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I'm sitting in Austin Airport trying to digest what has been a really interesting SXSW Interactive festival. Last year the big buzzy items were twitter and Second Life, but this year, while every single attendee seemed to be twittering furiously, I heard nary a mention of Second Life. How fickle the tech world is! There seemed to be a few more publishing types in attendance this year, but still a very tiny number relative to the amount of chatter in the book world on the impact that technology is starting to have on our business. The big talking point in Austin this year wasn't actually a technology announcement, but the controversial interview of Facebook CEO (and the world's youngest billionaire) Mark Zuckerberg.
By far the most thought provoking session I attended was Jane McGonigal's session on Reality, Games and Happiness; 'Reality is broken. Why aren't game designers trying to fix it?' is her basic question. She began by talking about research into 'happiness' which showed that there are four basic needs that promote a happy life; fulfilling work, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like and the chance to be part of something bigger. Multiplayer games, she proposed, deliver all these things whereas, unfortunately, real life often cannot. Game designers, she argued, were in a good position to deliver increased happiness in real life, because they already have the experience of creating 'happiness engines' in the games they develop. (There was lots more meaty stuff in this talk - check here for a full transcript).
This chimed with the session of Henry Jenkins, who when asked about the growing issue of internet addiction, argued that a) addiction was not a helpful word to use and b) that people spend so much time online and in alternate realities because they don't have sufficient opportunity to express themselves creatively in their day to day lives and work. An increased amount of attention is being given to the roles of games and play in encouraging creativity and developing skills and as our tools for online exploration and collaboration continue to develop, it is certain that we will see some exciting, challenging and, well, game-changing blendings of the real world and alternate realities in the months and years to come.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
PS Penguin's own foray into games that are stories and stories that are games (produced with game designers extraordinaire Six to Start) starts next week. Sign up here to be alerted when the game begins...
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When your younger sibling does something impressive it can provoke not just pride but also jealousy. So it is for us with Puffin, for the brand new Puffin website launched yesterday and it's typically precocious. All shiny-shiny and oh-so-cute with mini-games and author interviews and a newsletter and a brand new blog – everything you could want from the publisher of some of the best kids' books, old and new, there have ever been.
So we will watch carefully and with familial pride as they grow and develop, wishing them all the best and singing their praises to all who'll listen. And with just enough jealousy to want to dig out embarrassing pictures to remind them they weren't always so darn adorable.
Alan
Copywriter
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By: Venetia Butterfield,
on 2/26/2008
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There has been plenty of chatter in the last few weeks about ebooks and ebook readers, technologies which might or might not dramatically transform how we buy and read books. But there has also been the odd item here and there speculating on the future of reading, examining how internet usage might affect how people actually look for and absorb information.
There is a school of thought that says that Gutenberg's invention of the printing press - leading to the demise of the illuminated manuscript and the transfer of knowledge by linear type - actually affected the way that people absorbed ideas and information and that Western Rationalism might not have taken hold without the orderly presentation of text. So it is not implausible to imagine that as more and more knowledge and information is transfered via the internet, with popup windows, embedded video, infographic boxes and all the other eye-catching frippery competing for attention, we might witness significant changes in the way we read, and perhaps in the way we actually think.
This is probably already happening - in The Observer John Naughton quotes a report which described information seeking behaviour as 'horizontal, bouncing, checking and viewing in nature.' Teenagers, I was told today, start reading at the centre of a website moving outwards from the middle when something captures their digitally native eyes.
Of course not all books are linear - our sister company, Dorling Kindersley for example produces the most wonderfully designed and illustrated guides and reference books, but for fiction, generally, linearity is the rule. Beginnings, middles and ends. Words following words.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that in a few weeks Penguin will be embarking on an experiment in storytelling (yes, another one, I hear you sigh). We've teamed up with some interesting folk and challenged some of our top authors to write brand new stories that take full advantage of the functionalities that the internet has to offer - this will be great writing, but writing in a form that would not have been possible 200, 20 or even 2 years ago. If you want to be alerted when this project launches sign up here - all will be revealed in March.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
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I decided, after two years of looking at it, that it was high time for me to replace the photo on my blog. This is a hard thing for me, because I so rarely like photos of myself. But I do like this one, especially because when I look at it, I know the history of the uncropped version of the photo. In any case, it's high time for me to have a photo in which I'm not wearing sunglasses (it was a very rainy day, actually).
