Screw you, iPad. Underwood, a publishing house imprint, is releasing stories on vinyl.
From the piece in the Telegraph...
Nathan Dunne is either a very brave or a very stupid young man. At a time when a) the MP3 has supplanted the CD as the most popular format on which to listen to recorded sounds; b) literature as a physical artefact is coming under attack from the rise of iPads, Kindles and other digital reading devices; and c) the short story is as tricky to sell to publishing houses as it has ever been, Dunne has set up a new imprint called Underwood, whose remit is to produce 33rpm vinyl records featuring writers reading 20-minute short stories aloud. “Candidly, it’s an experiment,” he admits.
The first release from Underwood, which takes its name from a Fionn Regan song that alludes to another largely obsolete piece of technology, the typewriter (“I’m changing the ribbon in this old Underwood”), is a lavish affair. Designed by American comic-book artist Jordan Crane, whose stylised bucolic cover picks up on themes on the disc’s two stories – Clare Wigfall’s Along Birdcage Walk and Toby Litt’s The Hare – it’s presented in a four-panel gatefold sleeve so beautiful that it’s easy to regard the artefact as visual art as much as a record.
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