chronicle) by Harvard professor and librarian Robert Darnton says, “The nature of the so-called information age has led to a state of collective false consciousness.” He singles out 5 statements to dispute:

1. “The book is dead.”

2. “We have entered the information age.”

3. “All information is now available online.”

4. “Libraries are obsolete.”

5. “The future is digital.”

Regarding the last one, he says it may be not so much mythological as misleading.

In 10, 20, or 50 years, the information environment will be overwhelmingly digital, but the prevalence of electronic communication does not mean that printed material will cease to be important. Research in the relatively new discipline of book history has demonstrated that new modes of communication do not displace old ones, at least not in the short run. Manuscript publishing actually expanded after Gutenberg and continued to thrive for the next three centuries. Radio did not destroy the newspaper; television did not kill radio; and the Internet did not make TV extinct. In each case, the information environment became richer and more complex. That is what we are experiencing in this crucial phase of transition to a dominantly digital ecology

He says these misconceptions “stand in the way of understanding shifts in the information environment.”

They make the changes appear too dramatic. They present things ahistorically and in sharp contrasts — before and after, either/or, black and white. A more nuanced view would reject the common notion that old books and ebooks occupy opposite and antagonistic extremes on a technological spectrum. Old books and ebooks should be thought of as allies, not enemies.

Read this article in full.

Let Somersault help you see pbooks and ebooks as allies.

This article in Advertising Age (@adage) by Jack Neff (@jackneff) begins, “If you thought of Generation Y as the digital generation, wait till you get a load of their kids.” This insightful research can help publishers prepare for the consumer who will be buying books 10 years from now, whatever those books will look like.

Pre-teen and even pre-school children are key drivers for adoption of the iPad and other tablet computers, and a substantial number of kids, including two in five 11 and 12 year olds, now regularly use social networks even though they're technically not allowed, according to the study LMX Family: A Window into the Media Life of the American Family (LMX stands for Longitudinal Media Experience) conducted in early February by Ipsos OTX (@ipsosnewspolls).

Ipsos also says pre-schoolers are adopting digital habits or being exposed to new devices even faster than tweens, a sign of the speed with which digital technology is reshaping media and marketing habits for the youngest children. Of households with preschoolers, 38% had handheld gaming devices vs. only 24% among those with children aged 6-12. Preschool households also held an edge in laptops (82% to 76%), gaming consoles (76% to 63%) and Internet-capable cellphones (69% to 65%).

The youngest children have the most exposure to digital technology because they’re more likely to have Gen Y parents shaping their expectations, says Donna Sabino, senior VP-kids and family insights for Ipsos OTX.

“People laugh when they see 3 and 4 year olds who are used to smartphones or tablet touch-screen devices going up to a laptop and touching the screen to make it move,” says Sabino. “When I see that, I think the technology is already obsolete for her. Her expectation is that all her interface with media is going to be intuitive, something she can touch. It's a history of the future right now — what are we teaching them to expect from us going forward?”

·         18% of parents will let their tween boys aged 9-12 play video games rated adult only, and 36% will let them play games rated mature, provided a parent is playing too.

·         20% of parents will let children 6-12 go with them to R-rated movies.

·         23% of children 6-12 regularly visit social networking sites and 41% of kids 11-12 do so, though membership in the sites is supposed to be limited to 13 and up.

·         By age 11, half of kids have cellphones. Half of the time it’s the parents’ idea.

·         Kids in the household are huge drivers of iPad penetration. 10% of households with children under 13 now have iPads, vs. only 3% in households without children 6-12.

·         35% of households with children 6-12 plan to purchase some brand of tablet computer in the next year.

·         Over half of parents say their children should be able to go online on their own by age 6.

Read this in full.

Also read our blogpost, "25% of Toddlers Have Used a Smartphone."

Sony is creating a flexible screen that’s thin and sturdy enough to be rolled while still showing video images. Samsung also has created a flexible OLED screen display:

Another application of a lithe monitor is the Rolltop notebook computer:

Acer has launched the Iconia-6120 Dual-Screen Touchbook, which USA TODAY says offers two touch-enabled 14-inch high-definition widescreen LED backlit LCDs:

And the two-screen Kno tablet is yet to come, as reported by Digital Trends:

Update (8/10/11): Kno is now software, not its own tablet. See "Kno Rolls Out New Features for Textbook App." 

What will flexible screens and dual monitors mean for publishing innovation? And how will you start preparing for it today? Write your comments below.

At MIT, Cynthia Breazeal and her team are building robots with social intelligence that communicate and learn the same way people do. Watch this 14-minute TED talk (@tedtalks & @TEDNews) to discover that when the infants of today become adults in 20 years, they’ll be interacting with robots as naturally as they do their peers.

What are the consumer and product implications of these technological advances on the future of the publishing industry? How far beyond ebooks will these innovations go?

As you know, our free online dashboard SomersaultNOW includes a tab for RSS feeds that focus on the future; articles trying to discern (and predict) what tomorrow will bring. We also "publish" the paper.li "newspaper" Somersault Futurist Daily News, to which you can subscribe. We include these because one of Somersault’s distinctives is to scan the horizon for coming trends and innovations to help publishers and marketers prepare for the possibilities ahead. The above video is just such an example. As you watch it, be thinking how the delivery of published content in the future will need to adapt and change, and what you should do today to get ready for it (and let Somersault help).

Remember when? Reminisce about a time (the 1980s) when cell phones, weighing “only” 30 ounces, ushered in the era when “seeing people using cellular phones may seem as commonplace as someone checking time on an electronic watch, figuring on an electronic calculator, or programming on an electronic computer.” Also watch this brief BBC interview with Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first cell phone Apr. 3, 1973.

How will people in 2041 look back at our technology today? What technology will you embrace today to advance your brand? Let Somersault help you. And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Watch this video while thinking how publishing must adapt itself to a variety of changes coming our way. As Somersault says, these changes are a playground of possibilities!