This photo was taken using Susan Taylor Brown's camera by an employee at Hicklebee's Books, during National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Jon Scieszka's visit to Hicklebee's in January. You can find more details about that visit, and the uncropped version (with Jon Scieszka) here. Thanks for remembering your camera, Susan, for thinking to take the photo of me with our new National Ambassador, and for going to the trouble of sending it to me! Your thoughtfulness now has a semi-permanent place on my blog.
At Penguin we're lucky to come into contact with some of the finest minds around - our job, when it comes down to it, is to get the product of those fine minds into as many hands as possible. So it's been a real pleasure to see how enthusiastically early proofs of Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky have been
spreading round the office and how the ideas he espouses have become part of our conversational currency in Penguin.
It's also very appropriate for Clay to write a guest post here on the blog - as a teacher, writer and consultant on the social impact of technology we can certainly use his advice! Here Comes Everybody is concerned with the social changes we are witnessing today as the technology which allows individuals to rapidly disseminate and share news and views becomes more common and more sophisticated by the day.
We want as many people as possible to read this book, and we've got some advance copies to send out - so if you are a UK blogger and if you want to read Clay's book and share your views on it with the world, send us an email with your name, address and blog url and 'Everybody' in the subject line and we'll get a book over to you.
Now, over to Clay...
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
Here, on a random Friday in January, is some of what is on offer from the world's mass of amateurs.
At Livejournal, BlueDuck says "ok a bottle of wine later, i wish i hAd vodka...or something. damnit."
On Twitter, a user going by nsaum75 says "looks
like another sleepless night is coming to an end. 5:30am...need to be
up in an hour... ::sigh::"
At YouTube, bishow1808 has just uploaded a blurry 30 second video of a fish swimming in shallow water.
At MySpace, Jonathan (M, 24) tells us "you cant say happiness without saying penis"
At Xanga, seedsower has posted several photos of a doll with different styles of Play-Doh hair.
And that, of course, is a drop in the bucket.
The catch-all label for this material is "user-generated content." It's
easy to deride this sort of thing as the nadir of publishing -- why would anyone
put such drivel out in public?
It's simple. They're not talking to us.
We misinterpret these seemingly inane posts, because we're so unused to
seeing material in public that isn't for the public. The people
posting messages to one another, on social networking services and weblogs and
media sharing sites, are creating a different kind of material, and doing a
different kind of communicating, than the publishers of newspapers and magazines
are.
Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public
forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this
content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated
content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all,
at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot
of it is just part of a conversation.
Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking
of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a
group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a
community setting, and a community isn't just a small audience; it has a social
density, a pattern of users talking to one another, that audiences lack. An
audience isn't just a big community either; it's more anonymous, with many fewer
ties between users. Now, though, the technological distinction between media
made for an audience and media made for a community is evaporating; instead of
having one kind of media come in through the TV and another kind come in through
the phone, it all comes in over the internet.
As a result, some tools support both publication and conversation. Weblogs
aren't only like newspapers and they aren't only like coffeeshops and they
aren't only like diaries -- their meaning changes depending on how they are
used, running the gamut from reaching the world to gossiping with your
friends.
When BlueDuck is blogging drunk at LiveJournal, he's blogging a communal
context, and mostly for the amusement of his friends. As I'm writing this post
for Penguin, I am self-consciously working on something for broad public
consumption. When my students post to a class blog, they are operating
in-between; they are members of a small academic community, and they are writing
drafts of things that they may someday make public. This is new. We have never
before had a single platform which could scale from conversation to broadcast
and all points between, but social media gives us that -- it's like your
telephone could turn into a radio, depending on how you configured it.
The internet is in a way the first thing that really deserves the label
'media'. It is a truly general-purpose mediating layer, one that can hold
multiple types of content, created and distributed for a huge variety of reasons
and in a huge variety of ways, ways that can't be fit into the old mode of
"content", where one group creates and another merely consumes. What I've
discovered both as a participant and observer of social uses of media is that no
one pattern of use is as interesting as the incredible flexibility and
re-combinability of all the patterns together; one of the reasons I wrote this
book, and one of the things I most hope readers get out of it, is an excitement
about how much experimentation is still possible, and how many new uses of our
social tools are waiting to be invented.
