Dear All

2008 is the 60th anniversary of the last Left Book Club title (for those of you with a historical bent it was G D H Cole's 'Meaning of Marxism') it would be wonderful for this to be the year we bring the whole project back to life. I'm also lobbying those nice people at Philosophy Football to produce a decent commemorative t-shirt!

Last year we succeeded in getting LeftBookClub.com up and running, and putting the feelers out for potential authors and titles we could publish to meet the objective of creating a new angle on the political pamphlet. We unlike Steve Jobs believe in the power of the written word!

We have also been looking into the best route for printing - and the delay in this has meant that print on demand quality has improved greatly. At the moment we're of a mind to offer a book to read online for free, pay for a downloadable watermarked PDF, or buy a physical copy (and offer a limited hardback edition to special supporting subscribers). You can see this sort of offer in action at 37signals an American web development firm. We'd be very interested to hear your views on this approach.

I wrote to a large selection of authors last year and many expressed an interest ranging from Terry Eagleton, Henry Mintzberg and Ken MacLeod - as we think it is important to get some names on the list as well as offer new writers and journalists a route for political commentary. The only limiting factor at the moment is time and energy, and money of course, all standard stuff.

You may also have noticed a rather strange beast around last year in the form of LeftBookClubOnline set up by Labour MP Ed Miliband (brother of the more famous David and son of Ralph the famous Marxist theorist who wrote a superb analysis of the role of the state), I met with him at the House of Commons to discuss his use of the name Left Book Club, as we have encorporated as a limited company to protect it from general use. We didn't hear from him again after the meeting and the web site seems to have given up the ghost too. I don't know, you wait 60 years and two come along at once. If you're interested in Ed's voting records, say on the Iraq war, you can find them on TheyWorkForYou.com

The embarrasing lack of updates to the blog and via e-mail are all my fault, in September last year I left my employer, Waterstone's, to go to work on a new book start up project, once we have the new site for that launched in March I believe that I'll be able to move this project forward. Also the work I'm currently doing there is helpful for this too.


All the best

Kieron