When it comes to books, there are any number of great feasts. Think of Joyce Carol Oates’ 737-page novel, “Blonde,” published last year by Ecco Press, or David McCullough’s new 751-page biography of John Adams, from Simon and Schuster, now arriving at stores. And, for literary gluttons, there’s always the 2,300-page, 1.4-million-word “Remembrance of Things Past,” completed in 1922 by Marcel Proust.
Suzanne Beecher and Alexander Waugh, each in an unusual way, offer something much different to their readers: literary snacks — savory morsels of words, paragraphs and ideas, good writing to read on the run or during a short break in a busy day.
Beecher, a Florida-based entrepreneur, serves up daily tastes of new novels and non-fiction works by e-mail to some 100,000 subscribers around the world.
By contrast, Waugh, the grandson of novelist Evelyn Waugh, uses an approach that’s more than 2,000 years old to deliver his quick reading refreshments — the vending machine.
Since January, commuters using the South Kensington station of the London Underground have had the opportunity to purchase individual short stories for a single pound coin (about a buck and a half in U.S. money) from a retooled postal machine. Published by Waugh’s Travelman Co., the short stories are printed like maps, on a single large sheet of paper that folds up accordion-like.
“Our best sellers are Arthur Conan Doyle, Ruth Rendell and Ambrose Bierce,” says William Mollett, the managing director for Travelman.
Conceived in 1998, the stories were originally sold in United Kingdom bookstores, museums and similar venues, together with legal-size envelopes, so they could be more easily passed along to friends. (That’s how they’re offered now in the U.S. at the few stores that carry them.) The idea of selling them from vending machines came later.
The maplike format, the brainchild of Waugh, was so innovative that it was selected for one of 1,012 Millennium Awards from the British Design Council, out of some 100,000 entries. Even so, the product is still very low-tech. Vending machines, after all, have been around since about 215 B.C. when worshippers at Egyptian temples would put a few coins in a device that would then dispense a small splash of holy water. And using the government’s postal system — how old-fashioned can you get?
Yet, there’s something delightfully fresh about the idea of going to a vending machine, not for a bag of Fritos or a Butterfinger or a can of Pepsi, but for fiction — for storytelling, for surprise endings, for finely crafted prose.
There’s a freshness, too, to Beecher’s Chapter-A-Day service, and it’s totally 21st Century.
Each weekday, as many as 100,000 subscribers from as far away as Moscow and China receive an e-mail from Beecher containing a small excerpt (about 1,500 words, or five minutes of reading time) from a newly published book. Five excerpts, usually from the opening pages of the book, are provided Monday through Friday, and then, on the next Monday, a new book begins. Books so far have included Jane Smiley’s “Horse Heaven” (Knopf) and “My Grandfather’s Blessings” from Rachel Naomi Remen (Riverhead).
“I want to get people reading, and I want to make a change in people’s lives,” Beecher says. She got the idea for the service when, as a small perk, she began e-mailing snippets of books to computer-bound employees of her voicemail business. The response was so positive that she began offering the service to libraries in August 1999.
Free advertising
“I have to choose books that I feel, from the get-go, will grab your attention,” says Beecher who had no connection with the book industry before starting the e-mail service. In some cases, a publisher or an author will bring a book to her notice. In others, she’ll go to a publisher to ask approval to use excerpts. In all, she has gotten permission from more than 50 publishers, including Random House and Penguin, to use small portions of their works. And no wonder: It’s a form of free advertising. “We’re doing for books what radio did for music,” Beecher says.
Today, more than 3,000 libraries in the U.S. and Canada provide the service, labeled Online Book Club, through their Web sites, usually on the home page. A library user fills out a form at the site, and then receives the daily e-mails under the library’s name.
“People want good things to read. They want recommendations,” says Merle Jacob, director of library collection development for the Chicago Public Library. “Chapter-a-Day helps readers try something out. For me, anything that will promote reading, I will stand at State and Madison, and jump up and down, and say, `Yay!'” At the Chicago Library’s Web site, the link to Beecher’s service has been difficult to find, but a planned reorganization of the site should remedy that problem, officials say.
