The other day we received our first e-catalog from a publisher and we not only lived to tell the tale, we actually liked it. Though the digital revolution in the book industry has happily reached a tipping point, a lot of grouchy twentieth century old timers have stubbornly drawn the line at emailed catalogs. Here’s what I recently muttered on the subject:

Another capital-intensive practice on the chopping block for a number of publishers is paper catalogues, and though we’re all trying to enter the digital age unflinchingly, the disappearance of catalogues will be more wrenching than many other uprootings. Catalogues have long been the most familiar tool for introducing the bookstore trade to publishers’ front- and backlists. They are not merely informational and often beautiful but they are a publisher’s face to the world, its very identity. Even the spelling of “catalogue”, despite Microsoft spellcheck’s insistence on dropping the “ue”, bespeaks a stubborn and beloved tradition.

Holding out for paper catalogs is kind of like die-hard Southerners flying the Confederate flag in their front yards. It’s a losing battle. Catalogs are going E whether we like it or not, and the Visigoths who spell it “catalog” have won the day.

The one we received from Perigee, a division of Penguin’s Putnam group, is handsome, colorful, informative, and easily navigable. The only problem is technical. The size of the PDF file sent to me was more than 6 MB. That can strain some older computers, get snagged by filters or push the dial on some inboxes close to the Full mark. The alternative is for booksellers and other interested parties to visit the publisher’s website and proceed to the catalog links. We did so and invite you to do so too. Click here, then click on the “catalogs” tab and scroll down to the various Penguin divisions. You can then view a catalog online or download it as a zip file.

Some files are larger than others and because the Perigee catalog is bundled with those of other divisions it weighs in at a hefty 114 MB; the zip is almost as big at 106 megs. Publishers will have to find ways to keep file sizes down. If an e-catalog requires too much time to load it will defeat its raison d’etre. For a busy bookseller, two or three minutes of watching a progress bar on a computer is as much time as it used to take to browse an entire paper catalog.

In time these issues will be resolved and as the industry grows accustomed to the new format, the advantages of e-catalogs will make themselves abundantly manifest; we’ll see video, audio, hotlinks galore and countless other bells and whistles. E-catalogs are cost effective and so much friendlier to the environment than their paper forebears. Indeed, Perigee’s catalog was inspired by one of the publisher’s own books, Green, Greener, Greenest by Lori Bongiorno.

Note that I spelled catalog in the contemporary style. But I secretly thought catalogue. Twentieth century habits die hard.

Richard Curtis