The juggernaut of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series could not overcome the overpowering effects of a global recession last year as publishers sold fewer books in 2008 than the year before, according to the Book Industry Study group, a trade association.

Publishers sold 3.08 billion copies in 2008, down 1.5 percent from the 3.13 billion copies sold the previous year, according to Book Industry Trends 2009, an annual report that analyzes sales in the United States. Higher retail prices helped to lift net revenue just 1 percent, to $40.3 billion from $39.9 billion.

The numbers confirm a litany of dreary news that has emerged from the publishing industry since last fall, when booksellers began seeing significant declines in store traffic. The trend has not abated this year, as publishers have continued to report double-digit sales declines. Borders Group announced Tuesday that first-quarter sales dropped 12 percent.

Against this backdrop, publishers, authors, booksellers and librarians are gathering in New York for BookExpo America, the industry’s annual convention, which runs through Sunday.

Authors including Richard Russo and Lisa Scottoline, as well as celebrities like Julie Andrews and Steven Tyler, lead singer of Aerosmith, will be featured, while several panels will focus on the effects of digital publishing on the beleaguered industry.

Attendance is down 14 percent from about 35,000 who attended in 2007, the last time the convention was held in New York. Many publishing houses have toned down their customary parties from splashy sit-down dinners to cocktails-only events.

The data from Book Industry Trends reflected a change in methods as the Book Industry Study Group hired Outsell, a research company, to survey publishers and solicit sales data. Previously, researchers analyzed already-published numbers. This was the second change in less than five years. In 2005, figures from small and mid-size publishers were added.

According to the report, sales of adult trade books (fiction and nonfiction for the general market) declined 2.3 percent to 1.35 billion copies from 1.38 billion in 2007. Net revenue in the segment also slid 2.3 percent to $11.13 billion from $11.39 billion. Publishers expressed hope that “The Lost Symbol,” a novel by Dan Brown, might increase book sales when it is released in September.

Somewhat surprisingly, the data showed that sales of juvenile books, which include the hugely popular “Twilight” series, fell by 1.3 percent to 889 million copies, from 901 million copies. Leigh Watson Healy, chief analyst at Outsell, said that the blockbuster sales of Ms. Meyer’s books were not enough to propel the category forward and could not replace the absence of a new Harry Potter book.

But according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, the number of juvenile books sold in 2008 was 154.9 million, up nearly 6 percent from 146.2 million in 2007. (The 2008 numbers do not include nontraditional retailers like grocery or drugstores that were added to BookScan’s numbers just last year.) Ms. Meyer’s books sold 15.5 million copies in 2008, compared with 11.3 million Harry Pottery books in 2007, the year that the final installment in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” was released.

The report showed strong sales of professional and kindergarten through 12th grade and college textbooks. Ms. Healy said that budget cuts had not yet caught up to these segments.

Sales of religious books, previously a bright spot for the publishing industry, plummeted 10 percent to 247 million copies from 275 million copies.

Michael Hyatt, chief executive of Thomas Nelson, one of the country’s largest religious publishers, said the category did not have a top-selling book like “The Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren or the “Left Behind” series last year. The success of those books, Mr. Hyatt said, helped benefit all books in the category because “when people walked into a store to pick up those titles, they picked up something else.”

The data examined sales of electronic books for reading devices like Amazon.com’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader Digital Book. In the adult trade segment, for example, net revenues for e-books totaled $113 million, up nearly 7 percent from $105 million in 2007. Publishers have cited increases much higher than that.

This weekend, the world’s book publishers will gather in New York for the 2009 BookExpo America. Organizers say this year the focus is on quality, not quantity. Large publishers have been hit hard by the recession, so they’re trimming back the number of booths they’ll staff at the expo.

But one corner of the publishing world has its own strange economy. Poets and those who publish them are used to earning next to nothing for their work. They call the cycle of rejections, teaching and issuing small books the “pobiz,” short for “poetry business.” And maybe the pobiz isn’t so bad, if you look at it a certain way.

