The Southeast Booksellers Association Trade Show takes place Fri.-Sun., Sept. 16-18, in the Benton Convention & Civic Center in Winston-Salem, N.C. The trade show floor is open most of Saturday and Sunday until 1 p.m.

On Thursday, SEBA is sponsoring an all-day Bookseller School led by Miriam Fleischmann that focuses on co-op; participants will learn about opportunities like the Reader's Edge newsletter and Booksense.com's co-op programs.

For the first time, Friday morning's breakfast and annual meeting will feature a speaker: book-lusting librarian Nancy Pearl. Friday's educational seminars discuss how to merchandise and sell graphic novels; working with other independent retailers in the community; payroll issues; putting on authorless events; business-to-business programs; and how to help mystery fans cross over to other categories. SEBA is also sponsoring three author panels.

Six authors are scheduled to read at the first-ever Sunday morning Readings Breakfast. Another inaugural event is the Spoken Word reading room. Every half hour from 9 a.m.-5 p.m., an author will read for about 20 minutes, be recorded for the Spoken Word radio show (produced by Public Radio South, sponsored by SEBA and broadcast on public radio in the Southeast) and then sign copies of his or her book.

Other events include a team spelling bee, the Friday SEBA Book Awards authors luncheon, several other author meals and the Moveable Feast of Authors, the last of which stars 45 authors. "It'll be crazy," SEBA executive director Wanda Jewell told Shelf Awareness, who predicted that this SEBA will be the biggest in at least four years.

For more information, go to SEBA's Web site.

Ten college stores are participating in a program organized by wholesaler MBS Textbook Exchange and some  textbook publishers to offer students an e-alternative to certain textbooks this coming semester. According to C Net News, students will be able to buy an e-book Adobe Acrobat version of some 30 textbooks for 33% off. The e-book version has limitations: it will be "locked" in a single computer, cannot be printed in its entirety all at once and has a five-month expiration date.

Some of the store managers said students will likely be put off by the restrictions and the inability to sell a "used" book back at the end of the class, but stores want to provide "a digital choice to students who are increasingly computer-centered--and help them save money in the process."

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After steadily declining revenues the last four years, Paperbacks Unlimited, the 4,600-sq.-ft. store in Ferndale, Mich., is closing September 15, according to the Oakland Press. Owner Charles Hughes said he had survived superstores; the store is closing because "the public isn't reading . . . to the extent that it has in the past." The tipping point came when he received several offers to buy his building, one of which he had accepted.

The Detroit News noted that in the past year, five other bookstores in the Detroit metropolitan area had closed or announced plans to close.

But in happier bookselling news in Michigan, Debra Lambers, who owns the Book Nook & Java Shop in Montague, is applying for a $50,000 grant to help open a bookstore and coffee bar in downtown Grand Rapids, which would be the first general bookstore there in 17 years, the Grand Rapids Press reported.

When it rains, it pours: another developer hopes to make a bookstore a centerpiece in its own redevelopment project in downtown Grand Rapids.

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In another development project, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $1.8 billion project to revitalize downtown Los Angeles, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. The project features a hotel, condos, apartments, restaurants--and a bookstore. The centerpiece will be a skyscraper designed by Frank O. Gehry, who designed the neighboring Walt Disney Concert Hall.

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Scan this, PubNet and PubEasy users:

PubNet/PubEasy made a presentation at the Book Industry Study Group's ISBN-13 Task Force yesterday about ISBN-13 issues in EDI transactions. The presentation is available from the BISG office at info@bisg.org.

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Kevin Moran has joined Ingram Book Group as a field sales rep for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island. He is part of an expanded trade sales team that will represent Ingram Publisher Services publishers as well as Ingram's wholesale services to booksellers. For the past 15 years, Moran has worked for Continuum Books, Springer-Verlag, IDG Books Worldwide and Tab Books.

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The group of nearly 200 New Mexico publishers and authors that turned into booksellers last December will do it again this year.

In its first incarnation, the New Mexico Book Coop sold 3,400 books in 40 days in the Cottonwood Mall in Albuquerque, N.M. This year's fair will be different only in one major way: participants will not need to work in the store since a "regular sales staff" will run the venture. Before October 10, the price of admission per book is $45, with multiple-title discounts. Signings will be held Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. For more information, contact Paul Rhetts or Barbe Awalt at info@nmbookcoop.com; 505-344-9382; or www.nmbookcoop.com.

