Hoping to Lure Readers Who’d Rather Not : Books: Publishers have geared upcoming offerings to an audience referred to as ‘the Nintendo generation’--readers for whom a picture is worth at least a thousand words.

“Beam me up, Scotty.”

Quotation sound familiar?

Then don’t be surprised to find it in Bartlett’s “Familiar Quotations” when Little, Brown publishes the newest edition in November. Even that venerable, 137-year-old tome is feeling the pinch of the multimedia 1990s, roping in references from the tube to The King.

Indeed, multimedia was the buzzword at this year’s American Booksellers Assn. convention, which was awash in hoopla--celebrity authors, rivers of free booze, giant holograms, even the odd unseasonal Santa Claus--glorifying the endless variety of the written word. As publishers eye the growing competition for the public’s shrinking leisure time, the few familiar words that hit the mark were these--if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

“To operate competitively in the world, we have to have all the mediums covered,” said Beth Davey, publicity director of Little, Brown, one of 1,900 vendors at the Anaheim Convention Center.

An estimated 26,000 book-industry folk converged for a four-day confab that ends today. Significantly, the big-money recession-busters of the ABA were industry outsiders: Norman Schwarzkopf, who reportedly netted $5 million from Bantam Books for “It Doesn’t Take a Hero,” written with Peter Petre, and Magic Johnson, promoting two titles from his reported $4 million, three-book deal with Random House--”What You Can Do To Avoid AIDS,” which is out now, and the upcoming “Magic Johnson: My Life,” written with William Novak.

Other outsiders turning heads were Jimmy Carter, for “Turning Point,” about his first run for office 30 years ago, to be published by Times Books; and Ed Meese, stumping for “With Reagan” (Regnery Gateway). Even though she was absent, Madonna’s presence was felt; she is the subject of an upcoming volume of erotic photographs by Steven Meisel, which is tagged as Warner’s biggest book of the fall season.

“I don’t think there’s anything else that might compare with the controversy that (Madonna) might engender--from the house that brought you ‘Scarlett,’ ” crowed Warner Books publisher Nanscy Neiman.

Other titles that caused a buzz among book club and foreign rights scouts included “Kissinger,” touted as the first full-length biography of Henry Kissinger, by Walter Isaacson, an editor at Time magazine (Simon & Schuster); and “Clockers” by novelist/screenwriter Richard Price, a gritty tale of the inner-city drug trade just published by Houghton Mifflin. Also creating a stir was “Degree of Guilt”--a trial novel by San Francisco lawyer Richard North Patterson, which Knopf had bought only days earlier for a hefty $1.4 million. Knopf chief Sonny Mehta was exultant over the scramble for foreign rights. “It’s the most extraordinary bidding situation,” he said.

“Degree of Guilt” is unusual in other ways--its rape-trial plot centering on female protagonists is part of a boomlet of male authors anchoring their novels to women protagonists. First novelist Walter Lamb’s “She Comes Undone” (Pocket Books) explores four decades of a woman’s life in her own words. Laramie Dunaway writes about a young California divorcee’s answered prayer to be someone else in Warner’s “Borrowed Lives.”

Pocket Books author Walter Kirn, whose upcoming “She Needed Me” examines a pregnant woman’s struggle with an anti-abortionist, tagged the trend the typical male response to a literary challenge: “Men never saw a subject they didn’t want to make their own. They want to make women’s experience their own too. So some authors go in mental drag for a while.”

The literary urge to merge is meshing nicely with market forces--60% of readers are women, according to Jack Romanos, president of the Simon & Schuster Consumer Group, and the market for men’s spy thrillers is drying up with the Cold War.

“Men are starting to write about the issues in women’s lives,” said Judith Regan, Kirn’s editor. “We’re evolving in our thinking.”

“Degree of Guilt” is being touted as the women’s “Presumed Innocent.” Needless to say, the book was being courted by Hollywood.

While books have long seeded film and television projects, and motorists are used to popping audiotapes of books into their cassette players for the long haul home, publishers are exploring other variations on the media-crossover theme--publishing books from film and TV, using videos and infomercials to hawk books, packaging CDs with books and, most alluringly, developing CD-ROMs, books on compact discs embracing sound and image, primarily used for reference works at this point.

