Adam Langer, author of Crossing California and winner of Booksquare bonus points for this definition. . .
In the author’s dictionary, spouse is defined as “the partner with a health insurance plan.”
. . .discusses some striking differences between American and European publishing. While we really enjoyed the concept of magazines, we naturally latched on to the following idea (three guesses as to why):
The Really Cool, Eye-Catching website Amerikanische Literatur [BS note: While we do not speak German, our educated guess leads us to believe this means Fine Products From The U.S.]. With some notable exceptions (for example, check out Random House’s Haruki Murakami website or Jonathan Safran Foer’s extremelyloudandincrediblyclose.com), many American publishers seem to still be in the process of figuring out how to use the Internet as a marketing tool. Many authors have their own nifty websites (see also michaelchabon.com), blogs and self-serving columns. (I tend to enjoy the ones written by Steve Almond, Gayle Brandeis and Neal Pollack, among others.) But most publishers’ sites tend to be fairly staid. They will feature book summaries, reading guides, blurbs and author bios, but many look like catalogues and are not significantly more pleasing from an aesthetic perspective than, say, target.com or ikea.com. The easily navigable German site provides some cool animation and highlights themes from their books that don’t even require a working knowledge of German. A sidenote: An editor friend of mine has asked why publisher websites rarely feature downloadable catalogues in pdf form and why they still go through the trouble and expense of printing. A good question. Perhaps one to be addressed in an upcoming column.
(As an aside, we cannot speaking highly enough of the cool little search thingy in the upper right corner of the Firefox browser [nearly as cool as the tabs]. It defaults to Google, but you can select from a variety of useful sites. This allowed us to quickly find the correct spelling of Langer’s name, since we couldn’t locate it anywhere near the Book Standard article. Yes, whine, whine, whine.)