Clay Shirky
23 January 2008
"I Don't Want To Consume Media That I Can't Interact With
That's the bottom line. When I come into contact with media, I want to do something with it. Tag it, post it, reply to it, comment on it, favorite it, share it, gift it, quote it, whatever...
When are people going to understand that digital media, be it a book, a song, a film, an article, or whatever else, is not passive media. That was analog's gig."
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson reacting to the Amazon Kindle
When I was 6 the school playground was full of clusters of kids crowding round the lucky few who had been given digital watches with games on them. I asked my parents for such a watch for my birthday, but they didn't quite 'get it' and I received a decidedly analogue Timex. My mother says she realized her mistake when I unwrapped the watch and with a cry of anguish, demanded "But what does it do?".
All of which is a roundabout way of saying the Amazon Kindle, which was launched with a great deal of media hoopla last week does lots of things, and doesn't do others, and perhaps we should be asking ourselves what we want books to do and be as we hurtle towards a near-future where all media and all content consists of ones and zeros.
I haven't seen or played with a Kindle yet, but there is plenty of online coverage to be found here, here and elsewhere and it has certainly brought ebooks into the mainstream like nothing before. Undoubtedly the
Kindle, and particularly it's wireless delivery system, is a revolutionary way of putting books in the hands of readers. But, I wonder, is that enough?
It's quite instructive to read some of the comments in the Fred Wilson post above, and also comments on uberblogger Robert Scoble's anti-Kindle rant - clearly there is much debate over whether books have to be social objects. This debate occasionally surfaces here at Penguin Towers where the book lovers among us (and there are one or two) argue the point that to immerse oneself in a book is to isolate oneself from interactivity - books should not necessarily be a shared experience, they say, and there is interaction between reader and text.
Almost lost in the noise about the Kindle was the release of a lengthy report from the National Endowment for the Arts entitled To Read or Not to Read. The conclusions are sobering for anyone in the book business. Basically, Americans are reading less and this is especially true of teens and young adults 'who are reading less often and for shorter amounts of time than other age groups and Americans of previous years'. Now I am not about to claim that this is solely because of Youtube, Xbox and Myspace and other forms of interactive digital media. But perhaps we publishers and book lovers do need to think about whether books need a social life and work out how to satisfy those who want simply to disappear into a story and those who won't consume media that they can't interact with.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
PS I know what I want out of an ebook reader - a vast library, accessible anytime from anywhere, a decent screen and the ability to share my discoveries with others and see what my friends are also discovering. Internet access would be pretty necessary, and one of those neat touch screens like the iPhone has. I pretty much want it all, and I actually think we're nearly there (maybe not for this Christmas though). But what do you want from an ebook reader? And, in fact, do you want an ebook reader at all? Leave your comments below...
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By: Venetia Butterfield,
on 9/10/2007
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The day that my sister-in-law told me she had managed to look at my
work colleague's holiday photos was the day I realised that enough was
enough. Facebook is a pain, not a tool - it's a waste of my time (time
spent checking friend's status and researching the good times of
parties I never went to), and it's time I'll never get back. Both the
curmudgeonly nature of my feelings and the creeping sense that
Facebook, MySpace et al. make perfect sense to a younger generation
make me feel upsettingly old, and it's time to make way for those who
appreciate these amazing technologies. We've had enough arguments
around here on the "Should employers ban Facebook?" debate, and it
boggles my mind that newsworthy "employee representatives" can honestly
justify the defence of these things with the idea that employers ought
to accept that people have a life outside work. That's right. Outside it,
simpletons. It was a real lurch to click that Confirm Deactivation
button (even if it did make me feel like a Bond villain) but I feel
I've done the right thing. Working on titles like EU Law and the
Dictionary of Human Biology means that I simply have no room for
frivolity in my life - if you need me, send a note up to my garret.
Sam the Copywriter
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Since returning from holiday I've been involved with probably a dozen conversations about ebooks - about the hardware, Digital Rights Management, suppliers and technology partners, e-ink, about whether the era of the ebook is finally dawning. We've been publishing a small line of ebooks since 2001, but press
speculation, fueled by the blogosphere, is that Amazon will join Sony in releasing an ebook reader
in the near future, with digitised texts also viewable via Google Booksearch and perhaps on the iPhone and iPod Touch also.
