After reporting on the BookExpo America for three days, Hillel Italie notes in an Associated Press wire story, “As the book world winds up its annual national convention, some retailers are wondering about the fate of a cultural institution. It’s not a book or a publisher, but a customer — the old-fashioned bookstore browser who picks and pokes and doesn’t care about the critics or Oprah or the best-seller charts.” Italie says “booksellers and publishers agree that an accelerated society can’t help affecting an industry known for taking its time,” and both “speak of a more ‘focused’ consumer who knows what he or she wants, which is often the same as what others want . . . ” On other matters, Italie reports that the consensus as to which upcoming books would be “must-reads”: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, he says, and “Bob Woodward’s Deep Throat memoir, The Secret Man, were buzzed to the sky even before the convention.” But there were some others: “The Tender Bar, a memoir by J.R. Moehringer; Julie Powell‘s “Julie & Julia,” in which the author works through the recipes of Julia Child; and The Widow of the South, a Civil War novel by Robert Hicks.”