"You might be wondering if this is the moment where we're at," Ms. McIntosh, a tall figure in a slim navy dress, said with a smile, as dozens of students with plastic name tags hanging around their necks watched raptly.

So the summer session began with a focus on "The Digital Future." Students were schooled in "Reinventing the Reading Experience: From Print to Digital" by Nicholas Callaway, the chairman of a company that produces book apps for children. Managers from Penguin Group USA explained how to master "e-marketing," and a panel of digital experts talked about short-form electronic publishing -- not quite a magazine article, not quite a book -- which is so new, the genre doesn't really have a name.

"You never know what's going to happen," Carolyn Pittis, the senior vice president of global author services at HarperCollins, told a packed room of students several days into the course. "So it's very exciting for those of us who spent many years when a lot of things didn't happen."

As the students scribbled in notebooks and clicked on laptops, Ms. Pittis recounted some of the biggest developments in the industry so far in 2011. The proliferation of e-readers and the growing digital market share of Barnes & Noble. Amanda Hocking, a formerly self-published author, making a book deal with a traditional publisher. J. K. Rowling's selling her own"Harry Potter" e-books online. Even the surprise success of "Go the -- to Sleep," a hilariously vulgar children's book parody that rose to the top of best-seller lists after being widely pirated via e-mail for months.

In the past year, e-books have skyrocketed in popularity, especially in genre fiction like romance and thrillers. For some new releases, the first week has brought more sales of electronic copies than of print copies.

All of which were ripe topics for discussion for students in the course this year, even as they deciphered messages that could be simultaneously weary and optimistic.