Penguin has launched a website that gives London Underground passengers access to free book extracts and author interviews to read during their journeys.
It’s Penguin’s 80th birthday, and the publishing house that reinvented book publishing in the 1930s by producing inexpensive paperbacks (sold in everday stores like Woolworths for sixpence), is reinventing how people find books to read.
Or maybe reawakening reading?
At Penguin’s Summer of Penguin website, London Tube passengers with an internet connection (especially Virgin WiFi partner, Virgin Media, is hoping) can read exclusive excerpts from novels and author interviews, as well as listening to audio content from August 3 to 8.
The site launches with an extract from Stephen Fry’s about to be released memoir, More Fool Me; Nick Hornby’s tribute to the 60s, Funny Girl; Emma Healey’s bestseller, Elizabeth is Missing and one of Raymond Chandler’s notebooks.
The website was created in-house using a minimalistic design similar to the Little Black Classics series (80 books for 80p each) that Penguin launched in February – also part of Penguin’s 80th birthday celebrations.
The design references the London Underground, with its train line listings and use of different colours like those used to differentiate the Tube lines. The icons that accompany each extract were designed by UK artist, graphic designer and illustrator Rob Lowe (aka, Supermundane), Rob Lowe, whose work is also found in the New York Times and the Guardian.
At the end of each excerpt is a cover shot of the book it is taken from, and a link to buy the publication online.
Transport for London is Penguin’s other partner in the campaign.
The campaign follows a similar idea created by Penguin earlier in the year, that put WB Yeats’ 150th birthday year celebrations to good use for the publisher. London’s 4 million daily Tube travellers were able to read the poems of half a dozen Irish poets displayed on trains for eight weeks from February 22.
In the last week of March, Transport for London published a paperback edition of the Penguin anthology, Poems on the Underground. Copies of the posters were also available from the Poetry Society and London Transport Museum.
