The Penguin Blog

Our reading resolutions for 2010...

We asked our Facebook fans whether they made any book-related resolutions for 2010 and got some really lengthy replies - some said that they would like an answer to the question of whether to e-read or not, others just wanted to read more. We realised that having asked the question, we hadn't answered it ourselves. Here we share our reading resolutions...

Anna Rafferty, Managing Director of Penguin Digital
I'm going to read more Modern Classics - I've only read about twenty as I'm always drawn to the Black Classics for escapism and I'm a devil for re-reading favourites like Moll Flanders and David Copperfield again and again, but I know that there are some great new stories in there! 

Aine Fearon, Online Developer
Despite having almost finished this brilliant 1193-page whopper on the fifteen-minute commute clinging to a handrail on the Piccadilly line, I've resolved to make more of my new, longer commute to work and get some proper reading done.

Hannah Michell, Online Marketing Executive
Last year I resolved to read fifty-two books and only managed about thirty books (I'd like to think that this is, in part, because I picked up some real epics like Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda and Paul Murray's Skippy Dies). This year I really aspire to get to fifty-two books and taking inspiration from our 52 Books minisite, I'm also going to try to diversify my reading list to incorporate some non-fiction titles: I'm looking forward to sinking my teeth into Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals.

Jo Galvin, Children's Digital Marketing Manager
Being in children's publishing, my resolution would be to make sure I indulge a little in the grown up world of books every now and then. It's going to be a challenge going from lift-the-flap to The Left Hand of God, but I think I'm ready for it...

Jeanette Turmaine, Development Manager
I'm going to read a book in each available iPhone and Android ebook app :-o

Alice Berry, Magnet Editor
To only read my son two stories at night. He always nags me for a third.

Matt Clacher, Literary Marketing Executive
This year I really need to read more than just fiction. Every time I pick up a newspaper, read an essay or whatnot, I measure the experience in time I could have spent reading fiction. And even when I make an effort to read some non-fiction, it's usually by fiction writers anyway. I'm a fiction junky, and while I'm not looking to kick the habit just yet, this year I'd like to spend a little more time eye-balling some facts, such as those in Dave Eggers' Zeitoun, an urgent, timely and unforgettably haunting account of the horrors of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Chris Croissant, Online Marketing Assistant
I toyed with the idea of forty books for 2010, but that's ludicrous, I'm too slow a reader. I think thirty books is far more realistic. This is the reading list so far: I've got some Penguin Classics I want to read in the form of William S. Burroughs, A Confederacy of Dunces and many of the Deluxe Classics which are luring me with their beauty. Then there's all the fabulous literary books coming up, such as The Temple Goers and The Lessons that everyone's been telling me I HAVE to read. But I try and keep a good balance so I've got some non-fiction to get into; one or two autobiographies I've got my eye on. And lastly, there's all the non-Penguin books to read like anything Foster Wallace-related, The Glass Bead Game and Aldous Huxley's Island, both of which are sitting on my book shelf. I might even finish the Iliad...

 

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher
To encourage my son to read things other than Manga.

What are your reading resolutions for 2010?

Happy Reading!

Hannah Michell, Online Marketing Executive

Interfacing

These smart people have been doing thinking about how magazines might look and work in a digital future. 2010 would be a good time to do some similarly clever thinking about interfaces for digital reading of longer texts.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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Can we be of service?

As Penguin's Digital Publisher, I've had any number of conversations over the last few years with traditional book editors where I've tried to convince them that we're in 'the content business' rather than 'the book business'. I've realised, as I eat my lunch alone, that in a company full of book-lovers these editors don't really want to think of themselves as content producers, however I dress it up in sexy new-media jargon. Or, perhaps, because of the new-media jargon.

And as the debate about the value and price of digital content rages on, I'm testing out a new mantra on my suspicious colleagues; services not content. The idea, ill-formed as it is in my head, is that while we might continue find it a challenge to get consumers to pay for digital content, we might be able to use our skills, expertise and experience to create services that people will pay for. Services are what we do for writers, so perhaps there might be services we can create for readers. (note - I'm not the only person thinking along these lines - it's worth having a look at Bookseer and Bkkeeper, both from James Bridle and HarperCollins' BookArmy initiative). 

Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and so I'm happy to be launching our first 'service' - a suite of storymaking tools for children. At We Make Stories children (of all ages, though the site is aimed at 6-11 year olds) can create, print and share a variety of story forms. They can make pop-up stories, customise audiobooks, design their own comics, produce exciting treasure maps and develop a variety of entertaining adventures.

So we'll soon find out whether there is an audience for paid-for* services from publishers and whether, as well as publishing books that people want to read, we can develop services that people will find useful and entertaining. Otherwise, I guess I'll be looking for a new mantra before too long.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

*We Make Stories isn't free though it is very reasonably priced - and we've got free memberships for the first five people who leave a comment below

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Bookcamped

In the end there was a little less hacking, printing, soldering or coding than I might have hoped for, but the conversations, discussions and presentations that took place at Saturday's Bookcamp confirmed that people think that the time is right for some seriously bookish experimentation.

As Russell Davies blogged last week, the book isn't going away any time soon, but the business models associated with publishing are being vigorously challenged and excitingly (and challengingly for traditional publishers) the means to produce, promote and distribute books are  become available to anyone with an idea or story and access to the internet.

At Bookcamp a mixture of technologists and publishing types (and the odd publishing technologist) considered a good number of these challenges and opportunities. We thought about what publishers and authors might be able to sell if the book ceases to be an artefact. Whether good design can save the book from the online onslaught and whether good design can be built into digital products. We wondered how books can be turned into social objects, retaining the memory of who read them and how these readers had responded to the text.

In a week when it was revealed, to much astonishment, that the amount of time Americans spend reading literature has actually increased in recent years, Bookcampers asked how we might pass on an enthusiasm for reading to children, digital natives growing up with an (over)abundance of entertainment options. And there was a terrific brainstorming session on how an after-school literacy initiative based on the 826 Valencia model might be established on these shores.

All in all, it was a stimulating day which to me demonstrated that the geeks are not out to destroy the book or replace The Great Gatsby with Grand Theft Auto as an paragon of narrative. But equally clear are the challenges that face publishers who traditionally know only how to publish and market traditional printed books in the traditional way. The worlds of reading and books are changing - publishers like Penguin need to keep on learning new tricks while we continue to tweak our old ones.

Thanks to everyone who came and contributed - let's try and continue our conversations and experiments in the comments below or on the wiki.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

PS We're going to try and compile blog posts, photos, reports and other notes from the day into a print-on-demand edition with the working title The Big Bookish Book of Bookcamp - more on this soon.

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Supercharged

It's quite hard to know what to expect from Bookcamp which is now only a few days away. Publishing conferences (this is not one of them) are often quite dry events - 'Supercharging Content Acquisition and Productivity for Publishers', anyone? - and a lot of the real action takes place outside the conference room in nearby corridors, bars and hotel lobbies. The only time I've seen someone demo something that they had actually made at a publishing conference, they got a standing ovation.

At Bookcamp we're hoping to see lots of things people have made or hear them discuss what they might like to make in the future. I'm looking forward to following discussions about how we get children hooked on reading, hearing about authors' fear of the internet and learning why everything on the internet is the opposite of how it is in print! And I'm excited to meet some new people who share an interest in and passion for books and stories and, yes, technology.

But most of all I'm looking forward to being surprised on the day. It's a day of bookish experimentation and we're going to find out what happens when a bunch of smart, creative, enthusiastic people get together to think about how we might save, repair, rethink and rebuild the book for the 21st century. I can't wait.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

PS Please note that because of space restrictions we can't accept any more attendees but we'll report back here soon after the event and perhaps even try our hand at custom, print-on-demand publishing to produce a record of the day.