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Even the military is saluting the "lifestyle" shopping center.

"Not your father's base exchange" is how Stars & Stripes described the 844,000-sq.-ft. mall and hotel complex being built at Ramstein Air Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Leslie Whitlock, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service's project manager, calls the complex "a smaller version of the Mall of America in Minnesota or the Galleria in Dallas." Besides a food court, spa, restaurant, stores, a sports lounge and outdoor recreation center, the facility will have a café and "mega bookstore."

Today on the Diane Rehm Show, Barrett Seaman will tell all about his new book, Binge: What Your College Student Won't Tell You (Wiley, $25.95, 0471491195). He will also appear tomorrow on the Today Show.

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Bernard Goldberg appears tomorrow on the Today Show as he continues to promote his new book, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37) (HarperCollins, $25.95, 0060761288).

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Tomorrow on the Early Show, Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz smartly discusses her book, New Feminine Brain: How Women Can Develop Their Inner Strengths, Genius, and Intuition (Free Press, $25, 0743243064).

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Bret Easton Ellis appears tomorrow on Bookworm to talk about his new work of fiction--or nonfiction--Lunar Park (Knopf, $24.95, 0375412913). As the show puts it: "Beginning as an autobiography, Lunar Park turns into a classic horror novel. The haunted house, however, is spooked by Bret Ellis' personal demons, and the past comes alive in creepy ways that go way beyond autobiography." The book will be available on August 16.

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Tomorrow on the View, Morgan Spurlock, director and star of the hit documentary Super Size Me, offers tantalizing treats from his follow-up book, Don't Eat This Book: Fast Food and the Supersizing of America (Putnam, $21.95, 0399152601).

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Tomorrow on Oprah: Maria Shriver whose latest book is And One More Thing Before You Go. . . (Free Press, $13.95, 0743281012).

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John H. Richardson appears tomorrow on the Diane Rehm Show to divulge some of the contents of his book, My Father the Spy: An Investigative Memoir (HarperCollins, $24.95, 0060510358), about John H. Richardson Sr., a CIA station chief in Saigon, Vienna and other Cold War hot spots.

The Internet increasingly dominates the lives of nearly all teenagers, a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project survey has found.

"The number of teenagers using the Internet has grown 24% in the past four years and 87% of those between the ages of 12 and 17 are online," the group stated. "Compared to four years ago, teens' use of the Internet has intensified and broadened as they log on more often and do more things when they are online."

E-mail has become a medium for communicating with parents, institutions and authorities while instant and text messaging are the media of choice for communicating among themselves. Three-quarters of teens get their news from the Internet, and 43% makes purchases online.

Unfortunately there are clearly economic and racial divisions in terms of access. Teens in white and high-income houses are most likely to be online. For example, about 73% of teens from households earning under $30,000 use the Internet while 93% from households earning more than $75,000 a year go online.

For the full report, go to the Pew Internet Web site.

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TV news departments practice a balancing act because of differing male and female approaches to news stories, several people say in Ken Auletta's piece about the morning talk shows in the current New Yorker. "Men tend to like fairly dry factual bullets, and the shorter the better," David Westin, president of ABC News, said, while women use "storytelling as a way to access news stories."

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In a seemingly related story, one reason nonfiction may be trumping fiction at the moment in books and magazines is because, as Adrienne Miller, novelist and literary editor of Esquire, put it to Rachel Donadio in Sunday's New York Times Book Review, "We're in a dark cultural moment. I think people seem to feel more comfortable with nonfiction. The tragic theme here is that literary fiction has very limited cultural currency now. Fewer and fewer people seem to believe fiction is still essential for our emotional and intellectual survival."

Or as Philip Gourevitch, the new editor of the Paris Review put it: "We're living in a newsy time. There's an intense emphasis on topicality that also happens to coincide with a time when fiction is not particularly topical."

Donadio added: "Readers thirst for a narrative, any narrative, and will turn to the most compelling one. . . . Fiction may still be one escape of choice--along with television and movies and video games and iPods--but when it comes to illuminating today's world most vividly, nonfiction is winning."

But for how long? "To date, no work of fiction has perfectly captured our historical moment the way certain novels captured the Gilded Age, or the Weimar Republic, or the cold war," Donadio continued. "Then again, it's still early. Nonfiction can keep up with the instant message culture; fiction takes its own sweet time. Even Tolstoy wrote War and Peace years after the Napoleonic Wars."