This morning's Washington Post had an interesting article about a new "product" called Bit o' Lit. It's basically a new approach to marketing books—create "magazines," sized for easy reading on subway trains, that contain book excerpts. The magazines are free and are subsidized by the book publishers.

Here's a paragraph from the website that explains the Bit o' Lit philosophy:

We believe that while readers support the idea of reading new books, in practice, they are hesitant to risk their time and money on untested books or authors. This is undeniably why there were no new authors among the thirty bestselling books last year.

It sounds like a cool idea to me! I just hope they can make a go of it. They may be overly optimistic as it sounds from the Post article like it's all one woman's doing.