|
Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
boldtype
Ever go book shopping at your preferred local mega-chain and find yourself thinking, "Gee, I'm really in the mood for something published by Harper Collins. . .or maybe Doubleday?" The answer is probably no. Like most readers, you shop for authors, not imprints. After all, authors — Stephen King, John Grisham, Frank McCourt — are the Pepsis and McDonalds of the literary world. Publishers, on the other hand, are about as relevant or interesting to the average reader as the firm that delivers produce to the local supermarket. That being said, the Web site of Random House, one of the largest of the Very Big U.S. Publishers, is a curious thing. Type in www.randomhouse.com and you're greeted with a banner graphic that reads, not "Random House Inc." or even "Welcome to Random House," but rather "books@randomhouse." Just below the banner is a table of ads hawking books by Danielle Steele and Anne Rice. In the right-hand column, menu options include "Best Seller News", "Mavens' Word of the Day" and "Stan's Crossword Hint." Further down the page, you can register to win a collection of baseball books, even check your daily horoscope. Conversely, beyond a rather unobtrusive link labeled "Author's Connection" buried among other links, there isn't a lick of information geared toward authors or agents. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the link to RH's "Bookseller" content is located way down in the bottom navigation element: hardly a prominent placement for what is, presumably, the content RH would most want to highlight on its Web site. What can we make of all this? In e-commerce biz-speak, the RH Web site is clearly a "b to c play" (that is, business-to-consumer); its not what we'd expect from a traditional publisher, but rather more like the Web site of a consumer-facing company such as, say, amazon.com. However, if one considers the fact that Random House, perhaps more so than its immediate competitors, has made an enormous investment in the burgeoning e-book market (which includes a lion's-share stake in vanity press dot.com, XLibris) it becomes clear why RH would want to begin branding itself directly to readers. RH has seen the writing on the wall: the advent of digitized content, e-book readers and the like means that the traditional publishing model, now nearly 500 years old, may soon go the way of the quill pen. If RH and other publishers want to deal effectively with readers in the not-so-distant future, they're going to have to start dealing with them directly. This is where boldtype, RH's proprietary literary magazine, comes in. In a nutshell, boldtype can be seen as a part of a larger trend toward proprietary or in-house magazines, the primary purpose of which (and some would say the sole purpose) is to spark reader interest in the products of their parent company. In other words, boldtype is the Web-based equivalent of Kinko's Impressor and IKEA's new Space. The most cynical among us might summarily dismiss boldtype as so much marketing vaporware – no need to even click through to see what's inside. But are such publications always thinly veiled sales catalogues or the couriers of corporate gospel? Or is there some worthwhile content to be found in the midst of all the self-promotion? In boldtype's case, the answer to the latter question is yes. Literature, after all, is not a cheaply made couch or a batch of business cards. While no one should expect to find the cutting edge here or any content that isn't somehow tied-in with RH's considerable catalogue, serious readers will find a modicum of worthwhile content – author interviews and bios, excerpts from current titles, reasonable explications of featured works, as well as a few unexpected goodies. The November boldtype's poetry section, for instance, features Real Audio files of Sylvia Plath and other poets reading selections from the Random House audio series Voice of the Poet. In addition to Plath's "Lady Lazarus, " selections include Auden's "The More Loving One", James Merrill's "The Emerald," and Anne Sexton's "Music Swims Back to Me." Granted, such nuggets are teasers designed to get us to fork over for the titles from which they've been excerpted, but is the knowledge that it's all about pimping the RH list so unbearable as to pass up the chance to hear from the horse's mouth poems most of us have only heard read in our own voices? Clearly, readers will have to decide for themselves if patronizing a ‘zine like boldtype means casting a vote for shameless capitalism. If you can't make up your mind, consider this: Random House owns a number of generally well-respected lit-rich imprints, like Alfred Knopf, Vintage and others, so there's no telling what might make its way into boldtype's pages in the future. Tell us what you think. Email talkback@pifmagazine.com Want Pif to review your zine? Tom Hartman has been a regular contributor to Pif since 1999. He lives in Philadelphia. |
|||||||||
