We spent Saturday at BookCon - BEA's replacement for the Power Reader event we've attended the last two years. We bought tickets to this year's Power Reader day shortly after they went on sale - only to have them converted to BookCon tickets months later. We were concerned about the changes but BookCon staff assured us we'd "have access to everything we loved about Power Reader day", so we decided to give it a shot.

Our short take on it: BookCon is not BEA.

We haven't registered as bloggers for BEA in the past because it hadn't felt necessary. Spending one day as Power Readers gave us access to the entire exhibit hall and plenty of opportunity to check things out. Our biggest beef with BookCon is that we only got access to a small portion of the exhibit hall so we missed out on visiting some publishers we really enjoyed chatting with previous years, like Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, William Morrow, Penguin and Baker & Taylor, among others.

Our second big issue was that in past years it felt like coming to BEA was giving you a day pass into the awesome publishing world. BookCon was more like hey, come be part of a huge mass here to see celebrities! Personalized passes were replaced with generic ones and access to the entire exhibit hall was replaced with celebrity panels that were so poorly crowd-controlled that there were a few times we feared for our safety - and we weren't even trying to get into said panels, just around them!

That said, we did find glimmers of our previous experiences throughout the day. We had really nice chats with representatives from New Harbringer Publications, Mom's Choice Awards and the This Is Teen crowd from Scholastic. We got to meet some really fun, new-to-us authors during signings including Kristie Cook, Corey Ann Haydu, Liz Pichon, Lynn Brunelle and Paul Zelinsky. We grabbed a few ARCs we're excited about and our littlest BookCon-er decided to take her first steps while there! All-in-all, a good day.

Next year, we're planning to be there as bloggers. It feels more our speed after the big changes this year. We're looking forward to it already!