“I just gave a reading last week, and much to my surprise, I sold 15 copies,” says Keith Taylor, a poet and teacher at the University of Michigan. “I thought I might sell two.”

For editors like Bob Hershon, poetry is also a labor of love. His Hanging Loose Press advances poets the money they need to print and bind their volumes. Poets try to recoup that cost by doing readings and coaxing friends to buy their books. Hershon says his friends in commercial publishing are losing their jobs. “But we can’t be out of work because we don’t take any salaries,” he says. “We’re nuts, but my co-editors and I work out of our hip pockets.”

As tragedies go, not getting what you want is the straightforward kind, and getting it can be the ironic variety. But there is also the existential tragedy of not knowing what you want to begin with. That’s the species of catastrophe recounted in Walter Kirn’s memoir, “Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever,” the witty, self-­castigating story of the author’s single-minded quest to succeed at a series of tests and competitions that took him from one of the lowest-ranked high schools in Minnesota to Princeton. As Kirn, a noted critic and novelist, tells it, in childhood he leapt onto a hamster wheel baited with “prizes, plaques, citations, stars,” and kept rattling away at it until his junior year in the Ivy League, when he suffered a breakdown that left him nearly speechless.

Kirn cracked up as he began to suspect that he was approaching the end of the line. He didn’t especially desire money or power, and even his appetite for renown was quixotic. (He spent one summer bar-backing for a legendary mixologist in Munich, thinking: “This was true fame I was witnessing, true mastery. I should stay and learn from it.”) Up to that point, he’d devoted his whole life to “the great generational tournament of aptitude” in which “the ranking itself was the essential prize.” Somehow he’d made it through three years of college without seriously considering what he intended to do once he got out.

Like many memoirs, “Lost in the Meritocracy” combines penetrating shrewdness with remarkable blind spots. Take the book’s central question: How did anyone as smart as Kirn get into such a fix? The implication of the title is that “meritocracy” itself was to blame. Kirn grew up in the 1960s and ’70s, when technocrats were thoroughly systematizing American public education. In his suburban grammar school, subjects like art and music were formed into “units” and “modules,” implying that “learning could be engineered, and that it had been, perhaps by government scientists — the same ones behind the Apollo program, maybe.” At the same time, the teachers were squishy, easily flattered and willing to coo over any creative daub that seemed to express “feelings.” “Art” could be whatever he said it was, Kirn realized, and producing it was the equivalent of such apple-polishing activities as emptying the classroom pencil sharpener. When he concocted bogus stories about the emotions that supposedly inspired his projects, he won “praise, and sometimes hugs, eventually convincing me that art was about one feeling above all others: being loved.”

So there you have it: the young Walter Kirn quickly learned that achievement could be precisely quantified, but also that the system for arriving at that quantification could be gamed. “I was the system’s pure product,” he writes, “sly and flexible, not so much educated as wised up.” He figured out how to turn a teacher’s question inside out and parrot it back in a simulation of thoughtfulness. If asked, “How does racial prejudice contribute to inner-city hopelessness?” he’d reply, “Is our conception of ‘inner-city hopelessness’ perhaps in itself a form of prejudice?” A maestro of multiple choice, he managed to ace his SATs despite having cracked only three “serious novels” by the age of 16: “Frankenstein,” “Moby-Dick” and “The Great Gatsby.”

At Princeton, however, he discovered the limits of his facility. He could beguile a professor into thinking he understood such concepts as “liminal” and “valuational,” but his peers unerringly recognized his scholarship-boy status. The heiress girlfriend of one of his freshman roommates offered him some Champagne her father had sent her, then tried to charge him for his portion of the bottle. His roommates replaced their suite’s shabby furniture, then banned Kirn from the common room when he refused to pony up $600 as his share. In no time, the suite became “a concentrated version of what the whole campus would come to represent for me: a private association of the powerful which I’d been invited to visit on a day pass that, I sensed, might be revoked at any time as arbitrarily as it had been issued.”

