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The end of the book tour?

Oliver Burkeman

Margaret Atwood's round-the-world pen draws blank Margaret Atwood's new round-the-world pen draws a blank

New York: Around 40 people had turned up for Margaret Atwood's book signing and, to the untrained eye, the fact that Margaret Atwood was not one of them might have seemed a problem. Actually, that was supposed to be the point.

The fans arriving at the McNally-Robinson bookstore on Prince Street in downtown Manhattan had come to witness a long-awaited literary revolution: Canada's greatest living novelist would sign books in New York despite the fact that she was in London.

Not everyone had welcomed the gadget that Atwood launched on Sunday, called the LongPen, which is designed to allow authors to be in one place while signing their books, in real time, in another. Critics feared it might even spell the end of the book tour, saving writers many wearying hours schlepping from town to town, but ultimately cutting them off from their readers altogether. And it might — but not until they get it working.

"It'll be like being the first man on the moon!" somebody said, trying to reassure Aki Beam, a New York librarian nervously waiting first in line to have her copy of Atwood's new book signed by the LongPen's robotic arm.

"Apollo 13 is the parallel springing more readily to mind," murmured the bookstore's stressed-out owner, as a technical expert fiddled frantically with the machinery.

When it functions correctly, as it has done in several pre-launch tests, the LongPen allows an author to see the reader she is signing for, and vice-versa, using a videoconferencing system, and an image of the page to be signed.

She then writes her inscription on a touch-sensitive LCD screen and presses a button. That sends a signal to the remote bookstore, where the robot arm, clutching an ordinary ballpoint pen, copies out the message on to the book.

Authors tend to grimace at that most cliched of literary festival questions - "where do you get your ideas from?" — but Atwood was happy to pinpoint the moment she was struck by the concept of the LongPen. "Denver at four in the morning, on the paperback tour for [her novel] Oryx and Crake in Spring 2004,'' the Booker prize-winning author said. "After I'd flown from Japan, already did two events, one on the west coast and one in Denver, and had to get up very early to take a plane to Salt Lake City, and the same day take a plane to Boston."

A lifetime of book tours had left their scars. "You're talking to the person who was heading for Los Angeles when they had that earthquake, was heading for New York on the morning of 9/11, and set out to do a book tour in Japan when the SARS episode hit," Atwood said. "I'm the person whose limousine broke down on the New York freeway, green stuff and smoke came out of it, and I hitched. I was actually rescued by the marines."

Even so, she insisted, the LongPen — designed by a Canadian company that Atwood created for the purpose - was not meant to allow lazy writers to "loll around in the bath" instead of attending signings.

It could be a "democratising tool," she said, allowing authors to interact with readers in communities normally ignored by the big publishers' book tours. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

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