I've long been a big believer in onscreen reading - in the approaching age of always on broadband connectivity the idea that all the world's texts can be accessible, searchable and portable is, I believe, a very compelling scenario. While the book as an object will not become redundant technology for a while, I cannot see why the book industry should be immune from the disruptive changes transforming the music, film, newspaper and TV business, where everyday more and more people access content online.
But repeatedly perusing these images of some of the world's most beautiful libraries has given me a little 
pause for thought (do check out the whole set of images here - and tell us why Portugal has such a collection of amazing libraries!). The experience of reading in one of these is surely in a different league from booting up an ereading device and waiting for the page to refresh, even if the etexts are fully searchable. Is convenience enough to cause a massive shift in reading habits and perhaps encourage greater use of traditional book content? Do the extra things that ebooks could and should do (annotation, bookmarking, search, customization, integrated multimedia) make up for the fact that the aesthetic experience is different from (and less than?) that of cracking open the spine of a new book.
In his provocative article, Scan This Book, Kevin Kelly says
Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future)
assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one
another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There,
each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author
completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes
when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In
this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is
portability — the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits,
which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision
misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal
library, no book will be an island.
Kelly imagines a future where texts are 'liquid' - taggable, mashable, hyperlinked and above all searchable and findable. This 'universal library' he posits, will once again make books central to the culture (as they
were when most of the libraries here were built) and provide value for readers, writers and the publishers who get it.
I think that Kelly's idea of 'Books: The Liquid Version' is beyond the imagination of most publishers at this point in time (though there are those actively exploring the possibilities). We're still working out how to make ebooks work, how much content should be available online for free and who the players are in this brave new world. So happily, despite the buzz around electronic books it seems that the printed book, the ebook and the beautiful temples to reading shown in the photographs will coexist for some time yet.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
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I spent much of yesterday doing something a publisher should never have to do - buying skin for an author in preparation for an book launch. But when this event takes place in the virtual world of Second Life and when the author is William Gibson, normal publishing activity leaps out of the window.
The author of Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition and the just released Spook Country has legions of fans in Second Life and four hours before the event they had began to gather to await his arrival. Indeed so many arrived early that William Gibson himself could not get into the sim (the virtual space where the event was taking place) leading to a brief evacuation to allow the author to sneak in through the virtual fire escape. And then we were reminded that Second Life is still very much a world in its infancy by a video which failed to play - hopefully not too many were disappointed by seeing the quicktime logo for a few minutes!
But when William Gibson took to the stage, descending from the heavens in a customized shipping container, everything came good. He read from the opening portion of Spook Country and answered a series of very fine questions from the audience who hung onto his every word. Audio was beamed in from the MDM campus in Vancouver to the riversrunred studios in London, and out to Second Life. What made me happy about this event was that it gave people from all over the world a chance to be in the same space as one of their favourite authors, and during the event I was receiving goodwill messages from people thrilled to see him.
Should he return to Second Life he will find lots of friends, old and new, and I guess that this is what virtual worlds and social marketing is really all about.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
PS Pics, audio and video from the event will be available very soon and there is a nice piece about it here.
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Last night saw the first event in our virtual campaign for the launch of William Gibson's Spook Country - a screening of his 2001 film No Maps for These Territories. We had a gratifyingly full sim, some interesting discussion and all, I think, learned a little more about William Gibson and his writing. There is a full set of pictures here (thanks to Kronos Kikorian for these) and there will be another screening as part of the programme of activities on Sunday at 11am SLT. More info available by joining the Penguin Readers group...
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
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By: Venetia Butterfield,
on 7/9/2007
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"Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by
billions of legitimate operators, in every nation ... A graphic
representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in
the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the
nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city
lights, receding."
In 1984 William Gibson invented the word cyberspace in his seminal novel Neuromancer
and today, nearly 25 years later, a growing and significant number of
people are spending increasing amounts of time and money inside
'computer generated constructs', whether they be perhaps the most
analogous to Gibson's idea of cyberspace (Second Life), game-like
(World of Warcraft) or social (facebook).
So when we first started dabbling in
Second Life we quickly realized that something interesting Penguin
could do would be to bring William Gibson into this strange new place,
a place he seemed to have predicted and described years ago (though
he disputes this). Unsurprisingly many of the older residents of Second Life are hardcore sci-fi and cyberpunk fans and dotted around the virtual landscape are a number of sims with a
suitably dystopian
theme. And perhaps now we have a great opportunity to connect an
author and his fans in a totally new, and in this case totally
appropriate, environment.