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VanderMeer's 60-in-60: balm for an unhappy world

The Consolation of Philosophy, written by the sixth-century Roman politician Boethius while he awaited execution for treason, was the subject of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on New Year's Day. Suggesting that this book is better than any self-help manual you're likely to find cluttering up your local bookstore at this time of year, this Radio 4 programme drew a line from Plato and Aristotle via Boethius to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and, finally, Camus in an attempt to show how a rational, philosophical approach to the pain of existence could be at the least consoling and at best exhilarating.

This immediately brought to mind Jeff VanderMeer, who has been immersing himself in some of the great philosophical works of all time, served up in bite-sized chunks in Penguin's three Great Ideas series. He has set himself the task of reading and writing about one book each day for sixty days. He has just finished the first series and has taken a short three-day break to re-charge his intellectual batteries before embarking on phase two. Some might say that far from finding consolation in reading these works back to back, Jeff is actually creating for himself a world of pain, if not a world at the very least riddled with doubt and confusion. But that is to underestimate Jeff: a writer exhilarated by good writing.

Regardless of Jeff's state of mind, his readers, judging by their comments, have found this endeavour both entertaining and instructive (though Jeff, borrowing from Schopenhauer, has taken to calling these same readers his 'fellow sufferers'). The process itself is simple: Jeff posts every day about the book he read the night before, quoting a striking line, providing a brief summary, posing a question for his blog readers, and providing a long commentary on his experience of reading it.

And it is intriguing to see not only how these thinkers and philosophers speak to Jeff but also to each other through this experiment. Jeff has said that he often recognises the ghosts of ancestral writers in the words of those who came after them. While sometimes he wonders how different certain tracts might have been had others, yet to be written, come before. Would the Communist Manifesto, for example, have been any different, had Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which unreservedly placed humankind in the red-in-tooth-and-claw jungle of the animal kingdom, been published first?

His comparisons are also fascinating. I'd never have expected to see Swift and Ruskin directly compared to one another, but Jeff's delight in their use and mastery of the extended metaphor shows the keen eye of a fantasy writer at work. I also enjoyed this playful description of Orwell's writing: 'good prose is a window pane, but sometimes the pane is dirty or cracked, and sometimes it has the reflective qualities of a mirror, or even a hint of soft green fungus growing in the gutter between glass and wood.'

Perhaps most interesting of all is that Jeff finds many of the texts not only highly relevant today but also he suggests that often we have failed to heed the ideas or lessons contained within them. Anyone dispirited by the misadventures of the American government of George W Bush over the last eight years will find that Rousseau's The Social Contract still has a lot to teach, he tells us. While his assessment of Paine's Common Sense ends with this question: Has the United States “in the flesh” lived up to Paine’s faith in it as an idea?

This is the history of thought as dialogue, which underlines the title of this series of books and provides proof, if any were still required, that what Jeff is doing here is far from frivolous.

Here are links to the first series of Great Ideas as read by Jeff:

#1 - Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life
#2 - Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
#3 - St Augustine’s Confessions of a Sinner
#4 - Thomas à Kempis’ The Inner Life
#5 - Machiavelli’s The Prince
#6 - Montaigne’s On Friendship
#7 - Swift’s A Tale of a Tub
#8 - Rousseau’s The Social Contract
#9 - Edward Gibbon’s The Christians and the Fall of Rome
#10 - Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
#11 - Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
#12 - William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating
#13 - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto
#14 - Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of the World
#15 - John Ruskin’s On Art and Life
#16 - Charles Darwin’s On Natural Selection
#17 - Friedrich Nietzsche’s Why I am So Wise
#18 - Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
#19 - Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents
#20 - George Orwell’s Why I Write

It's balm for an unhappy world.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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VanderMeer's 60 in 60: a great idea or a silly one?

No one could ever accuse Jeff VanderMeer of being a slouch.