“The Nintendo generation has grown up an interactive, visually intensive generation and they don’t go into books. There has to be a way to reach out to them,” said Michael Reagan, publisher of Turner Publishing, a 2-year-old arm of Ted Turner’s media empire. “In 10 years, this (CD-ROMs) will be a $100-billion business. We’re on the threshold of something absolutely profound.”

Some publishers like Turner, with his CNN, the MGM library and Hanna-Barbera, figure that if people are going to watch TV and movies anyway, they might as well be hooked with related books, each medium promoting the other. Hyperion’s success with a book spin-off of “Wayne’s World” emboldened Disney’s publishing arm to take on another “Saturday Night Live” character, the androgynous Pat, in “It’s Pat, My Life Exposed” as well as a cookbook inspired by “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.”

Bantam Books’ hardcover book sequels to the “Star Wars” film trilogy have been “a gigantic sales story,” says Lou Aronica, Bantam’s mass market publisher. Bantam printed 300,000 copies of the first, “Heir to the Empire,” slightly more of the second, “Dark Force Rising,” and has plans for a steady flow of new celestial adventures.

“It’s an unquestioned phenomenon,” Aronica says. “What’s fascinating is there’s a large readership developed via another medium.”

Newmarket Press was showing around director Ron Howard to promote its book version of “Far and Away,” a glossy melange of script, photos and trivia spun from the film. Newmarket scored a publishing touchdown with its “Dances With Wolves” book, selling 100,000 copies, making it the biggest-selling pictorial movie book, according to Newmarket publisher Esther Margolis.

In another kind of media mesh, HarperCollins is packaging a CD with October’s “Ferrington Guitars,” an elaborate guitar-shaped tribute to guitar-making guru Danny Ferrington. The CD features such artists as Elvis Costello and Ry Cooder playing on their Ferringtons.

And author Tama Janowitz was promoting her Crown novel, “The Male Cross-Dresser Support Group,” with a nod toward MTV--with a video she directed that was beamed on an ABA channel in convention hotels. True to the book’s title, the cartoon-like 40-second video, which stars the B-52s’ Cyndy Wilson, even showcases a dog in a dress.

“I’ll go on a talk show, and they’ll say, ‘What’s your book about?’ and I can show a clip,” Janowitz said at a Crown party promoting her and Douglas Adams in honor of his upcoming novel, “Mostly Harmless.” “Or they could run it in a bookstore. I don’t think we’re living in a time when people are thrilled to read books. Why shouldn’t they be seduced?”

Such questions may become more pressing as publishing grapples with the recession. February returns of Christmas season books were generally “staggering” this year, said Adrian Zackheim, William Morrow vice president, although he said the company was prospering and sales appeared to be picking up.

But not everyone was convinced the industry was equipped for the onslaught of the Nintendo generation.

“I have a 14-year-old who doesn’t like to read,” said New Jersey literary agent Sandra Choron. “It’s a lost art and this industry is fighting a lost battle. I can’t say this industry is really addressing itself to answers.”

Still, there were signs that the noble written word was alive and well:

Western Publishing celebrated the 50th anniversary of its classic Little Golden Books for children with a ‘40s-theme bash featuring another classic, singer Maxene Andrews of the Andrews Sisters, and actors dressed as World War II soldiers, USO volunteers and Rosie the Riveter.

Random House privately feted author and iconoclastic Texas columnist Molly Ivins in honor of her sleeper bestseller, “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That Can She?,” which has logged 26 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

And offers of the industry’s resources were made to help heal the wounds of the Los Angeles riots. Donors included Random House, which announced a gift of $100,000 worth of books to eight libraries and bookstores destroyed in the unrest, including the Aquarian Bookshop, the country’s oldest African-American-owned bookstore.

In the end, while Carolyn Reidy, president of Simon & Schuster’s trade division, acknowledged publishing’s common sentiment that CD-ROMs are “the wave of the future,” she threw in her own lot with the wave of the past.

“I think people like the physical heft of a book,” she said. “This 19th-Century medium is never going to go away.”