Over the next few weeks - to celebrate and, yes, promote his new novel Spook
Country - we're planning a range of William Gibson activities in Second Life; we're screening his fine and strange movie No Maps for These Territories;
there's a competition to design an avatar for the man himself; we're
giving away shipping containers packed with Gibson goodies and at the
beginning of August, William Gibson himself will be coming into Second
Life to read from Spook Country and answer questions.
If you want to join in, log into Second Life,
join the Penguin Readers group or get in touch with me virtually by
sending an IM to Jeremy Neumann. We're looking forward to sharing a
consensual hallucination with you.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
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Generally, I would describe myself as an early-adopter - I like the shiny shiny new things, whether they be gadgets or cool websites or even chocolate bars with 'New!' in a starburst. I appreciate that this can sometimes make me the internet cafe equivalent of a pub-bore, but it is the way I was programmed...
So I can't really explain why it has taken me so long to create a facebook account - but three days in, I just don't get it. I've registered, uploaded my addressbook, been friended (but not 'poked' yet), added a couple of widgets and, er, what now? My virtual friends can contact me by a number of ways, through Twitter or Second Life and my Real Life (or 'meatspace') friends often know my actual address and even sometimes my phone number! So what do I get out of Facebook? Emails telling me that someone has sent me a message? Just send me the message already! The chance to participate in the 'How do you like your chocolate chip cookie?' Poll of the day? (I prefer a Ginger Nut). I also was struck by
Jason Kottke's post about open Vs closed networks - he describes Facebook as an intranet - surely less interesting than the internet itself.
So come on - am I doing something wrong? Have I missed a trick? How do I connect with books and with readers and with authors? Am I just suffering from social network overload and is it affecting my job? Am I simply too old? Let me know your thoughts, here, there or other places entirely - if I don't find something good soon my facebook account will join http://myspace.com/jeremyet in a pretty short list of deleted web services.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
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I just wanted to mention a couple of blog-related things to you all.
- If you comment on this blog, you may have noticed that I've started requiring "catchpa", where you have to copy a series of letters and numbers from a graphic before your comment will be accepted. I find this annoying as a commenter, but spammers have made it necessary. Since I turned this on, comment spam has markedly decreased. Sorry for any inconvenience.
- You may have noticed that at the end of all of my reviews, I've been including bibliographic information about the book (publisher, age range, etc.). A friend who uses this blog to find book suggestions for his two children asked if I could make a change, to move the information to the top of the review. That way he could see at a glance if the review would be relevant for him, and not have to spend time reading reviews of books that weren't of direct interest. I'm all about saving people time, and I thought that this was an excellent suggestion. Since some of the bibliographic information is more detailed, I decided to leave that at the end. Therefore, I've started splitting the reference information about the book into two sections. Author, title, number of pages, and age range at the top, publisher, publication date, source of books, and links to other reviews at the bottom. Please let me know if you think that there would be a better way to organize this information, or if you think that this works. I especially want the reviews to be helpful to parents, librarians, and teachers who are looking for book ideas for kids.
- There's a link going around by which you can have the content of your blog rated, following the standard movie ratings. For anyone concerned about such things, Jen Robinson's Book Page was rated PG. It probably would have been rated G, except for some references to "dangerous", and one reference to "death". That dratted Dangerous Book for Boys!
Mingle2 - Online Dating
Because of a truckload of spam, I had to turn on comment moderation here at the blog. It's a bummer because I'd rather have the spontaneity of "live" comments, but if that's what it takes to keep the spammers at bay, I'll have to roll with it for now.
So, if you comment (and please do!), know that I will approve and publish your message as soon as possible.
So after two days of talk about the future of the book at the Tools of Change conference, I spent my last few hours on the west coast in San Jose's Museum of Technology, known as The Tech. The museum (and it's gift shop!) were fantastic, packed with the American innovators of tomorrow, pushing buttons, learning about technology and the environment, creating avatars with effortless ease. I learned that the community of websurfers (currently a little over one-and-a-quarter billion people) grows by ten people every second, that I have enough dust accumulated on my body to have me banned from any clean room and that I do not make a good virtual bobsleigh driver.
