Publisher Random House says, “This wide-ranging collection of never-before-published essays offers the very latest insights into the daunting scientific questions of our time. Its contributors—some of the most brilliant young scientists working today—provide not only an introduction to their cutting-edge research, but discuss the social, ethical, and philosophical ramifications of their work. With essays covering fields as diverse as astrophysics, paleoanthropology, climatology, and neuroscience, What’s Next? is a lucid and informed guide to the new frontiers of science.”

The declining state of traditional book publishing could be read very clearly at the recent Book Expo 2009 tradeshow in New York. If anything, the show exposed how an elite industry is having trouble coming to terms with an information-based culture, full of self-publishers with digital devices that know no barriers to entry.

The annual Book Expo is where publishers typically come out in force to tout new titles and cozy up to customers, including the nation’s librarians. But since the last Expo in New York in 2007, the number of attendees this year dropped by 11 percent to about 12,000, not counting exhibitors.

A few telling nuggets from this year’s event:

* Major publishing houses, such as Random House and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, cut so far back on floor space that they held meetings in windowless basement rooms.

* The Associated Press described this year’s Expo as “a low-budget, low-celebrity convention, with fewer parties and fewer advanced copies of books than in the past, and a sense that the best way to meet expectations was to lower them.”

* Instead of continuing as a three-day weekend show, next year’s Expo is likely to be scaled down, maybe held mid-week over two days, and maybe open to the public. In detailing the despair evident at this year’s Expo, New York Magazine’s Boris Kachka suggested that opening next year’s event to the public would turn the Expo into “a nerdier Auto Show or a less nerdy Comic-Con.”

(Never mind that comic-book publishers – large, small and independent – have taken advantage of the interactivity to showcase new titles and products while allowing fans to meet the industry’s top artists, writers and creators.)

In fairness, Expo organizers did try different strategies this year, such as promoting the new, iPod-inspired e-reader, Cool-Er, and handing out 1,000 copies of Joshua Ferris’ second novel, “The Unnamed.”

But writing in their blogs, even exhibitors at the show questioned its future.

Clearly, digitals formats have turned traditional publishing on its ear – in effect toppling the Ivory Tower where publishers once lived. Now it’s as if the industry is becoming unmasked.

We always knew it was smug. But we could at least hope for a level of respect, or even a desire to understand the real customer, which is the everyday reader.

What would happen if the public were invited in, say to stand in line for free copies of Ferris’ novel?

Publishers would come face to face with the customers they are trying to know better. They might also learn a few things about what average readers think, what they want and how they intend to consume books in the future.

There is an old saying in business, something along the lines that if you don’t eat your lunch, someone else will eat it for you.

The threat to publishers is not whether the public will come to next year’s convention. The threat is that the tables will turn, and elitism will take such a turn that the book-buying public will one day say to publishers, “Let them eat cake.”

Hard Road, Easy Riding: Deaf Biker Lady is now available on amazon.com.  

Deaf Biker Lady is a motorcycle journalist and writer.  She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, and she rides highways on a motorcycle she calls “Run Escape.”

For more information, visit www.deafbikerlady.com.

Amazon.com is now selling First Editions of Hard Road, Easy Riding: Deaf Biker Lady.

About Deaf Biker Lady:  She is a motorcycle journalist and writer of the book Hard Road, Easy Riding: Deaf Biker Lady, which captures the spirit of a woman riding motorcycles on life’s open highways. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia, but she can usually be found riding the highways on a motorcycle she affectionately calls “Run Escape.”

For more information, visit www.deafbikerlady.com.

Maybe you shared an apartment with a roomie whose laundry took on a smelly life form of its own or who never heard of washing dishes. Or perhaps you spotted the tell-tale hashmarks of a fork having scraped the contents of your peanut butter jar.

I Lick My Cheese: And Other Real Notes from the Roommate Frontlines by Oonagh O’Hagan is a compilation of real-life notes posted by roommates or “flatmates” as the original U.K. version termed them. They range from cute and fun to sarcastic to angry rants to really disgusting re-creations of certain, um, transgressions allegedly perpetrated by a room- er, flatmate.

The author’s Web site, roommatesanonymous.com, has a substantial collection of posted photos of said notes. The best of these are immortalized in hardcover in the recent U.S. book or its 2007 U.K. predecessor, I Lick My Cheese and Other Notes: From the Frontline of Flatsharing. You can log in and add your own stories from the “Frontline” at the Web site. Or just read in horror and be grateful your situation wasn’t that awful. Was it?

