Holtzbrinck Online

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.

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.   

A Long Way Gone

This compelling memoir by Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier in Sierra Leone, is on sale today. I’ve been keeping close tabs on this book since early January, when the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, asked us to develop the website for the book. Since then, A Long Way Gone has received a huge amount of advance praise and very strong reviews. As Belinda Luscombe of Time Magazine says, “Ishmael Beah doesn't realize it, but he's about to become a [literary-humanitarian] rock star … (I'll eat my hat if he does not meet Bono in the next 12 months.)” Beah, now 26 and living in New York City, recalls his journey in and out of the madness of the civil war in Sierra Leone. He fled attacking rebels at the age of twelve, was picked up by the government army at thirteen, and after years experiencing and committing unspeakable acts, released to a UNICEF rehabilitation center. His story is poignant: shocking, and often extremely violent, but also touching and hopeful. It’s one of those books that has stayed with me; that I think about at random moments. Importantly, as Beah continues to point out in interviews and speeches to non-profit and humanitarian organizations, his story represents the lives of hundreds of thousands of children across the world. Poised to become a huge success, the book, which is also the current Starbucks Entertainment featured book, is well worth the time.

For more, visit www.alongwaygone.com

The literary stars of tomorrow (and the closing of bookstores today)

Chris Powers writes on the Guardian book blog about the demise of the independent bookstore, and wonders about the literary scenes of tomorrow (he cites as past examples the City Lights store in Calfornia and Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris where, in the photo, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein are amiably chatting). However, as sad as it is, a number of these venerable bookstores are going out of business, and the next wave of literary scenes will revolve not around bookstores (or even one geographical location, such as Paris in the'20s), but these scenes will instead revolve around online, virtual locations such as websites, blogs and wikis. The Internet has flattened the world to such a degree that a writer no longer needs to hitch a ride across the country to go "on the road"; they can instead explore the world from their laptop. Nor do they need to frequent a physical place in order to meet other writers; instead writers get together in chatrooms, message boards and the comments sections of litblogs (not mention in Second Life). Whether or not this will make them better or worse writers than the Beats or whoever will remain to be seen, but there can be no arguing that the era of the bookstore as the center (or creator) of literary scenes in over, and the dominance of the Internet has arrived.

From the blog: “The question that arises now is whether today's crop of independent bookshops - Bloomsbury's the London Review Bookshop, say, or St Mark's in New York's East Village - can become nests for new literary schools. Do cyberspace's virtual communities obviate the need for a bricks and mortar space to meet, read and exhange ideas? Or, as with books themselves, is their physical presence still an essential part of the process?”

Guardian: The bookshops that shook the world

A Wiki Novel

Back in November, Meredith wrote a post on We Are Smarter Than Me, an anticipated Pearson publication that is a collaborative effort of thousands of authors registered on WeAreSmarter.org. Today, Penguin UK launched a similar effort - its first wiki novel A Million Penguins.

Using MediaWiki technology, anyone who registers on www.amillionpenguins.com is able to edit and/or add onto this web-based tale for the next 5 weeks. Already, there are 500 posts (some by return users), four chapters, and an interlude. While there are no definite plans to publish a print version, the site has quickly developed a decent web community during the first day of launch. By opening registration to any willing participants, it’s questionable whether the material spawned will be quality ficiton, but this is surely beneficial to Penguin’s brand recognition, site traffic, and their entry to social networking.

Read about Penguin UK's wiki novel in this Reuter article.

The Deep Backlist: Its Rise & Influence

I've heard mixed reviews about Tom Stoppard's three-parter, The Coast of Utopia (Voyage, Part 1, is now playing at Lincoln Center) in papers, on TV, online, in elevators, but I am desperate to see it nonetheless. Herzen, Belinsky, Bakunin--- you don't get a chance to see these superstars of 19th-century Russian intellectual history depicted on the stage every season. You could, of course, have read prior to the play's arrival, A Sportsman's Sketches (recommended under What We're Into) or historiographies such as Orlando Figes' Natasha's Dance to get yourself in the proper "Russian" frame of mind. If you tried hard enough, you may even have been able to get a copy of Isaiah Berlin's 1978 Russian Thinkers, but not any more. An innocuous list of suggested readings in Utopia's playbill has triggered a "Berlin craze" (see the NYT article). Russian Thinkers (a work for which Berlin had "fairly low expectations," according to Wolfson College fellow Henry Hardy) is currently out of stock, and Penguin, its publisher, has ordered two reprintings of 3500 copies. It's come rushing out of the Penguin backlist from nowhere like Chichikov's carriage, destined, I imagine, to return to its modest place in that backlist once the love affair with Utopia fades. Now, if you could only get Russian Thinkers in ebook (can you?). Then, if Stoppard writes something else that pushes Berlin back out of the ivory tower and into the limelight (or there's a Utopia revival in future years), any corresponding rustlings in the backlist can be more promptly managed. Or so, that's the theory.

And the nominees are ...

The big motion picture awards season kicks off tonight with the 64th Annual Gloden Globe Awards. We’re keeping a close eye on the Golden Globe nominations for Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, and Running with Scissors, all films based on books published by Holtzbrinck imprints.

Little Children, a film based on the novel Little Children by Tom Perrotta published by St. Martin's Press and St. Martin’s Griffin, has earned nominations for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Performance by an Actress (Kate Winslet), and Best Screenplay (Todd Field and Tom Perrotta).

Notes on a Scandal, a film based on the novel What Was She Thinking? [Notes on a Scandal] by Zoe Heller published by Henry Holt and Picador, has earned nominations for Best Performance by an Actress (Judi Dench), Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Cate Blanchett), and Best Screenplay (Patrick Marber).

Running with Scissors, a film based on the memoir Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs published by St. Martin’s Press and Picador, has earned a nomination for Best Performance by an Actress – Musical or Comedy (Annette Bening).

Blame It On Culture

In a recent New York Times article, an independent bookstore owner accredits the shrinking of the independent bookseller market to a cultural shift. Logan Fox is closing his bookshop, Macawber Books of Princeton, NJ, sometime this March and apparently puts partial blame on society’s fascination with pop culture television and the need for more immediate satisfaction. I attribute this to our movement into a more visually based culture.

From a scientific standpoint, information presented with graphical aid is more quickly recognized by the brain than if presented in just text; while words precisely relay ideas, pictures quickly relay broad concepts. A luxury book publishing company devoted to the elite, Assouline Publishers have been sustaining a rather successful business by publishing fashion photography books. Riding on trends, they can speedily put together and publish a book within 2-3 weeks time, promptly satisfying public craze before the fad fades. As with many other publishers in this genre, their books contain very little text and are filled with photos and artwork featuring topics that range from high-end designers to social identities.

By no means am I advocating that we abandon literature, but rather exercise the concept of adaptation. While Mr. Fox was trying to maintain his shop’s atmosphere and functionality based on the years of yore, he failed to integrate that with new cultural trends. As he proudly admits resisting computerization, e-books, and Barnes & Noble field research, it is no wonder as to why he worried about the depreciating value of his business and sold it off to Princeton University.

Curious about Assouline Publishers? Read a more recent article about them here.