I became interested in the author's work in 2001 and since then he has written and had published three novels and four collections of stories (including the epic City of Saints and Madmen), edited alone or with an accomplice (often his wife Ann) six short-story collections, and contributed reams of fascinating material to internet discussion forums, his very popular blog Ecstatic Days, the Amazon Blog Omnivoracious, Bookslut and the Huffington Post. If I've left anything out – and I'll bet I have – it's entirely his fault and not mine. I just can't keep track of everything he's up to this or any other day. (I'm also beginning to suspect there's more than one of him: perhaps he's cloned himself – twice.)

However, there is one thing he's currently up to that I've just got to tell you about.

A couple of months ago, Jeff contacted me with an idea he'd had. He'd seen that Penguin had a new set of Great Ideas out (that makes three sets, sixty books in total) and he wanted to blog about them. Nice idea, I thought. They're good books, beautifully designed.

Then I read the rest of his email. He wanted to blog about EACH book in all three sets. Okay. Brave man to set himself such a task. But then it got ridiculous. He wanted to review one book per day for sixty days.

If anyone else had suggested this to me, I'd have suggested right back that they were an idiot.

Even Jeff, I've noticed, isn't claiming with one hundred per cent certainty that he can go the distance. But he's going to try. And he's started.

Yesterday, the first post went up: Seneca's On the Shortness of Life. And it's not a short post and it shows a great deal of understanding about just why certain classic works remain vital and interesting. Get over there and check it out. And go back each and every day for the next fifty-nine days. Lend him your support in this endeavour.

No slouching now.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

** Update: Jeff's 60-in-60 has been made the Guardian's Site of the Week. **

#1 - Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life
#2 - Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
#3 - St Augustine’s Confessions of a Sinner
#4 - Thomas à Kempis’ The Inner Life
#5 - Machiavelli’s The Prince
#6 - Montaigne’s On Friendship
#7 - Swift’s A Tale of a Tub
#8 - Rousseau’s The Social Contract
#9 - Edward Gibbon’s The Christians and the Fall of Rome
#10 - Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
#11 - Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
#12 - William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating
#13 - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto
#14 - Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of the World
#15 - John Ruskin’s On Art and Life
#16 - Charles Darwin’s On Natural Selection
#17 - Friedrich Nietzsche’s Why I am So Wise
#18 - Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
#19 - Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents
#20 - George Orwell’s Why I Write

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A Day of Bookish Experimentation

It's been an exciting and stressful couple of weeks in the world of books and frankly, I'm suffering from information overload. Last week three big US publishing companies announced redundancies or restructurings causing one commentator to ask whether book publishers should be compared with car companies or banks. Makes a change from us being compared to record companies, I suppose.

Despite, or perhaps because of The Fear, the last week has also seen a spate of interesting digital announcements from the big publishers. Our sister company in the US have announced the launch of Penguin2.0, a suite of forward-looking applications. Over here HarperCollins have announced that they are putting ebooks on the Nintendo DS and Macmillan are doing the same on the iPhone via the Stanza reader. All nice interesting work with the general concept of giving the customers as much choice as possible in how and when they access books, and on what devices.

So rather than announce any bookish experimentation of our own (for now!), we're going to sponsor a day of bookish experimentation instead and host what we are calling Bookcamp in the middle of January. Our plan is for this to be a day of talking and doing - examining the role of the book as an object and as a delivery mechanism for content.  We're inviting authors, typographers, cover designers, printers, technologists, retailers, literary agents, publishers and geeks to come along and consider if and how technology can transform and perhaps improve on The Book. Will print on demand mean the end of the bookshop? Will ebook technology allow everyone to be their own publisher? Will printed books go the way of vinyl and become collectors objects? Are games the new novels? And, most importantly, what is the use of a book without pictures and conversations?

To help us make this a day of making and building as well as talking, we've roped in Russell Davies and James Bridle to help plan and execute and we've invited a bunch of excellent people who we hope will have fun taking apart and rebuilding the book - and perhaps the book business - for the 21st century. There are still a few spaces spare, so if you think that you might have something to contribute, share or show send us an email and let us know what you've got in mind.

We'll cover the event on this blog and on twitter in the new year - now at least we've got something to look forward to after the winter break!

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

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