MAIN NEWS HEADLINES
August 23- August 30, 2007 Edition

Penguin Launches
Book Club for Two
USA Divisions

NEW YORK, NY/8/20/07–Penguin Group USA has launched an online resources site for reading groups. The site, called VP Book Club, offers short descriptions of Penguin paperbacks and Classics and Viking hardcovers, along with reading group guides and links to author sites. The VP Book Club site appears to still be in a beta development stage, but offers visitors a chance to sign up for a monthly newsletter, and provides book excerpts, author background information and book tour schedules.

The first three titles featured on the site are Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (Penguin Classics), Meg Mullins’s The Rug Merchant (Penguin) and Deirdre McNamer’s Red Rover (Viking).

Penguin USA already features an extensive list of book clubs at http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/readingguides/index.html. The new VP Book Club apparently is intended to feature books from Penguin’s Viking/Penguin Classics divisions, and to provide additional support material. Viking president Clare Ferraro developed the idea.