Fans will soon feast this year, as the film adaptation of Angels and Demons hits the big screen next week, and another book featuring the Robert Langdon character, The Lost Symbol, will be published in September.

Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was a smash hit in 2003 and the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard movie was a hit (though not necessarily with critics) in 2006.

Brown’s latest book compresses the action into 12 hours. Doubleday is excited about  the prospects of another blockbuster, and the publisher plans a first printing of 5 millions copies – the largest first print in Random House Inc. history, says www.danbrown.com.

“This novel has been a strange and wonderful journey,” said Brown at his Web site. “Weaving five years of research into the story’s twelve-hour timeframe was an exhilarating challenge. Robert Langdon’s life clearly moves a lot faster than mine.”

Need a refresher on The Da Vinci Code? Start here.

A-Rod reveals new details, including allegations that A-Rod, also dubbed A-Roid  (he has several less-flattering nicknames among fellow New York Yankees), starting dabbling with performance-enhancing drugs in high school and continued in New York after he left the Texas Rangers, contradicting his admissions of drug use to date.

In a public statement about his steroid use, Rodriguez said he felt the pressure as baseball’s highest-paid player (not to mention the pressure-packed New York media cauldron) to do anything to be the best player possible.

A flurry of accusations, denials, admissions and so on preceded and followed baseball’s Mitchell Report on steroids, and no doubt more will come.

Names that pop up in the book include Madonna, trainer Angel Presinal, former Major Leaguers Kevin Brown and Jose Canseco (himself author of controversial books) and former coaches – even high school teammates. And, to quote the New York Daily News, ”dalliances with out-of-town floozies.”

Adding insult to injury, Roberts reports he was unpopular at Hooters, where baseball’s richest player tipped the minimum 15 percent.

A-Rod is set for May 12 publication by HarperCollins.

Other DelMio posts on baseball:

Veeck as in Wreck.

Three baseball must-reads.

Yankee Doodle not always dandy.

Baby's got a gun

Tor.com, purveyor of sci-fi and fantasy lit, gives away a fair amount of its properties no doubt in hopes of luring dollars from grateful readers.

This can present some risk. What if readers don’t like it? Or worse: What if they just go on reading the freebies, sponging all these books and short stories without ever spending a dime?

Well, it must work on some level, because Tor keeps doing it. A recent endeavor is a whacky short story by Terry Bisson, TVA Baby.

TVA Baby starts out in the skies over the Tennessee Valley, or the Mississippi River, depending on who’s right, and things (literally) take a rapid descent from there. It’s a bumpy ride, narrated with a unique point of view. Some comments by readers that followed found the occasional lapses in logic and continuity annoying, which might  miss the point. See for yourself.

Or if you prefer, hear for yourself.

And if you’d like to get a virtually limitless stream of free stuff from Tor, sign up here.

“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers,” Dorothy Parker once wrote, “the second-greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of ‘The Elements of Style.’ The first-greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”

Strunk & White have long found themselves on the bookshelves of many writers, nestled next to the dictionary, thesaurus, AP Stylebook and a few other select titles (We would include William Zinsser’s On Writing Well and James Kilpatrick’s The Writer’s Art). Last week, it turned 50, or 90-something, depending on your perspective.

Happy birthday, The Elements of Style.

The Elements of Style rose to prominence in 1959 when E.B. White revised William Strunk’s original text four decades after Strunk first self-published the book while an English professor at Cornell (White was his student in 1919). It got some free press from White in The New Yorker and a boffo review in the
New York Times.

Elements has been revised several times since then, although it still can seem a tad quaint at times. And not all writers or “experts” appreciate Strunk & White’s “little book” of rules for writers. Then again, rules were made to be broken, no?

Fallada, a successful novelist before the war, never saw the book go to print. He suffered from mental illness and died of a morphine overdose in 1947 just months before it was published, reports veryshortlist.com.

But now the story is being published in English.

Otto and Anna Quangel started their campaign after learning that their only son had been killed during Germany’s invasion of France.

“Mother! The Fuhrer has murdered my son,”  read the first postcard Otto wrote and left to be seen in public.

Famous Holocaust survivor Primo Levi calls Every Man Dies Alone “the greatest book ever written about the German resistance to the Nazis.”

Resistance is not always futile.