In a unique pairing of bricks and mortar bookstore and Internet television, San Francisco’s Booksmith has announced that its popular author events will now be streamed live and made available to book aficionados all over the world on benow.tv.
The first two videocasts, with authors Tao Lin and Nick Bilton, ran on October 4 and 5 respectively. They will be followed by five additional events this month that include readings and talks by Steven Johnson, Dinaw Mengestu, Michael Krasny, and Joel Selvin. “We plan on doing the live streaming on a sustainable basis from now on,” said Booksmith co-owner Christin Evans. “We’ll be doing seven to ten a month going forward, and already have several authors lined up for November.”
Booksmith began testing the program a year ago with author Dan Piraro; his video has had 122,000 views. Ariel Meadow Stallings’ event in April of this year has been viewed 34,000 times thus far. “The tech-savvy authors are the best participants,” Evans said. “They know how to market themselves digitally, which makes all the difference.” With but a few exceptions, all the authors who have been invited to be featured on live streaming have accepted and signed the necessary release forms.
Booksmith, which Evans and her partner Praveen Madan purchased in 2007, and benow.tv share the cost of the social video programming. “If publishers are interested, we’ll list the program as a menu item on our events price list as a potential co-op advertising agreement,” notes Evans. “We look at the expense of live streaming as a supplemental marketing expense for publishers that can be very beneficial to them.” In addition, the rights to the videos could be leased to publishers for their promotional purposes.
Pending author releases, Booksmith plans to feature livestreaming of Tom Hudgen on November 8, Twinkie Chan on November 9, Kevin Kelly on November 16, Greg Graffin on November 19, and Peter Baqlakian on November 20. In a statement on the press Evans said, “Our partnership with beNOWtv is helping us further realize our goal of becoming a bookstore for the 21st century. Livestreaming high quality video of our author events over the Internet to viewers locally, nationally, and globally allows us to enhance and extend our community of authors and readers.”
