Blog a Penguin Short 1: A Guest at the Feast

There is something very satisfying about reading an entire book in one sitting. Part of the pleasure of Julian Barnes’ Booker Prizing winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, is that you can spend a deeply pleasurable and indulgent afternoon devouring the book whole. You don’t have to worry about forgetting who said what when, of losing track of the plot as you nibble your way through the pages, piecemeal, when you get a moment here or there. The book is completely with you and the reading experience all the richer for it.

Last week we launched a new series of eBooks written with this experience in mind. The Penguin Shorts can be read over a long commute or a short journey, in your lunch hour or between dinner and bedtime, these brief books provide a short escape into a fictional world or act as a primer in a particular field or provide a new angle on an old subject.

To introduce you to the series, we are going to blog our way through all nine of the launch books, as we read through the series on our way in and out of work. To kick off, I’m starting with Colm Tóibín’s A Guest at the Feast. Celebrated as one of the finest novelists and short story writers of his generation Colm Tóibín, in his Penguin Short, turns his hand to his first piece of memoir, moving from the small town of Enniscorthy to Dublin, from memories of a mother who always had a book on the go to the author's early adulthood, from a love of literature to the influences of place and family.

To Work: 388 from Victoria Park Road to Embankment (50 minutes)

It was bitterly cold yesterday morning. It proved difficult to keep my reader still as I tried to steal away the first few pages while keeping my morning vigil for the 388 to take me into work. It’s a good journey, I always get a seat and it allows for just shy of an hour of solid reading time. A Guest at the Feast opens with Tóibín's childhood in Enniscorthy, the story of how parents got together, his schooling (good at maths, giving ‘smart answers’ and being ‘no good’), childhood trips to the Wexford Town, and by the time I reach work, he is on his way to Dublin and University.

Back Home: 26 from Aldwych to Cassland Crescent (50 minutes)

In Dublin, Tóibín’s love of the arts develops. There is a wonderful scene in which he meets Frederick May, a forgotten Irish composer, responsible for ‘one of the greatest contributions to Irish beauty which was ever made’. He continues, reflecting on his mother, an avid reader that adored ‘smart’ books and stayed clear of those she found ‘slow-moving’. And finally, to the importance of place and the influence it has had on him and his work. And that’s it, a perfect gem of a book and an insight into one of our most profound writers, completely enjoyed and digested on a single day on my way in and out of work.

 

Matt Clacher
Penguin General Marketing

 

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Picture books for the digital generation

Today is an incredibly exciting day. Today is the launch of the Puffin Digital Prize and a brave new world for Puffin picture books. I'm so excited I can hardly breathe. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take a deep breath and I’ll explain things properly. I'll start at the very beginning . . .

As the Editorial Director of Puffin Picture Books, I am the lucky girl who has the privilege of working on beautifully illustrated, full colour books for young readers. Think Raymond Briggs and The Snowman, add Helen Oxenbury and Julia Donaldson and you get the picture. As I said, I am VERY lucky. But I wasn't feeling quite so lucky a little while ago, when the word digital was a real thorn in my side. How did picture  books fit into this amazing digital world everyone was talking about? Well, quite simply, they didn't. Being full colour with integrated text, the technology simply didn't exist to bring them to life on a digital device. I would enviously look at my fiction colleagues with their e-readers where a whole world of stories lived and breathed in one nifty little machine. Sigh. All I could do was be patient. One day, I said to my beautiful, fully illustrated books, one day, your time will come.

And come it did with a bang – the iPad. Woo-hoo! Like every other person at Penguin, I used all sorts of ruses, good and bad, to get my hands on one. And when I did it felt like Christmas. I've always been a 
book-sniffer (I use that term affectionately, someone who loves a book for being a book as well as a fabulous story) but my conversion was complete in that one moment. Just look at what this thing can do! We have glorious technicolour in fantastic resolution but that's just the beginning. There are interactive games, enhancements, zoom in/zoom out functions, not to mention the wonderful apps where information architects build amazing book experiences at the touch of a screen. (Yes, I know – information architects? I don't know what they do either, it's very technical apparently, but boy am I glad that they are part of my world now!) Now we can read a picture book by flipping through the pages with a swipe or a tap. Talk about a head spin.

There's no doubting that these new platforms will spell out a new world for picture books. They will no longer be bound by the contstraint of 32 pages, it can be what you like. The sky is the limit. But not everything has changed, we are still here to serve our audience of three to six year olds who still love a ripping good yarn, whatever the format.

So, if you think you might be the Eric Carle or Quentin Blake of the digital generation, then we would love to hear from you. The Puffin Digital Prize is open to every writer, illustrator, designer and digital creative, and we’re asking you to create a digital story and win the opportunity to see your book published. We know how much talent is out there and this is your opportunity to showcase it. Find out more at www.puffindigitalprize.co.uk. Good luck!

Louise Bolongaro
Editorial Director, Puffin Picture Books

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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 😮

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

How to win friends and influence people

Last week I was in Paris explaining to 600 French publishers, librarians, booksellers and writers that editors at Penguin were more and more often thinking ‘beyond the book’ when they considered publishing opportunities for their authors. The view that we are in the content business rather than the book business is not one that made me popular in Paris, where the publisher’s role in the preservation of literature is taken very seriously indeed. 

