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Living in France, I hear a lot about how Americans are . . . from a French perspective. In general, despite reports to the contrary, Americans seem to be well enough liked, with some exceptions, at least in the south. The election of Obama has helped the reputation of the United States. There also seems to be a deep-seated love here for Starsky and Hutch.

Curiously “Starsky et Hutch” speak French.

Not long ago I was one of 50,000 people who made the pilgrimage to the book festival in Mouans-Sartoux, a small town in the foothills north of Cannes. Publishers from the region and elsewhere in France set up stands and showed off their titles. Writers, too, were there, waiting behind their little stacks, hoping to chat with a reader or sign a book. If we are about to enter a new era of electronic books and unlimited distribution, the festival was a reminder that most people are still living in a slower time of texture and paper.

So what is going to happen? The publishing industry is aswarm with utopian visions of an electronic, democratic future. Many find support in a theory developed by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, and described in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The kernel of the idea can be said simply. In the past there were limited distribution channels (e.g., movie theaters or bookstores), meaning only a small number of products found buyers. But the Internet has created unlimited access to goods, making consumers aware of niche and obscure products and increasing demand for them. Using the terminology of the idea, demand is moving away from the head (the most popular products) to the long tail (everything else).

Here is Chris Anderson explaining the theory.

Humans seem to be attracted to visions of great change, whether social, religious, or economic, especially during periods of instability. Publishing is not immune. With people reading fewer books and spending more time on the Internet, and with paper books, long the preferred container of long narratives, beginning to give ground to ebooks, there is a lot of speculation about what is going to happen to publishing.

Among the most interesting publishing visionaries today is Richard Nash, formerly editorial director of Soft Skull Press. Nash is one of many people who think traditional publishing is broken and needs to be replaced by the new tools and social habits of the twenty-first century. In Nash’s view publishing has to stop selling books as objects (wholly opposite to the current fetish of the object in literary publishing) and consider a different way to get writers and readers together, especially on the Internet.

Nash outlines that different way in a recent Publishers Weekly article. According to Nash, except for the 500 best-selling books, which will be published on the Hollywood blockbuster model, the future of publishing will be based on niche social communities. Reflecting this vision, Nash is starting a new publishing venture, Cursor, which will contain a “portfolio” of online membership communities to which people can subscribe. The first two will be Red Lemonade, a “pop-lit-alt-cult operation,” and charmQuark, a “sci-fi/fantasy community.” Nash explains these communities in Publishers Weekly.

Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Nash is looking for investors, so we’ll have to wait a while to see Cursor in action.

Every day it seems another independent bookseller goes out of business. You can blame the economy, Amazon.com, the Internet, or maybe your neighbor, but the facts remain—stores are closing, and people aren’t buying as many books as they used to.

Some booksellers, however, are putting up a fight. Village Books, an independent bookseller in Bellingham, Washington, has embraced technology and plans to offer customers high-tech options in addition to traditional paper books. The store has partnered with Symtio to provide audiobooks and ebooks. Customers will purchase a book in the form of a product card at the store; the card then allows them to download the book wherever they have an Internet connection.

Village Books will also be home to an Espresso Book Machine. The EBM is a print-on-demand book-making machine. Not only can customers purchase, print, and bind out-of-print books but they can also create self-published books. Village Books is banking on the belief that there will be demand for out-of-print local books. There are only a handful of EBMs in retail stores across the nation.

The message was simple and soft and alluring. And since I was in France, it was also in French.

Allons voir plus loin, veux-tu? Voir la mer, la baie des anges et ses palmiers . . . un peu plus loin, de l’autre coté du Musée Masséna.

Translated into our more accented English, it said,

Let’s go see farther. Do you want to? See the sea, the Bay of Angels and its palm trees . . . a little farther, on the other side of the Masséna Museum.

Musée Masséna? That’s in Nice, where I live, so how could I say no?

I had never met the person who wrote the note. In fact, I read the message on bookcrossing.com, a website that promotes “free range books.” The idea is simple: read a book, and afterward, instead of putting it to rest on your bookshelf, set it free. The site gives suggestions.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a friend or tuck it onto a bookshelf at the gym – anywhere it might find a new reader!

When I found the listing for Allons voir plus loin, veux-tu? by Anny Duperey, I saw there were almost 800 books “in the wild” in France, all waiting for someone to find them. In the United States there were some 10,000 books left in parks, coffee shops, and other random places.

The site also lets readers post notes about books before passing them on to someone else. This copy of Allons voir plus loin, veux-tu? began in Feins, Bretagne, in the north of France. It then traveled to nearby Pléneuf-Val-André before heading south to Lyon and finally Nice in southeastern France, where a reader left a rather uninspired recommendation: “Enfin je ne sais pas pourquoi j’avais envie de lire ce livre! . . . mais j’ai passé un bon moment” (”In fact, I don’t know why I felt like reading this book! . . . but I had a good time”).

After reading the note, I decided it was my turn to “passer un bon moment.” Fortunately there was one more clue: “Livre laissé côté rue de France, sur les grilles du Musée” (”book left on the side of rue de France, on the gate of the museum”). As I was going to a concert that evening not far from the museum, I decided to “go hunting,” as the site says.

The museum is a stone’s throw from the sea and next to the famous Hotel Negresco, where, as one site claims, Claudia Schiffer, Orson Welles, and Michael Jackson all stayed. But rue de France is one street in from the sea, and at night, when I arrived, it seemed desolate. A light breeze was pushing around a plastic sack. I was wearing headphones, listening to the French pop singer Bénabar, and reached my hand through the gate to search through a thick stretch of shrubbery. I must have seemed like a thief or a homeless person.

After a while, something didn’t seem right.

I looked around and across the street. Two prostitutes stood waiting for tourists. A flic, as cops are called here, sped by on a motorcycle. Great, I thought. This is all fine, and I don’t mind the weirdness, but someone already took the book.

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