This is a good joke.

But "be prepared" is probably as apt a motto for literary scouts as any, because the job of the scout is to know everything. New York City-based scouts spent last week doing their best to know everything there was to know at Book Expo America, which took place at the Javitz Center, May 25 through May 27.

In order to know everything, scouts must talk to everyone. Through charm or maybe intimidation (and definitely persistence), they must get editors and agents to hand over unsold manuscripts that might become best sellers three-ish years into the future. Then the scouts must read everything.

"You have to do more reading than anyone else in publishing," says Agnes Krup, scouting director at Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. "Period."

Reading completed, scouts must then display impeccable judgment in speedily advising their publishing clients around the world about which American books to buy--before a rival scout gives similar advice to a rival publisher.

Some publishers want a scout who acts as a general consultant. Others want one who's essentially a surrogate editor in New York, closely involved with individual titles.

In either case, the job requires not just taste but knowledge of what will and will not work in other countries. Regional literature is notoriously hard to sell abroad--though Cormac McCarthy's West is no problem, and the occasional Southern standout (like Kathryn Stockett's The Help) can succeed. Much American nonfiction (like the political memoir) has no market abroad--but what's euphemistically called "mind-body-spirit" pop psychology does well in Brazil. And some literary fiction (think T.C. Boyle or Alice Munro) fares better overseas than it ever would on American best-seller lists.

Book Expo America has not traditionally been the most exciting place to scout. The focus is on booksellers rather than foreign rights, and the international business area is a fraction the size of its equivalent at the Frankfurt Book Fair. But after Eyjafjallajökull's volcanic ash muffled this spring's London Book Fair, BEA was, by all accounts, livelier than usual. Even if there weren't big deals going down--buzz, battles, money on the table, that kind of thing--more people made the trek to New York than otherwise would. Thus, more opportunity to socialize: a crucial part of knowing everything.

"It's very distinctly a business founded on relationships," says Devon Mazzone, a veteran scout who left Lauri Del Commune Enterprises this year to handle rights at Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. "And you have to earn those relationships."

There are the relationships with editors, with agents and (most delicately) with fellow scouts. So even while scouts do their best to learn everything they can from the people with the books, they have to be careful not to say the wrong thing to the wrong person. The professional stakes for indiscretion are high.

"The slightest thing could slip and you could lose out to a competitor," Mr. Mazzone said. "You could lose a client." Ms. Krup recalled rejecting a promising intern because the applicant mentioned her Greenburger job interview on her Facebook page. She had seemed like a sharp girl, but they didn't have a choice: The balance between socializing and secrecy is a tricky one, and if you can't keep quiet online, who knows what you'll say at a cocktail party?

"You're very friendly to your fellow scouts," says Bettina Schrewe, who runs her own agency--but it would be "plain stupid" to share any information.

Scouts have to be looking over their shoulders all the time, which creates a close-knit and intense little world. Sometimes people will try to introduce scouts to other scouts. This is foolish: They all know each other, and they probably can't chat anyway

"It's weird having a job where only 40 other people on earth do it," said Liz Gately, a scout at Barbara Tolley Associates.

Certain names loom large--Bettina Schrewe, Aram Fox, Todd Siegel, Mary Ann Thompson--but Maria Campbell is universally agreed to loom the largest.

"She's a presence. She's incredibly good at what she does. She's relentless," says Mr. Mazzone. She has "a reputation for how she runs her office," he says-"there's probably a culture of fear." Of course, he admits, this is all "mythology": He met her in person for the first time only the other night, over drinks.

Other morsels of Maria Campbell mythology: Won't reveal her age. Will make fearsome phone calls when clients don't follow her advice. Occasionally, at publishing conferences, when a band plays, will dance--to the astonished delight of scouting subordinates, left scrambling for cell phone cameras to capture the moment. (Rumors and amateur paparazzi: such are the hazards of being at the top of a profession devoted to gossip.)

On May 26 at BEA, Ms. Campbell wore a straw fedora and trench-coat-style khaki dress. She looked like a summertime spy, which seemed entirely appropriate.

