“How is this possibly a book club?” asks a GalleyCat reader of the Viking Penguin Book Club, which launched earlier this week. Each month, the website—”designed to simulate the experience of browsing the shelves of a bookstore or library, while offering the speed and flexibility of a digital environment”—will feature one Viking hardcover, one Penguin paperback, and a Penguin Classics paperback, with links to author bios, reading group guides, and an assortment of links to online bookstores. (There’s also a baseline archive of about 100 titles already installed.) “This smells like a a fancy feature rather than a real book club,” our reader continues. “Where is the community? Author involvement? Why is this in Flash?”
Penguin Group‘s press release promises “community” will be an added feature to the site, in the form of “a forthcoming blog where readers can post comments and reviews,” along with messages from the authors and Viking/Penguin staffers. The publishers are confident the new site “will help fill the needs of the modern reader by offering the interactive digital content that readers crave today,” but our reader isn’t impressed yet. “I don’t see a blog or anything other than a very clear BUY THE BOOK message,” she says. “If you’re going to launch with all the features you’re touting about in your press release, why not wait until then?”