Innovation was not thick on the ground at the conference. US publishers (who I discovered were there in good numbers) are in an arms race to digitize as much of their content as quickly as possible, strike the best deals with google and amazon and pump out ebooks into a market which seems to be growing at a good rate for them. "Authors and genres are the brand" was the mantra - a view that we only partly buy into at Penguin UK. There was little talk of user generated content, or tagging, or wikis or blogs - in a market where profit and loss are the only meaningful measure of success it seems that figuring out how to commodify community is either not high on the agenda or simply too hard to figure out.
But there was one magical moment of innovation which had the audience on their feet and applauding. Manolis Kelaidis a young designer/artist from Greece presented his project at the Royal College of Art's Summer Show, called bLink. By printing ordinary paper with conductive ink and inserting some clever circuitry in the binding of a book Manolis has created a book-to-internet interface which has, potentially, some fascinating applications. He demonstrated touching the words Mona Lisa to launch a google image search, iTunes played a song when he touched the title printed on a page, touching a picture of a giraffe caused a computer to say the words "It's a giraffe!". After his demonstration and the standing ovation that followed, Manolis was besieged by printers, publishers and technology companies who all thought they could see something they could do with his technology - he was completely overwhelmed. You can read more about it here and here and I'll try and post a video of bLink in action soon - but at a conference where process, systems and revenues were the talk of the floor it was wonderful to see how a beautifully designed and engineered object - a book that linked the digital and print worlds - became the talk of the town.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
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San Francisco, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Stanford, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose. For a student of the history of technology (ie total geek) as the Caltrain rolls through these stations thoughts of dotcom glories past and present are evoked. One can't help look at ones fellow passengers and wonder who is the google millionaire and which younger, hungrier buck dreams of usurping him.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I am excited to be in San Jose, California for the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference, which (starting in about five hours) will be looking at the ways that book publishing and technology are intersecting now, and the future of this sometimes happy, sometimes not, relationship.
Perusing the agenda there is lots of stuff to look forward to, but the publisher - rather than the geek - in me, was also looking forward to meeting some fellow publishers for a gossip and an exchange of views on the issues raised by the conference. But apart from the odd exception (Random House are here in numbers!) there are almost no book publishers here! What is going on? Am I at the wrong conference? Is it that the conference is in California, rather than New York, that has kept others away? Or is it, as a book blogger suggested to me in the bar, that publishers 'just don't get technology', and don't think they need to? Hopefully I'll find out the answers to these questions and more over the next couple of days.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
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Spinebreaker (n):
1. a well-loved and enthusiastically thumbed book
2. a member of www.spinebreakers.co.uk, Penguin’s pioneering online book community website for teenagers.
This morning Penguin announced the launch of www.spinebreakers.co.uk, a booklovers community website, revolutionary in the UK publishing world because it’s the first site that’s not just for teenagers … it’s by them too.
Yes (gulp), it’s true. We’ve realised that as much as many of us may still think we’re the voice of edgy youth, it’s been many a year (many a decade for most of us if we’re frank) since we actually were teenagers, so who are we to write a teen website? Rather than look like dancing dads, we’ve handed control over to a crack teen-team, who will get to interview authors, read and review books, design their own jackets and, crucially, editorially manage the website, including making decisions around all the user-generated content we’ll be encouraging from the online community and even deciding what the URL should be (that took some time and many, many hours of teen debate, believe me!).
So, after many months of working on the idea, it’s finally out there and set to launch in September. What do you think? Any teens out there who want to get involved? Drop me a mail.
Anna Rafferty – Penguin Digital Marketing Director
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1. Miss Fuse has news: A Fuse #8 Production is moving to School Library Journal for a paid blogging gig. Congratulations to Betsy Bird, the voice behind the curtain at Fuse 8.
2. Confessions of a Pioneer Woman posted the most complete recipe for chicken spaghetti casserole I've ever seen. With photos. Awesome.
3. After last week's Carnival of Children's Literature, here's some more on multicultural lit. Saturday's piece at La Bloga was an interview with Theresa Howell, a children's book editor, about authenticity. René Colato Laínez asks Howell, "What does a manuscript need to have in order to be multicultural?" Howell answers,
Too many stories for children depict characters from the dominant
culture. A multicultural manuscript tells the stories of characters
outside of the mainstream. These manuscripts tell stories of people
from wonderfully diverse cultures. They help readers look at the world
from different perspectives.
