Penguin to offer Dicken's A Christmas Carol as a podcast

What a nice idea. Penguin Podcasts will give us A Christmas Carol in installments beginning Dec. 15. Here is the feed.

Penguin Books started podcasting in October but have gotten off to a slow start. Maybe it's picking up now.

What a brand Penguin is, no? If I'm in a bookstore and it's one of several softcover choices for a classic, I'll pick Penguin every time. Covers are always so nice and non-commercial, and while the page design is often not cutting edge, it's readable in the extreme, and tasteful. I have a few very old Penguins that I'm fond of. If I ever mislaid my old Pygmalian I'd be crushed.

I've always wondered, who is the market for movie tie-in covers? Those are the last I'll choose, if there is a choice. Do mass market publishers think you'll like owning a book with famous actors' faces on it? Or is it a merchandising gambit saying, "Right, this is the one the movie was made from; buy this one."

I dislike it when products are altered for merchandising. Do what you want with the packaging, but the part that doesn't get thrown away, leave that out of selling equation, please.

There was a piece on "All Things Considered" on Thursday -- you know, the night I spent almost four hours getting home -- about toys with sound chips. Somebody in the story remarked that manufacturers purposefully make the sounds louder than you would want in your home so it will rise above the din of a Target store. Isn't that disgusting?

Huh! This brings us full circle in my ramble. NPR and Penguin have sort of the same target psychographic, don't they?