CartMedia Coverage of Caravan
Shelf Awareness
Caravan Project Starts Joruney
April 3, 2006
PublicAffairs founder and editor-at-large Peter Osnos has taken a major step in his goal of offering readers a range of choice for how they read serious nonfiction (Shelf Awareness, August 19): with help from a group of publishers, booksellers and associations, he has formed the Caravan Project, which aims “to use existing and emerging technologies to increase the availability and variety of format of serious nonfiction books across all channels for sales and distribution, in stores and online.”
Early next year, as the first example of what it plans to do, the Project will make available about 24 titles in traditional hardcover or paperback, as well as e-book and audiobook versions (both available for download in their entirety or on a chapter basis). A large-print POD version may also be available.
The current, April 10 issue of Business Week has a long story about the project.
The Caravan Project is based at the University of North Carolina Press. Other nonprofit publisher participants are Beacon Press, the New Press, the University of California Press, Yale University Press and the Council on Foreign Relations Press. Ingram and its Lightning Source subsidiary will provide content management, fulfillment and other services.
Caravan is also working with the ABA and some of its members individually, including R.J. Julia Bookseller, Madison, Conn., Politics and Prose, Washington, D.C., and Books & Books, Coral Gables, Fla. Some Borders stores will participate in the project, and the board of the Association of American University Presses has endorsed Caravan. The New York Public Library may make the multiple formats available in test locations.
Osnos will be executive director of the Caravan Project. Kate Douglas Torrey, director of UNC Press, is chair of Caravan's board of publishers. Della Mancuso, a former Random House production executive, and Carie Freimuth, a former Random House and HarperCollins marketing executive, are consultants.
Caravan is being funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and Osnos personally is being supported by the Century Foundation, where he is a senior fellow for media.
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