By Ali Gharib

After a bad flood last year in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, writer Deborah Emin, who has family roots in the Mid-western city, visited to write about the fall out.

But driving west, she noticed something about the landscape between Kew Gardens and Iowa. Many places suffered from the same lack of literary variety – and lack of enthusiasm for books – that she also saw at home in central Queens.

Emin, who takes several trips a year to Cedar Rapids, decided to combine her journeys with a new project she was getting underway at home: a small e-publishing house called Sullivan Street Press.

And so Emin, 60, set out for Iowa in her baby-blue Toyota Prius on a recent Sunday, leaving early to beat New York Marathon traffic. Along the way, she put on the Itinerant Book Show, a combination of an expo for lesser-known volumes and an educational seminar about how publishing is changing.

“We need to take new technology and tell people they need to be more involved with books,” Emin said at a small coffee shop in Forest Hills, her eyes beaming with pride behind square-frame glasses. “We want to teach people about the new publishing paradigm and how they can use it.”

Emin, an author, journalist and writing teacher, first saw the deficiency of independent titles in Kew Gardens, where she has lived since 2005.

There are only large chain bookstores in Kew Gardens and Forest Hills, neighborhoods made up mostly of single-family homes and lawns peppered with autumn’s fallen leaves. And there’s no library – the nearest one is across the neighborhood boundary in Richmond Hill.

Two years ago, Emin launched the Sullivan Street Press, a small e-publishing house. She named the company for a street she lived on in downtown Manhattan when she first came to New York. She also launched the REZ Reading Series – in the basement of a church in Kew Gardens – as a place for authors to showcase their work for local audiences.

Sullivan Street Press sells books through the Itinerant Book Show, which, with outside works from other independent publishing houses, now includes 20 titles from 19 authors in five categories: fiction, young adult, non-fiction, poetry and memoirs.

This unconventional approach to reinvigorate literary passions may seem quixotic in the face of the precipitous drop in reading. A 2007 AP poll, the most recent such survey with a large sample size, revealed that only one in four American adults read a book in the preceding year. But that doesn’t mean that books are going away.

“I don’t see the book disappearing soon,” said Tom Engelhardt, an editor at Metropolitan Books and a three-decade veteran of the publishing industry. “In ten years, books will be here, though maybe they’ll be selling less to a smaller core audience.”

However, Engelhardt says that new technologies – e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle, mobile phones, and computer screens – are changing how people read.

Like Engelhardt, Emin and her two volunteer helpers – an information technology expert and a marketing specialist – are optimistic, encouraged by interest in their project.

“We think, ‘Is this thing going work?’” said Rob Lebow, 45, Sullivan Street’s tech guru, of Emin’s trips. “And every time there is a show, two or three people come up to Deborah and want to get involved – not just buy books, but get involved.”

Lebow admits that the Itinerant Book Show is a bit of preaching to the choir – most of those so far attracted by the outings are “bookies,” he says.

Lebow, a technology consultant who used to work for the New York Stock Exchange but held a passion for writing, said an essential part of Sullivan Street’s effort is connecting readers to authors – something Emin, through her gregarious nature and contacts with writers, is well-positioned to do. Emin says she’s had years-long relationships with some of the authors whose work she sells, inviting them and other writers, who then entered her fold, to the reading series.

One author who did a reading, Connecticut-based Melissa Crandall, 52, has seen modest sales of her book “Darling Wendy and Other Stories” through the book show.

“I think we should all nurture those ways in which books that might normally fall between the cracks can be brought to the attention of the reading public,” said Crandall.

On her latest trip West, Emin performed Itinerant Book Shows in Clarion, Penn., and Toledo, Ohio, where she spoke at the Ground Level Coffee Shop.

“Toledo is known as the franchise capital of the world because they test franchises here,” said Jesse Lipman, a poet and co-owner of Ground Level, which was founded to provide an independent shop with a performance space for alternative artists. “That’s really what we’re about is connecting with people like [Emin] and providing a space for them. It was a nice symmetry with her.”

In an entry on the web site OpedNews.com, Emin said 20 people listened to her at Ground Level on Nov. 2.

The long, lonely trips to Iowa have softened up for Emin, and she writes that she’s fulfilling one of the main purposes of the book show: To “make new friends along the road.” And, with her journals on OpedNews, she finds the journeys are something worth writing about.