Just to Pile On a Bit

So after commenting on the ridiculous LongPen a couple of times in the past week, I sat down to read the September issue of Harper’s last night and found this item in the “Readings” section from the LongPen website:

Where did the idea come from?

As I was whizzing around the U.S. on yet another book tour, getting up at four int he morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the minibar at night as I crawled around on the hotel-room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, “There must be a better way of doing this.” With LongPen, the author could make “appearances” in different countries all in one day. The in-store book signing would be enhanced. You could have an event with three different authors: a big one, a medium one, and a local one, in the same store on the same afternoon, one after the other.

Pringle food objects! Man, The price of celebrity is rough. I’m glad there’s an impersonal, mechanical object capable of making life easier for certain authors and totally commodifying the author event experience.