For Bookstores, a Real Page-Turner

Not surprisingly, his partners agree.

"He's trying to do nothing short of change the way the entire industry publishes their books," says Mark LaFramboise, the head book buyer at Politics and Prose. If it works, "it would be huge."

"If this takes off, other people may try to replicate it," says John Donatich, director of the Yale University Press.

"This could be a pilot for what all publishers end up doing eventually," agrees Tom Dwyer, director of merchandising at Borders. Right now, Dwyer adds, bigger publishers are mainly focused on "digitizing all their content." But when it comes to distribution, he says, he's sure they're "planning something in this direction."

Maybe so, maybe not.

Distributing digital content through bookstores "is not something we've been exploring," says HarperCollins President and CEO Jane Friedman, though she emphasizes that brick-and-mortar bookstores remain " extremely important to us."

"Peter is a trusted figure in the community," says another big-company executive, declining to be quoted by name. But "my two cents is that this is not likely to be at all significant."

Still, as the Politics and Prose demonstration proceeds, it gets easier to conjure a bookstore's multi-format future.

Imagine you're a customer looking for a book you don't find on the shelf. As you would now, you'll likely ask a bookseller to check the store computer for it. As is not yet possible, the bookseller will say: "We can order you a print copy or we can sell it to you in other formats, some of which could be ready for downloading by the time you get home. How would you like it?"

So why did Politics and Prose get involved with the Caravan experiment?

"Peter asked us to," explains co-owner Carla Cohen, who's joined the group halfway through the proceedings. Osnos has been a friend of the bookstore since it was launched, "and we owe it to him."

Cohen herself worries more about competition from non-book entertainment than she does about digital books. But who knows? "He may be -- and I hope he is -- a visionary," she says.

As for the possible visionary himself: Osnos says he's especially proud of figuring out ways to reduce the cost of producing audiobooks, allowing the kind of modest-selling titles Caravan puts out to appear in that format for the first time.

He's also proud of the fact that the Caravan Project is going to disappear.

The first paid transaction could occur as early as next week, he says. Caravan will double in size in the fall and continue to grow for another three seasons. "And then we're going to say: 'Ladies and gentlemen, now you know how to do it.'

"Publishers should know how to do the books in all the formats. Booksellers should know how to sell them. And we go away."