In one respect, Kirn lucked out: his college years coincided with the ascendancy of “theory” in American academia. Since hardly anybody understood the deconstructionists to begin with, it was that much easier for Kirn to bluff his way through, powered by bravado alone. Better yet, theory was intent on proving the illegitimacy of all those great books he’d never read. “We skipped straight from ignorance to revisionism,” he writes of his cohort, “deconstructing a body of literary knowledge that we’d never constructed in the first place.”

On campus, Kirn cultivated an identity as an avant-gardist. He wrote pretentious plays and poems about “the creeping loss of ‘personhood’ in an era of technological change.” He called his social crowd “the Joy Division” after the postpunk band he pretended to like while secretly thinking that their music sounded “like noise in a coma victim’s brain.” On a trip to Manhattan (to buy drugs with a self-styled Marxist who regarded flushing the toilet as “unpaid labor”), he hung out with a rich girl in an apartment downstairs from Truman Capote’s and overlooking the U.N. Her skin, he marveled, looked like it might have been “harvested, through some blasphemous new process, from the wrists of infants.” His life was a Jay ­McInerneyish scenario, which is to say a Gatsbyish scenario, but Kirn was incapable of grasping this because he’d ludicrously misconstrued Fitzgerald’s novel as an “invigorating chronicle of several high-spirited Midwesterners storming through the mansions of the East.”

No one could be harder on the youthful Kirn than he is on himself; he has to be. He has the satirist’s cruel knack for conjuring and dispatching an individual in a single line, like the “computer whiz” described as having “all the characteristics of a bad stutterer without the stutter itself.” You can’t dish that stuff out unless you’re willing to take most of it, at least not without making yourself hateful to your readers. “Lost in the Meritocracy” betrays the roots of this skill in a wobbly notion of the self as a void encased in a posture. But did “the meritocracy” cause Kirn’s chronic hollowness, or was it simply the vehicle at hand, ideally suited to a boy starved for approval? His parents — a restless, titanically self-involved father and a mother who cultivated her inner life in strict solitude — seem a much likelier source for his condition. It was only after Princeton, while holed up with his mother’s little stash of “classics for the masses,” that Kirn finally summoned enough faith to risk losing that fragile self in other people’s books. You lose it, but it always comes back. That’s one of the ways of learning it was there to begin with.

I have always loved his work, here is one of my favorite pieces:

The New Poetry Handbook by Mark Strand

1 If a man understands a poem,
he shall have troubles.

2 If a man lives with a poem,
he shall die lonely.

3 If a man lives with two poems,
he shall be unfaithful to one.

4 If a man conceives of a poem,
he shall have one less child.

5 If a man conceives of two poems,
he shall have two children less.

6 If a man wears a crown on his head as he writes,
he shall be found out.

7 If a man wears no crown on his head as he writes,
he shall deceive no one but himself.

8 If a man gets angry at a poem,
he shall be scorned by men.

9 If a man continues to be angry at a poem,
he shall be scorned by women.

10 If a man publicly denounces poetry,
his shoes will fill with urine.

11 If a man gives up poetry for power,
he shall have lots of power.

12 If a man brags about his poems,
he shall be loved by fools.

13 If a man brags about his poems and loves fools,
he shall write no more.

14 If a man craves attention because of his poems,
he shall be like a jackass in moonlight.

15 If a man writes a poem and praises the poem of a fellow,
he shall have a beautiful mistress.

16 If a man writes a poem and praises the poem of a fellow overly,
he shall drive his mistress away.

17 If a man claims the poem of another,
his heart shall double in size.

18 If a man lets his poems go naked,
he shall fear death.

19 If a man fears death,
he shall be saved by his poems.

20 If a man does not fear death,
he may or may not be saved by his poems.

21 If a man finishes a poem,
he shall bathe in the blank wake of his passion
and be kissed by white paper.

Dan Brown’s first new novel since The Da Vinci Code was recently announced. Inevitably, it involves a global cult and a race against time to unlock a secret formula.