But over the last few weeks I’ve had approaches from a number of Penguins asking whether particular titles might make good iPhone apps, interesting ebook especials, digital learning tools and even an ‘artificial reality app’ (whatever that is!). And at the same time we’ve also started talking to creators of video games about books that might be able to be adapted in interesting interactive ways to create new products which might attract new readers to our authors and their books. 

This, more and more, is what 21st century publishing is going to be like – not just sifting through the hundreds of submissions to find an author to cultivate but also sifting through the growing number of digital channels and platforms to see how best to market, distribute and sell those words.

So it’s really exciting to see one of these initiatives bear fruit and actually go onto the shelves. Last week Electronic Arts launched Flips ebooks for the Nintendo DS and the first four titles, including Artemis Fowl titles and Cathy Cassidy ebooks from Puffin, went on sale on Friday. At Penguin we’ve spent lots of the last year thinking about ebooks and how we should go about getting the thousands of titles we have in print onto devices such as the Amazon Kindle and Sony eReader. What’s exciting about the Flips titles is that these are ebooks to be read on devices that millions of children already own and use on a daily basis. The hardware is already out there – now there are rich, colourful interactive ebooks to read on them. 

With so much media competing for adults and children’s attention we want books to be represented on whatever screens people are looking at – our future business depends on books being part of the rich multimedia entertainment mix. So it’s positive that a major games developer feel that there is a place for books alongside their games lineup and it will be very interesting to see whether these find their way under the Christmas trees this year.

Jeremy Ettinghausen

Digital Publisher

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Special Guest Post – Nick Hornby on ebooks

Last Friday some Penguins presented other Penguins with our plans for the (re)launch of ebooks which will be happening later this year. We, like other publishers, are frantically digitizing our books because, as we are all aware, The eBooks are Coming!!! This is, of course, a tremendously exciting time – we might be at the brink of a revolution in the way that we distribute books and the way that people access books. But the key word is ‘might’ – the really exciting thing is that no-one really knows how things will turn out. Ebooks might change our world … but they might not. We’ll know a little bit more a year from now.

Within the publishing community there’s no shortage of opinions about the future of books and the future of reading, but it is refreshing to see the views of a reader and writer on this topic. So below, reposted from Nick Hornby’s own blog, are his thoughts on books, ebooks and readers. Feel free to comment and let us know your thoughts.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

 

In branches of Borders, they are trying to flog us their e-book reader, the ‘Iliad’, for £399. Meanwhile in the London Evening Standard, David Sexton seems quite taken with Amazon’s version, the Kindle. In my branch of Borders on Monday, the Iliad was piled high on the left, just as you walk in; on the right is their wall of bestselling paperbacks, many of which are being sold at half price. It was a quiet Monday morning, and there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four hundred quid e-book reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either. Attempting to sell people something for four hundred pounds that merely enables them to read something that they won’t buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task. (A member of staff at Borders told me that he attempted to persuade a young and famous comedian to buy an Iliad last week. He seemed interested, until he was told the price, at which point he swore loudly and walked away. So at the moment, they are priced too high for millionaire showbusiness entertainers.)

There is currently much consternation in the book industry about the future of the conventional book, but my suspicion is that it will prove to be more tenacious than the CD, for the following reasons:

1)    Book readers like books, whereas music fans never had much affection for CDs. Vinyl yes, CDs no. They are too small for interesting cover art and legible lyrics, the cases break easily, and despite all promises to the contrary, they are extremely easy to break and scratch. Books have remained consistently lovable for several hundred years now. For readers, a wall lined with books is as attractive as any art we could afford to put up there.
2)    E-book readers have a couple of disadvantages, when compared to mp3 players.  The first is that, when we bought our iPods, we already owned the music to put on it; none of us own e-books, however. The second is that so far, Apple is uninterested in designing an e-book reader, which means that they don’t look very cool.
3)    We don’t buy many books – seven per person per year, a couple of which, we must assume, are presents for other people. Three paperbacks bought in a three-for-two offer – expenditure, fourteen pounds approx – will do most of us for months. The advantages of the Iliad and the Kindle – that you can take vast numbers of books away with you – are of no interest to the average book-buyer.
4)    Book-lovers are always late adaptors, and generally suspicious of new technology.
5)    The new capabilities of the iPod will make it harder to sell books anyway. How much reading has been done historically, simply because there is no television available on a bus or a train or a sun-lounger? But that’s no longer true. You could watch a whole series of the Sopranos by the pool on your iPod touchscreen, if you want.  Reading is going to take a hit from this.

But – and this is the most depressing reason – the truth is that people don’t like reading books much anyway: a 2004 survey of two thousand adults found that thirty-four per cent didn’t read books at all.  The music industry’s problems are many and profound, but you never see advertisements asking us to listen to more music; there are no pressure groups or government quangos attempting to ensure that we make room in our day for a little Leona Lewis. The problem is getting people to pay for music, not getting people to consume it.  Can you see every teenager in Britain harassing their parents for a Kindle? Me neither.

I’m not naïve –  I’m sure that in the future we’ll be able to take a pill that saves us the trouble of having to read anything ever, and books will die overnight. But while people are so resistant to the act of reading itself, the four hundred pound reader is not going to be the must-have accessory of the near future.

Copyright © Nick Hornby, July 2008

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