4. See also "Questioning Cultural Stereotypes," an essay by Radhika Menon, the managing editor of a small publishing house in India. Menon writes,
The reality, then, is that the focus on multicultural publishing has not translated into authentic and inclusive literature from all cultures. The reality is also that the parameters of what is acceptable in multicultural publishing are set by big, successful, western publishing houses – the rest of the world must follow unquestioningly.
Link via Educating Alice and Writing With a Broken Tusk.
5. First it was a best-selling series of children's books. Now it's singing and dancing? "Magic Tree House: The Musical" premieres at the Warner Theatre, in Torrington, Connecticut, in September.
Many thanks to Time Out for our Relentless sampler in this week's edition of the magazine (one copy for each zone of the Penguin compound - normally just read nostalgically by the last person on the Time Out rota). A tiny thing of only 3 folded sheets (9 pages of book text), and approximately only 800 words, the Penguin copywriting team was taken aback by the wee-ness of it, but agreed that the blurb on the back was incredibly gripping, with real pull-power. The final line of the blurb is "He cries out and then utters six words that will change your life for ever... the first two lines of your address". Eeek. The blurb on the web, however, is a few lines longer, and mentions both the men chasing the main character and his missing wife, which had my Copywriting Colleague gasping with suspenseful delight. Is it too daring to do a sampler this short? Or does it show real confidence in the book's premise? I'm sure the average fellow wouldn't be bothered by the lack of branding on the sampler, but I found it v odd to have to search so hard for Bantam's name. Still, it's a strong contender for my Basket of Beach Books.
More beauty on t'interweb in the form of words (of a sort).
A glamorous trip to the impossibly glamorous audio studio last week as the recording for our Special Topics in Calamity Physics podcast progessed. The abridged book will be starting from June 4th, with a new episode each night for 2 weeks, as part of a Listen with Penguin scheme we're dipping our toes into. More details to follow closer to the time, but do start dropping the name Amber Sealey into all your audio-related conversations: she's quite the voice to listen to, don't you know.
Sam the Junior Copywriter
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By: Venetia Butterfield,
on 5/18/2007
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Isn't the internet a wonderful place? Lots of interesting debate on sleeping with the enemy vs. working from the inside for those nice folk at Innocent, plus the best pop-video ever, a neat piece on consumers' feelings for advertisers, and some free reading from Hodder.
I'm hooked on non-fiction at the moment, most recently Penguin Press' title Deluxe, out in August. Since reading it, I solemnly promise to never buy a $30,000 handbag ever again. Who knew the horrors that lay behind each "Made in Italy" leather good, or the cash behind those harmless-seeming fakies? Let's all swap now, instead. Like a global jumble sale.
Finally, a good way to lose a few minutes this weekend: a voice of reason in a sea of madness.
Sam the Junior Copywriter
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Our own Betsy Bird of A Fuse #8 Production has an article about Blogging the Kidlitosphere in the May/June issue of The Horn Book Magazine. I haven't received my print copy yet, but the full article is available online. My favorite quote from the article is this:
"Every day more parents, teachers, librarians, scholars, authors, illustrators, and readers are discovering and creating blogs of their own in an effort to add something to the general discourse surrounding books for kids. You can avoid blogs and suffer few consequences, but this new technology offers a remarkable way to talk about children’s literature while adequately supplementing already existing media."
Way to go, Betsy! The website also include a list of Kid-lit Bloggers to Watch, with short descriptions of each site. Welcome, to all Horn Book readers who have clicked through to visit this page. And thanks, Betsy, for making us all look good with your well-informed piece.
Mary Lee and Franki from A Year of Reading tagged me for the non-Kid-Lit blog meme back on Saturday. I'm still catching up from a long weekend away, but I am finally responding. A meme, for those of you unfamiliar with the concept, is a kind of online quiz, where people respond individually to a standard set of questions. This one asks participants to name five blogs not related to children's literature that they visit. It's difficult to choose, but here are five:
- The Never Eat Alone blog. This blog is an offshoot of the book Never Eat Alone, by Keith Ferrazzi, which helped inspire me to start my blog. It's not really about never eating alone, but more about increasing connectedness in one's life. Which, of course, is what blogging is all about.
- The Escape Adulthood and Swingset Reflections blogs by Jason and Kim Kotecki. Kim and Jason are all about encouraging people to find and maintain a childlike sense of joy. They sell lots of fun stuff at their Lemonade Stand, too.