Details of the plot are likely to remain fiercely guarded until much nearer the publication date of September 15, but intrigue centres on whether Brown’s vast and conspiracy-crazed international fanbase can divine any clues about the novel from its title: The Lost Symbol.

The story, a sequel to The Da Vinci Code, unfolds over 12 hours and again features the Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon. It has taken Brown five years to write but only in the past few days has he settled on a title bland or enigmatic enough to give away none of his new subject matter.

Since The Da Vinci Code was unleashed on a largely unsuspecting world in 2003, Brown’s success has been such that every carefully drip-fed hint of his plans has been cannibalised by fan sites and rival publishers.

When the long-rumoured sequel was provisionally listed for publication in 2006 under the title The Solomon Key, it led to a rash of pre-emptive books about how to unlock the Solomon Key.

The new title was deliberately chosen to be “as opaque as possible”, according to a source close to the project. “Dan Brown is so phenomenally successful that anything he says in relation to his books can spawn a whole publishing industry in itself.” Brown had previously hinted that his next novel would be set in America and concern freemasonry, just as The Da Vinci Code delved into the religious organisation Opus Dei, and its predecessor, Angels & Demons, tackled a secret society called the Illuminati. His books have antagonised Christian groups and upset sensitive lovers of fine English prose but their protests have been drowned out by record-breaking sales.

Brown’s publisher announced The Lost Symbol at the London International Book Fair yesterday. Booksellers immediately predicted that it would be the biggest-selling book of the year, sparking the sort of hysterical expectation last witnessed with the publication of the seventh and final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, in 2007.

Brown’s last four novels (the first three of them republished after the phenomenal success of The Da Vinci Code) are now the first, second, third and fourth bestselling adult paperback novels in British history, according to Nielsen Bookscan. Appetites will be whetted further next month with the release of a film version of Angels & Demons. Like The Da Vinci Code adaptation, it is directed by Ron Howard and stars Tom Hanks.

Sonny Mehta, chairman and editor in chief of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Brown’s US publisher, said: “This is a great day for readers and booksellers. The Lost Symbol is a brilliant and compelling thriller. Dan Brown’s prodigious talent for storytelling, infused with history, codes and intrigue, is on full display in this new book. This is one of the most anticipated publications in recent history, and it was well worth the wait.”

Jason Kaufman, Brown’s US editor, said: “From the first page, Dan’s readers will feel the thrill of discovery as they follow Robert Langdon through a masterful and unexpected new landscape. The Lost Symbol is full of surprises.”

Brown said: “This novel has been a strange and wonderful journey. Weaving five years of research into the story’s 12-hour timeframe was an exhilarating challenge. Robert Langdon’s life clearly moves a lot faster than mine.”

Toby Bourne, Waterstone’s head of fiction, said: “Customers constantly ask our booksellers, ‘When is the new Dan Brown out?’ It’s incredibly exciting that we now have an answer.”

The Da Vinci Code’s British paperback edition (published in March 2004) spent 120 weeks in The Sunday Times’s Top Ten.

Angels, demons and symbols

- Dan Brown was born on June 22, 1964, in Exeter, New Hampshire. Before becoming a novelist, he was a singer-songwriter and pianist, releasing albums, including one entitled Angels & Demons in 1994

- His first book was called 187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman. One of the types of men it recommended avoiding were those who write self-help books. It was co-written with his wife, Blythe, and published under the pseudonym Danielle Brown in 1995

- In 2004, spurred by the success of The Da Vinci Code, all four of Brown’s novels were in the US bestseller list in the same week

- The Da Vinci Code has sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, making it one of the bestselling books in history

- Brown’s income from The Da Vinci Code has been estimated at about £170 million. It has been translated into more than 50 languages, and the subsequent film adaptation grossed nearly £500 million worldwide. The sequel, Angels and Demons (starring Ewan McGregor) is due for release in Britain on May 15

