Get Lit at Your Desk: featherproof Light Reading Mini Books

By Betsy Mikel in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 11, 2010 6:20PM

We don’t read as often as we should. With such a short window of warm sunny days, we’d rather spend the time with friends outside. And those pesky desk jobs seem to cut into our reading time, too. Ironically, work is where we seem to have the most available free time. If only we could whip out a book instead of waste all that time mindlessly scrolling through Tweets and our Google Reader subscriptions, we’d have so many more intelligent things to add to happy hour conversations. To solve this problem, Get Lit at Your Desk explores some online literature that’s based right here in Chicago.

Featherproof’s Light Reading Mini Books are a prime example of a publisher getting hip to the interwebs and using it as a tool for book promotion. A couple months before featherproof publishes a new book, the Chicago-based indie publisher will also release a free mini-book on their website. These printable PDFs are often a chapter from the book to come, and they can be folded origami-style to make a little pocket-sized book. The mini books are short and sweet and are kind of like book trailers. In fact, they’re better than book trailers.

As the publishing industry has tried to make sense of all this Internet/new technology/e-book business, many have turned to filming trailers to market new books. But sometimes they’re not well done, and we don’t quite understand how watching a YouTube video can help us decide if we are going to read a book. A mini book, however, is a great way to tease a new release. We get the opportunity to read a sample from the actual book to get a feeling for the storyline and the writer’s voice. Then we can decide if we want to take the next step and purchase it.

Featherproof currently has a whole slew of Light Reading Mini Books available to download. Their featured mini book is Peggy’s Brother by Lindsay Hunter, who lives in Chicago and runs the flash fiction reading series, Quickies! Peggy’s Brother is from Daddy’s, Hunter’s “down and dirty” debut book that will be released in September. Download it to see if it's your style. But take note; if your printer prints pages front and back, this little book cannot be read easily. The mini books are meant to be printed one page per sheet of paper.

Previously in the Get Lit at Your Desk series: University of Chicago Web Exhibits and Chicago Poetry Tour and Podcast.