- The Truth About Writing, by Fred Charles. Fred is a writer of fantasy novels, as yet unpublished, and explores the writing and creative processes on his blog. I like his down-to-earth writing style.
- Jess's Blog. Jess looks at blogging and other digital communications media from an academic perspective, and is especially interested in the role of women in this new media. Her lab at DeMonfort University is planning a Women, Business & Blogging conference in Leichester, UK in June.
- Occidental Tourist. The personal blog of a graphic artist currently staying at home to raise her daughter. She writes openly about the challenges of her new life vs. old.
I'm not going to tag anyone else, because this has been around for a while now, and I would imagine that most people have already participated. But if you were somehow missed, consider yourself tagged.
By: Venetia Butterfield,
on 3/22/2007
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Over at the wikinovel blog Penguin's Jon Elek has posted his last review of the Million Penguin's project. Jon had a tough job - to review the unfolding experiment as if it were a traditional literary narrative and provide editorial guidance for the participants. Below is an extract from his final post and you can read the full text here...
'I know I said this in one of my earlier posts
but the whole thing about us thinking it would be a linear book and
everyone else telling us that it wouldn’t be, then us secretly getting
all high and mighty about it, then realizing we were wrong, is actually
pretty important. In fact, what was most successful about this project
was its use of the wiki format as a space for a jointly authored text –
though the writing isn’t half bad in places. When Jeremy first told me
about what he had in mind, I was like, “OK, but I don’t understand what
you’re talking about. You need to find someone smarter.” And to be
completely honest I don’t think I really understood what the project
was about until about half way through, and even then – or now, for
that matter – I may not completely get it...
There are countless examples in literature of books in which the sum
of the parts is greater than the whole. The wiki-novel is one such case
(though naturally I’m a bit nervous about making any claims for its
being literature, at least in the whole “mind of Europe”
sense of the word). There are classic themes here: love, death, sex,
loneliness, friendship, animosity, creativity, social justice, violence
and so on. I don’t think any of these are explored in much depth, but
then that’s not exactly what you’d expect from a book like this. I’d
like to say that I expected range without substance, but I’d be lying:
I didn’t know and couldn’t guess what people would write. Now it seems
obvious. When 1500 people set out to write a work of fiction, bringing
1500 people’s worth of experience, perspective, grievances and
proclivities this project was never going to be anything if not
multitudinous, international and epic....'
The writing is over, but the discussion continues - so feel free to pitch in here or on the wikinovel blog.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
By: Venetia Butterfield,
on 3/14/2007
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A six-hour layover in delightful Dallas-Fort Worth airport gives plenty of time to ruminate on four hectic days at South by SouthWest. I've once been to the Frankfurt Book Fair - the world's largest gathering of publishing types - and there is a marked difference between the two events. The SXSWers are much younger, far scruffier and drink much less alcohol but the strange thing is that a constant theme at both events is the quest to find new storytellers. At Frankfurt publishers vie with each other to sign up the hot new novels, but at SXSW it is the games designers looking for people who will craft the story that will give their game the edge. An American publisher I met wondering the aisles of the convention centre was in Texas to scout for new authors - and bemoaning the fact that few seemed interested in being published in print. (Presumably because the computer games industry pays considerably better.)
This ambivalence towards old fashioned books was typified by the sparse attendance at the 'Do Books Have a Future?' panel (Answer, yes, probably) where Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive talked up the prospects for digital books and engaged in a little skirmish with a representative of Google Booksearch. Self-publishing outfits lulu and blurb were both in attendance at the conference, showing that books, like music, film and journalism are not immune from the swelling numbers of people who are becoming media producers as well as media consumers. 74% of American teenagers now produce some sort of online content, and
more than 30% of them share this content beyond their immediate friends
and family - a generation is growing up who want to actively participate in the culture and have the tools to do so.
So old-media companies, like Penguin, are having to change their ways and move with the times, encourage participation, look at how people want to use the books we publish and how they want to share them and talk about them. It's not always going to be a smooth transition, and we might stumble on the way, but as four days in Austin have shown me, there are a lot of great storytellers out there and plenty of people who want to hear those stories and, importantly, some great ways of connecting the two groups.
Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
PS - looks like the twitter novel idea is already under way.
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