Holtzbrinck Online

"The Best Words In Their Best Order"

Halfway through National Poetry Month, we’re pleased to see that FSG’s new blog initiative is looking fantastic! Launched on April 1, the FSG poetry blog, The Best Words In Their Best Order, was created to celebrate FSG’s legendary roster of poets. FSG kicked off the month by distributing an “unusual” cell phone ring tone – an original couplet by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon that you can download here and listen to here:

“It’s only me trying to get through
I’d really love to talk to you”

The blog (which is named after a quote from a great writer) features wonderful posts by publicist and events coordinator Ami Greko, and focuses on poetry as a spoken art form. How so, you wonder? Well, we were able to assemble a wonderful collection of MP3 recordings of FSG poets introducing and reading their own poetry, as well as that of backlist poets. As FSG’s press release points out, “The matchups chosen by these poets are remarkable: Robert Pinsky reads Elizabeth Bishop’s At the Fish Houses, C.K. Williams reads Robert Lowell’s For the Union Dead, Seamus Heaney reads The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott reads Joseph Brodsky’s Lullaby.” New audio clips are available almost every day to stream, to download, and even via podcast. Also, we worked with FSG-designed broadsheets for two poems to create desktops and screensavers that visitors can download. The blog’s a wonderful treat, but it will only last so long – until April 30, actually – so visit www.fsgpoetry.com sometime soon. Enjoy!

Debuts Galore

	Dune by Frank Herbert Audio Renaissance Pub Date:  May 29, 2007 Running Time:  27 hours ISBN: 1-4272-0143-9
Exciting news for Dune fans: Audio Renaissance will be releasing this classic series in audiobook CD format. Stay tuned to www.DuneAudio.com for the latest updates on this exciting event.
	Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata Farrar, Straus & Giroux Pub. Date May 2007 272 Pages ISBN: 0374103984
www.RethinkingThin.com also debuted last week. New York Times science writer, Gina Kolata, tackles the realities of weight loss and dieting in our modern society.   Read an excerpt from the book here.

No Impact Man

Over the past couple months, we helped a new Farrar, Straus and Giroux author start publishing a blog called No Impact Man. On the blog, author Colin Beavan chronicles his year-long project to make no net impact on the environment. Quite a challenge to begin with, and even more so when you factor in that he’s doing it with his wife, young daughter, and his dog, and living in the middle of New York City! But so far, he’s making it work, AND getting some well-deserved attention. Colin discussed his project on WYNC’s The Brian Lehrer Show this morning and a profile of No Impact Man and Colin’s family is in today’s New York Times House & Home section. Colin’s project has already been featured in TimeOut for Kids, and you can read an Op-Ed by Colin in the New York Times here. No Impact Man will be published by FSG in 2009 and a documentary film about the project will come out the same year. Amidst loads of information about environmentalism, it’s fascinating and informative to follow how Colin is attacking the problem on a personal level. The blog is a great read and a compelling call to action – there ARE plenty of things individuals, even those of us in living in big cities, can do to decrease negative impact and increase positive impact on planet Earth. We’re truly excited about the way No Impact Man has taken off, and encourage everyone read more, join the discussion, and take part in Colin’s initiatives.

E-ink in the workplace

I ran across this post at Engadget earlier this week and it reminded me of the use the iLiad reader has been finding in the airline industry.   It also made me think about a conversation I had with a co-worker who owns and uses a Sony reader (the first time I've seen one "in the wild", as it were) and who absolutely loves it for its ability to hold every manuscript she is working on and still fit in her purse.   

Both of these examples really throw into perspective how beneficial the ability to carry as many papers as you want in a 12oz package.   

One of the things I think will be interesting to see is how this plays out in the educational market - particularly for college textbook publishers.    If a single platform such as this becomes widely adopted, which would seem to be the next stage of the various clicker devices that textbook publishers are offering as an extra to many of their books, it would be unbelievably easy to deliver students' books without the cost of printing (or the cost of the used book market) and it would allow them to install Blackboard-esque tracking and collaboration software at the same time, potentially linked to notes that students make directly on their texts. And (unlike in the trade market at this time), this is a move that would probably be embraced by the students - fewer items to lug to class, more interactivity, and cheaper textbooks (they would lose the money they get when selling books back, but that never comes near the price they paid for the book in the first place).   

Web 2.0 Expo

Growing up, the only type of conventions and expos I heard about were for Science Fiction/Fantasy fans - Star Wars, Star Trek, comic books, etc. Now that I'm a grown up ::waits for snickering to stop::, I've heard of other types of conventions for various interests and have been coerced into attending a few of them by some enthusiastic pals.

