thoughtsignals

Authors and book publishers are using quickly recorded audio books to whip up publicity for book sales, sometimes releasing the audio versions before the print version.

Because audiobooks are so fast, inexpensive and easy to record, the dynamic seems to be changing, with publishers looking to the audio format to fuel interest in paper books that aren’t quite ready for the printing press.

And with the ubiquity of iPods, that interest can be generated quickly: recordings need not be pressed onto CDs and packaged, but can quickly be uploaded to iTunes. Sometimes these recordings will be made with well-known authors whose next release isn’t quite ready for bookstores, and other times with newcomers like Ms. Fogarty whose work has gained a following another way.

Ms. Fogarty said that when she was first contacted by Ms. Winfrey’s show, she thought, “I’m going on ‘Oprah.’ Gosh, I wish my book were done.”

Fogarty is the source of the online Grammar Girl podcasts, which can be found here. Two fairly obvious observations about this:

1. Technology changes everything.

2. It’s a good thing that publishers are focused on marketing, rather than on silly things like whining about the disappearance of newspaper book sections.

Link.

For word buffs, a cool, long New York Times piece about what the editors at the Oxford English Dictionary do and how they do it. Among the tasty tidbits in this story is the word that means “a misheard lyric:” Mondegreen.

Link.

Readers and publishers of romance novels are unhappy with a new Washington, D.C.-area campaign meant to suggest that people are more likely to read Plato’s Republic on the subway there than romance novels. The advertising campaign’s backers insist the ads are all in good fun.

Link.

Google’s convtroversial Book Search is helping publishers sell more books, according to Reuters.

“Google Book Search has helped us turn searchers into consumers,” said Colleen Scollans, the director of online sales for Oxford University Press.

She declined to provide specific figures, but said that sales growth has been “significant”. Scollans estimated that 1 million customers have viewed 12,000 Oxford titles using the Google program.

This is unsurprising. There are lots and lots of books out there, most of which sell only small numbers of copies. For publishers and authors the biggest problem is simply connecting with people who are potentially interested in their books. Google, Amazon and similar services help do that. Writer and blogger Cory Doctorow has a longer, more eloquent explanation of this here.
Link to Reuters story.

A Maryland parent has gotten his daughter’s school to excuse her from reading the Ray Bradbury anti-bookburning classic “Fahrenheit 451.” Now he wants the school district to remove it entirely from the curriculum.
The irony in this is incredibly rich, but apparently totally lost on the father in question. He has not read the book, but he’s looked through it, he says, and “found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, ‘dirty talk,’ references to the Bible and using God’s name in vain.”
Link.