A few weeks before the BEA, The Observer spoke to Ms. Campbell at I Trulli, a Gramercy Italian restaurant she favors.

Ms. Campbell's first language was Italian, and she began her career at the Italian publishing house Mondadori. She started scouting in the mid-1970s.

"There were people scouting before me," she acknowledged, but described her predecessors as tending to be expatriate Europeans who shared information in a friendly, informal capacity. She took an "American approach": She thought of scouting as an enterprise, and began steadily accumulating clients.

"Whenever I wanted to give myself a promotion," she said, "I took on another."

In the years since she got her start, she said that scouting has become more of a career; there's more of a professional structure in place. And now that publishing-inclined young people don't see the mobility or security that they once did in the big publishing houses, scouting looks increasingly appealing. Today her office includes nine people total, plus an intern or two.

"We have someone buying a book every day," she said.

Some scouts put the average burnout period at five to seven years. Mr. Mazzone was a scout for 11 years before accepting an offer earlier this year from Jonathan Galassi to handle rights at FSG.

Mr. Mazzone says he doesn't miss scouting yet--it's only been a few months. But there have still been sacrifices.

"I miss being in the know. You don't know as much," he said. "But to fix that you just talk to scouts."

mfischer@observer.com

Literary authors were not entirely absent. The Transom heard of a young author releasing a first fiction collection last week who believed his debut had been overshadowed by the simultaneous reissue of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. Who could blame him? The back cover of the BEA program was emblazoned with the cover of the forthcoming memoir Life, by Keith Richards. In a way, the writer's predicament recalled that of Jonathan Franzen, who published The Corrections just 10 days before 9/11.

The most banal corner of the Javits was to the southeast, the designated Digital Book Zone. Here the Transom encountered a representative of Equire Tech, a typesetting firm based in Pondicherry, India, that charges around $600 to compose a 500-page book, corrections included; by any industry standard this is cheap, and it makes sense when you consider that Equire's 70 employees make about $400 a month each. Down the line was Copia, a Web site spun off a family electronics firm that brands itself as "Amazon meets Facebook"-retail plus social networking. Around the corner was iScroll, a technology that combines ebooks with audio books, such that you can read a book on a screen and have it read to you through headphones at the same time; the effect on children, your correspondent was told, is a quantifiable improvement in reading comprehension.

Far across the Javits floor, another contender in the ebook race, Google, had erected a lavish, multicolored mini-pavilion directly across from a man clad in shorts selling half-priced subscriptions to The New York Times and serving as a cheerful metaphor for the death of print. Many times the Transom approached the Google booth, and many times he was told to come back shortly to speak to Google's communications person, who eventually told us he could not speak on the record.

He, Sean Carlson, did issue a statement, which read, in part: "We want to build and support a digital book ecosystem to allow our partner publishers to make their books available for purchase from any web-enabled device."

One thing children learn in school-or on their iScrolls-about ecosystems is that they sometimes creep up on and overwhelm neighboring ecosystems. And this was an anxiety in the heavily conditioned air at BEA.

"Is epub going to become the dominant format?" asked an attendee of Google's Thursday morning talk.

"I don't know," Google representative Aimee Hong began her long and somewhat evasive reply, which concluded, "I do think ebooks are going to get more dominant."

The talk was titled "How the Digital Book Cloud Works for Publishers and Users." The technical meaning of "cloud" here is that in a few months, readers will be able to buy Google Editions of books through their Gmail accounts and access them anywhere they can check their email-forever. The symbolic meanings are threefold: (1) Google's cloud will be fluffy and cumulus, making the ecosystem prettier for everyone, readers and publishers alike; (2) Google's cloud will rain down information, fertilizing the ecosystem with ideas; and (3) Google's is a storm cloud that will ravage every ecosystem in its path.

"A tsunami is coming," said James Macfarlane, founder of the U.K.-based Easypress Technologies during his Cassandra-like talk "eBooks $how me the MONEY" on Thursday. "The wave is on us now."

