The podcasting Penguin

Penguin the book publisher has started podcasting

The Guardian blog says

Penguin is the first of the UK's major publishers to jump on the podcasting bandwagon , with the Penguin Podcast , and they are making a pretty good fist of it.

The fortnightly radio show has so far consisted of extracts from audio books, including Zadie Smith's On Beauty and Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down.

But Penguin are upping their game from next week with a podcast of the unabridged audiobook of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, in five instalments. The classic yuletide tale is read by the actor Geoffrey Palmer and the first serving will be on December 15. Penguin has always made an effort with online marketing – their website is one of the liveliest among publishers, with an interactive reading group section, quizzes, giveaways and so on

Just one more small example as to how our media ecology is changing. And that as Jeff Jarvis says we have moved from a centralised marketplace to a distributed one.

And here is something we prepared earlier from the SMLXL vaults A customer centric approach to marketing and technology

Question is will it sell more books? I am sure Penguin wouldn't be doing it even they didn't think it would. At least they are creating a greater sense of value by allowing people to access content in a completey different context. Its got to better than Buy One Get One Free.

Or what Hugh MacLeod describes as BOGOF.

It is the inevitable digital destiny