Doors Opening? Bit o’ Lit for Reading Riders
By Laura Yao
Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, July 1, 2008; Page C01
Bored and cranky, Shannon MacDonald was riding the Metro one morning four years ago, headed to her job as a paralegal at Akin Gump.
She was tired of crosswords and Sudokus. She’d never been much of a newspaper person. She was a “book nut” — but due to recent poor choices at the library, she didn’t have anything good to read.
Cue the light bulb: Wouldn’t it be great if you could pick up free commuter-length book excerpts at Metro stations? Wouldn’t publishers be eager to cooperate, to promote new books and authors? Couldn’t somebody, say Shannon MacDonald, turn this into a profit-making enterprise?
Well, she’s about to find out. It took a few years for MacDonald to focus her ideas, meet publishers, line up designers and printers and quit her day job. But she’s now the sole publisher of the latest and most literary addition to the local freebie reading lineup — Bit o’ Lit.
A bite-size (8 1/2 -by-5 1/2 -inch) magazine containing four or five excerpts in each issue, Bit o’ Lit made its debut May 5 and has come out on alternate Mondays since then. In a world where more and more reading is being done on a screen, the 25-year-old MacDonald is headed in the other direction: using one dead-tree medium to promote another.
“It’s kind of a retro idea, in this read-excerpts-online world, but it’s a neat idea — giving books to people who have time to kill on the subway,” said Carl Lennertz, vice president of Independent Retailing at HarperCollins.