The Big Six publishers--Random, Hachette, Simon and Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, and Macmillan--were still the center of gravity, their booths the most crowded. They had advance copies everyone wanted and they had the snazzy tote bags. Hachette even brought beer and cake.

Given the slowly stabilizing state of digital publishing, we were intrigued to check out the demos staged yesterday by the researchers at the Book Industry Study Group. The guest list was largely potential buyers -- publishers with managerial titles and the occasional librarian. The seventeen demos were a mixed bag, ranging from the most wonky of enterprise solutions to the downright consumer facing, but we did notice that book tech doesn't seem to have escaped the cloud fad.