TOO MUCH: About 55,000 new books are...

TOO MUCH: About 55,000 new books are published annually. At Bookstar in Woodland Hills, there are 70,000 titles. “Fiction outsells everything,” says store supervisor Russell Sakamoto. John Grisham and Michael Crichton’s books are moving fast. And R. L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” series is a top kids’ seller. . . . “Young readers like horror stories, but not as gruesome as grown-ups.”

COMPUTER AGE: The Disney Co. sells plenty of kids’ books but also some for adults. The Disney Encyclopedia of Baby and Child Care, which attempts to be the ‘90s Dr. Spock, and the Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters both may be turned into CD-ROM formats. . . . The animation tome contains every Disney animated character. “On CD-ROM, you could see them and hear them,” says Lisa Kitei of Hyperion Press.

OLD GOLD: Busy traffic at new bookstore chains “means more used books for us, eventually,” says Eve Klein, above, owner of Green Ginger Bookshop in Canoga Park. . . . Her customers’ tastes vary, but “somebody every day asks for Richard Brautigan or Jack Kerouac.” Less certain is each day’s sales. But recently someone bought 100 used cookbooks.

YOUNG READERS: Darlene Daniel of Pages, Books for Children & Young Adults in Tarzana says books based on Disney films are often “written to a format” with “a hero, one secondary humorous character and the villain.” She decries the book industry’s homogenization and the practice of the big chains, where a book must sell fast or disappear. . . . One new book she likes is “The 13th Floor: A Ghost Story” by Sid Fleischman.

NO CRAYONS: Malibu Comics Entertainment in Calabasas, publisher of “Terminator 2” comic books, tried marketing comics on CD-ROM, but “they weren’t profitable,” says media manager Donna Sava. Yet one high-tech move stuck: The final coloring for comic books is done on a computer, not by hand. To do one page, a computer colorist needs “one hour to five hours.”