90,000 receive service
Some 45,000 people have subscribed through their libraries, according to Beecher. Another 25,000 to 30,000 individuals have joined the e-mail list by signing up at her own Web site, www.chapteraday.com. And about 20,000 more receive the service through several businesses, including Books-A-Million, that use it as a promotional vehicle.
The service is free to those who receive the e-mails, although Beecher charges libraries small fees and businesses much larger fees to sponsor the program. In addition, those who want to buy a book can do so through links to major online booksellers at the Chapter-a-Day Web site, with a commission on each sale being paid to Beecher’s company.
Of course, book excerpts on the Internet are nothing new. Publishers, as well as Barnesandnoble.com and Amazon.com, routinely provide a taste of new novels and non-fiction works. For example, a reader interested in David McCullough’s new biography of our second president can go to any one of several Web sites to sample the book by reading its first chapter — some 25,000 words or, if printed out, some 40 single-spaced pages or so on paper. The idea is to replicate for the consumer the experience of paging through a book at a brick-and-mortar bookstore before deciding whether to buy it.
The Chapter-a-Day service is a different wrinkle, though. It isn’t for potential buyers who have gone looking for a book, but is aimed at people who read only occasionally. Beecher hopes her service will not only make it easy for such people to sample books, but also help them become as hooked on the joys and benefits of reading as she is.
“It’s almost a crusade,” she says. “I want to make a profit, but reading really does change people’s lives.”
Waugh and his colleagues at Travelman also talk about their short-story machines as being part of a crusade to improve the reading tastes of British — and eventually American — readers. “It’s a casual read, but a high-brow casual read,” Mollett says. “Most casual reading today [in magazines and newspapers] is badly written.”
Many of the 42 titles in the series, selected with the help of an editorial panel that includes Dame Muriel Spark and Martin Amis, are examples of classic good writing, such as “The Open Boat” by Stephen Crane, “The Rocking Horse Winner” by D. H. Lawrence and “The Peacocks” by Yukio Mishima. New works include a couple of stories by Spark, and, in a nod to the masses, there’s even a James Bond short story from Ian Fleming.
In the United Kingdom, some 300,000 of the stories were sold in stores between 1998 and 2000. Yet, only about 50 American locations carry the stories, and sales have been disappointing, Mollett says. Tower Records in Schaumburg, for example, has them in stock, but Kati Falbo, the book manager, says, “I haven’t seen them move that much.”
`They’re really cool’
Even so, Debi Morris, the front-list buyer for Barbara’s Bookstores, is thinking about ordering the stories. “They’re really cool. They have great potential, like at the North Western train station,” Morris says. “Commuters like short stories.” And Jaime Guthals, a spokeswoman for the Chicago-based Independent Publishers Group, which distributes the stories in the U.S., says, “I like to read them on the `L.’ You don’t have to invade anyone’s space.”
As for using the vending machines in the U.S., Alice Dark is less than optimistic. “I don’t think it would work here,” the short story writer says. “So few people read short stories in this country. Selling them in the same way you sell gum or condoms, I don’t think it would appeal to the same people who read short stories. They want to have it come from the New Yorker.”
And don’t expect to see Travelman petitioning Metra or the CTA soon for the opportunity to install vending machines on Chicago-area platforms. For one thing, their main goal at the moment is to persuade London Underground authorities to permit an expansion of the service to some 50 vending machines on commuter platforms within two years. And, for another, the company is seriously considering a move to a different, newfangled type of selling device.
Travelman, Mollett says, is now looking into the possibility of providing short stories and other text products through a sort of digital vending machine. In this paperless version, the material would be downloaded to a personal digital assistant, such as a Palm Pilot, or some other gadget with a larger screen, and read there.
A more modern approach, to be sure. But the idea would remain the same — a literary snack, a taste of good writing.
