With the industry settled back into routine five days after the close of BookExpo America, two carefully considered and closely observed takes on the convention put it in perspective: Says David Kipen in a San Francisco Chronicle commentary, “Beset by aging readers and stagnant sales, the whole profession resembled nothing so much as 25,000 castaways beached on the west bank of the Hudson River, tending their signal fires and hoping for somebody — Oprah? GooglePrint? — to rescue them before the breadfruit runs out.” Kipen says that despite some good books on the horizon, he wasn’t necessarily left optimistic about the ability of the more literary end of the business to survive the influence of the conglomerates and homogenized choices. “Will the book business remain as successful as the film business in putting off a reckoning that seems long overdue? For all we know, yes. Publishers, and especially booksellers, will put up with a lot to keep working in their beloved chosen field. But lately, literary publishing is in much the same fix that movies were in a few years ago, before DVDs came along to save the studios’ bacon for a while. If some new savior technology is just around the corner for publishing, I didn’t see it on the convention floor last weekend.” Meanwhile, Sheela Kolhatkar walked that floor for her New York Observer report. “The whole affair was a blur of cheap wine, mini empanadas and free books, punctuated by the odd wannabe author cruising the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center with a toilet seat around his neck,” she writes. “The fact that the expo took place in New York, as opposed to Chicago or Los Angeles, only lent a certain world-weariness to the proceedings.” She notes tacky promotions, grabbing for galleys, lackluster parties and numerous panel discussions. But she also talks to some genuine enthusiasts who had fun and seem somewhat optimistic, or at least determined, such as Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor Lorin Stein, who tells her, “If the business doesn’t get less corporate and become nicer, then we’ll need to find ways to make not very much profit on books. We need to publish books that we’ll be proud of when we’re old and fired.”