VP Book Club

This news is a couple days old, but Viking Penguin recently launched a new online resource for reading groups:

Unique features of www.vpbookclub.com include the ability to personalize the site’s homepage, regular posts from authors, editors, and sales and marketing people at Viking and Penguin, as well as a forthcoming blog where readers can post comments and reviews. The site will offer a monthly newsletter as well as weekly news, awards, author tour updates and contests/giveaways. And, unique to publishing house websites, www. vpbookclub.com invites users to purchase items from the retailer of their choice, several of which link to each title’s page.

They probably should’ve come up with a better name so that they didn’t have to keep repeating “www.vpbookclub.com” over and over throughout the press release, but whatever, that seems to be the least of their problems. Joe Wikert has a really snarky report on his excellent Publishing 2020 Blog.

It probably seemed like a good idea at the design stage, but the implementation is, well…go see for yourself, but try to remain patient while the main page loads. I’m talking about the new VP Book Club, a new joint website offering from Viking and Penguin.

Tim Spalding does an excellent job dissecting the VP site on his LibraryThing blog. He refers to it as “a gorgeous mistake.”

The site is gorgeous, and the idea of featuring a Viking hardcover, a Penguin paperback, and a Penguin Classic isn’t bad. But do book clubs really need all these Flash bells and whistles? Probably not. I ‘d like to believe that book clubs are most interested in content, like Reading Group Guides, with or without simplistic questions. (E.g., “Our three principal characters all seem to be in search of something. What does each character in the novel gain/learn from the other?”)