- Brown has admitted using gravity boots to hang upside down when he has writer’s block, claiming that it gives him a different perspective from which to view his plots

‘We’ve got to get home and start reading,” said one of the teenage girls tearing out the door of the small-town Borders where I bought my copy of Breaking Dawn a few minutes after midnight on Aug. 2. Ardent fans of Stephenie Meyer’s blockbuster series about perpetually swooning Bella Swan, her vampire sweetheart, and the various werewolves and bloodsucking freaks who populate her world aren’t waiting for a cool critical appraisal of this final installment to decide whether it’s worth their time. You succumb to Meyer’s novels as you do to a powerful, slightly ridiculous dream. Or you don’t.

Here’s a third possibility: You whip through Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse, then abruptly lose all patience with the franchise midway through Breaking Dawn, when Meyer takes her supernatural love story several bizarre steps too far.

Dawn begins days before 18-year-old Bella’s wedding to Edward Cullen, whom she has worshipped since she first arrived in the drizzly town of Forks, Wash., three volumes and 1,700 pages ago. Back then she was the new kid in town, insecure and crushing madly on the cutest boy in school, who just happened to be a vampire. (He’s part of a polite coven who drink animal blood.) Now, after countless misunderstandings and estrangements, after outsmarting evil fiends and consorting with cuddly werewolves, Bella finally has what she has always wanted: Edward. ”He had the most beautiful soul, more beautiful than his brilliant mind or his incomparable face or his glorious body,” Bella coos. Yes, you need to plow through acres of this kind of goo in all Meyer’s novels, but they move so quickly you hardly notice.

The couple has made a pact. Edward will transform Bella into a vampire — a fate she has pleaded for — but only after they enjoy a ”real” honeymoon, complete with vampire-on-human sex. So, off to a tropical island the newlyweds jet to at last consummate their long-simmering love. Like many of his kind, Edward gets a little wild in the sack; he shreds pillows and destroys the headboard of a bed during their coupling, and bruises Bella all over her body. Happily for her, though somewhat upsettingly for the reader, she is so transported by erotic rapture that she fails to notice: ”I only remembered wanting him to hold me tighter, and being pleased when he did….” If this sounds steamy, rest assured (or don’t get your hopes up): Meyer writes about even furniture-wrecking sex with the decorum of a Victorian schoolmistress.

She is less restrained, alas, in her macabre descriptions of the pregnancy that immediately follows. Any reasonably astute reader will guess that Edward has knocked Bella up — inexplicable nausea, gnawing hunger — long before she figures it out herself. And it’s when Bella, suffering from morning sickness and gestating a vampire, starts vomiting ”a fountain” of blood, that Meyer jumps the shark.

The series has always been grounded in Bella’s human voice, which is imbued with adolescent fragility and unwavering passion for Edward, which, however goopily described, has a kind of winsome purity rare in young-adult fiction. You may wish she had loftier goals and a mind of her own, but these are fairy tales, and as a steadfast lover in the Disney princess mold, Bella has a certain saccharine appeal. As the masochistic teenage mother-to-be of a monster — a fetus that breaks her ribs when it kicks — she is not only hard to identify with but positively horrifying, especially while guzzling human blood to nourish the infant. (She adamantly refuses an abortion, which even Edward begs her to consider.) By the time the feverish birth scene rolls around, you’ll think Rosemary’s Baby might make a suitable companion video to What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

And this is just the beginning.

During the loonier stretches of the novel, Meyer wisely turns the narration over to Bella’s old friend Jacob, a warmhearted werewolf who has always been sweet on her. He becomes our tenuous anchor to sanity, as outrageous new plot twists sprout like kudzu. ”I felt like — like I don’t know what. Like this wasn’t real. Like I was in some Goth version of a bad sitcom,” Jacob confides before he too is swept up in the narrative mayhem. So do we, Jacob. So do we.