On a very short list, I've gone to a tech expo, comic book convention, and a car show. Let's just say I was a little disappointed with the amount of awe and entertainment the displays provided. Rather than getting sneak peeks of developing and innovative projects, spacious rooms were filled with neatly arranged products already out on the market. Suffice to say, I feel a bit jaded. Then lo and behold I came across an ad for the April 2007 San Francisco Web 2.0 Expo, apparently a new event. Targeting marketing, design, technical, and business professionals, their homepage boasts a attending list of personnel from some well known companies. While terms like "Wow!" and "Jiminy Jilikers!" may or may not be bellowed by the mass, this is an event I would probably learn something from. Let's hope they make plans to come to New York.

Read a lengthier description about the Web 2.0 Summit here.

Double Clicking Goodness

My incredible discovery of the day, which is apparently not "new" in any way, is that you can double click any word in any article on NYTimes.com and instantly receive thesaurus and dictionary entries for that word in a pop up window.

I think what amazes me about this functionality is that this is exactly the sort of thing I want to see eBooks doing, and here it is on the NYTimes website right under my nose!  It's simple, elegant, and extraordinarily helpful to users. 

But ultimately it also shows a different attitude towards how we interact with text than most books or websites do - the very fact that they do not trumpet this feature shows it as something that we should be able to take for granted, and hearkens back to times when it was unthinkable that one should read a book without other books to reference or writing materials to make notes in the margin.    When did the act of reading become so passive? 

Already browsers are including search bars that will allow you to quickly choose a search engine or website (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, IMDB) and jump directly to the search results for a phrase, how long before we can select text on the screen, right click, and choose from a drop down menu whether we want to see what sort of response that selection brings up in Dictionary.com, Google, or Wikipedia?    It seems more and more likely that the answer is "not that much longer".  I'm looking forward to it.

Obama, the Social Butterfly

To be honest, I haven't exactly been engrossed in recent political news and agenda like most Americans. There's good reason to pay extra attention to the 2008 election, we have our first female candidate - Hillary Rodham Clinton. Senator Clinton, however, will not be the focus of this post. Earlier this month, our alternate Democratic candidate Barack Obama has integrated a full-fledged social network on his website BarackObama.com. Essentially a tool for his supporters to organize their efforts in the most optimal manner, signing up with My.BarackObama.com provides every user a slew of functionalities - My Dashboard (a page showing an overview of your account's activities), My Friends, My Events, My Messages, My Groups, My Fundraising, and My Blog. Support rallies have never been so easy to organize.

In addition to this network tool on Obama's official website, he also covered other bases by creating accounts with YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook (see screen shot). I'm not sure if he has my vote just yet, but he's sure caught my [web] attention.

Still Searching

The February 5 issue of The New Yorker features a decent overview of the Google Book Search program and the related legal, technical, and logistical issues. The article, called “Google’s Moon Shot,” does not offer any big, new insights, but it does have some interesting bits, such as a portion about Dan Clancy, the chief engineer of Google’s system for scanning books. All in all, the article serves as a good refresher, and should get those less familiar with the Book Search project more or less up to speed.

"Google's Moon Shot"

Choose Your Own Adventure

There was an interesting post recently on Wired about Hotel Dusk, a game for the Nintendo DS portable system that stretches the definition of "game" and "book" to meet somewhere in the middle.

A quick overview: Hotel Dusk is a game that plays like a mystery novel set in an old hotel.   The player navigates around the hotel and speaks to the various characters in an attempt to solve the mystery.    The style is reminiscent of film-noir (both graphics and dialogue) and the vast bulk of the game consists of reading what the characters are saying to you.    And you even hold the system sideways so that it opens like a small book.   

E-Books are generally assumed to be the natural incursion of books into digital media, but more success is being seen with formats like podcasts and cell phone serialization, which makes me wonder if our efforts are not better spent trying to find the best format for a given story, instead of trying to wedge readers into the formats that the publishing industry is most comfortable with.   

The Socially Impulsive

Who among us hasn't sent an impolitely-worded, sloppy email and then regretted having sent it moments later. I don't do it often, but I look over English soccer league chat sites every now and again (never at work, of course), and the banter can get heated and potentially offensive fairly quickly. Social networking and other forms of online interaction require a different set of emotional triggers than face-to-face discussion, and as evidenced by an assault last October involving two men who had been communicating in a chat room, a pickax, and a knife, not appreciating the rules of online engagement can be dangerous (read the NYT article). The absence of real-time responses such as change in tone and other social cues, makes it easier for us to fall victim to the "online disinhibition effect," or flaming. So, what does this mean for those of us who work in this largely self-policing, socially ambiguous landscape? Does this mean that we resign ourselves to being as impersonal as possible for fear of unleasing online rage? Or, maybe it simply means that we just deal with the human emotions behind the IP address, as we do in the real world, and try to be as decent as possible to each other.