After his talk, Mr. Macfarlane was approached by a man who asked, "How can I make billions off this tsunami?" This was Dr. Anup, M.D., author and publisher of 400 multimedia titles from his own four-person press based in New Jersey. Dr. Anup told the Transom he got his start self-publishing a book for his medical students on rare blood gas disorders. The spare copies sold out of Barnes & Noble on Fifth Avenue, and he discovered a market. Now he caters to a developing-world audience that seeks an American level of care, with titles like Essentials of Diabetes.

"Google makes the whole world the market," Dr. Anup told the Transom. In Google, Dr. Anup was looking for a partner-or what an ecologist would call mutualist symbiosis.

"Google's use of the word 'cloud' is a lot of hocus-pocus," OR Books founder John Oakes told the Transom. "It's a new word that publishers hear and think, 'Oh wow, here's a new thing that we want to be a part of.' But it's the same process that's brought publishers to their knees. You have a middle person taking a cut, and the publisher is left with a fraction."

An ecologist, by this view, would term Google a parasite.

"A book is a pretty advanced instrument itself," FSG president Jonathan Galassi told the Transom. "No writer wants to give his mother an ebook to show that he wrote a book. All writing is not going to become virtual in five years. It just isn't.

"There are two competing interests at work. People who want to sell widgets at the lowest possible price. They want action, scale, volume. They're not interested in creating value. A publisher is invested in the creative process. Somebody should be willing to spend $26 or $28 to buy Jonathan Franzen's new novel. It's something that's going to enrich our lives, and it's worth that.

"There are ebook consumers who are saying, 'I'm not willing to spend more than $10 for a book.' That's thinking about a book like a widget, where books are interchangeable. It's not the kind of reading I'm talking about."

The Transom is inclined to talk about reading the way Mr. Galassi does. Sarah Palin is a widget. Cecily Von Ziegesar is a widget. Keith Richards might be a widget. Dr. Anup makes widgets that save lives. R.L. Stine is a widget. Gertrude Stein is not. Freedom, the volume by Mr. Franzen that Mr. Galassi will be publishing in September, is unlikely to be a widget.

So perhaps when all the widget-books melt into widget-ebooks, only the real books will be left in the undigital ecosystem, and the literature business and the publishing industry will be one and the same.

As of this afternoon, New York is in the lead. Clearly, those mid-western bookstore owners are voting in droves, because no one in New York – the center of book publishing and book-related media – likes to have Book Expo here. The Javits Center? Ew. Plus, when you live in New York, you can’t get your employer to put you up in a hotel. Similarly, you can’t as easily invite that nubile young assistant publicist home with you, when home is a dumpy room in a nasty Bushwick railroad instead of a King suite at the Loews.

Consider this a rallying call: New York publishing folk, don’t let BEA take up here permanently. Go vote for Los Angeles, or Chicago. Even DC is better than here! Anything so we can go back to ordering room service and taking cabs on someone else’s dime. Our apartment doesn’t even have the contents of a mini-bar.

Jon Bon Jovi may no longer be headlining, but the organizers of this summer’s Book Expo 2007 don’t feel any less young and hip for that.

Just look at the Web site! In its press area, there’s a special corner for bloggers (BookExpo America Loves Bloggers!).

Elsewhere, there’s a place to load in personal essays inspired by the event! (“Did you meet your wife? Lose your mind? Get stranded at the airport and end up talking with Gore Vidal? Tell us.” Umm, we’ll be tracking these closely.)

But best of all, there’s a little nook called “My BEA.”

It looks like in the future “My BEA” will be some kind of Nerds Only-Friendster page (social networking, blah blah blah).

But for now, the page is collecting profiles of “Book Industry Characters.”

Scroll past the guy who’s up there now (bookstore owner, American Booksellers Associaton prez, etc) and click on last month’s, which we somehow missed: it’s Jeff Seroy, FSG publicity gatekeeper!

Mr. Seroy has always been somewhat mysterious to us – we usually deal with his minions – so imagine our delight in learning that he loves yoga too! (Savasana, for those who don’t know, is corpse pose. Is he that guy who’s always snoring in our class at Om?) More here.