It looks like it's going to be a writers critique group as well as offer self-publishing opportunities for a fee.

A quote from the article:

quote:

---

Penguin hopes the site will attract agents, editors and publishers scouting for new talent, and allow writers to produce work with more polish and direction than they could otherwise.

---

Definitely sounds interesting. What do you guys think?

Edit: I'll only use the free stuff I refuse to use for fee publishing, vanity or otherwise.

It was marketed on Another Forum[tm] as a critique and mutual-help site, and that's what's up there so far. You can upload a MS of any length, and crit whatever you like. They're using a "genre spectrum" gimmick to sort by field-of-interest that's interesting in concept, but...

So far I've found its navigation too awkward and convoluted, and the comment system too lacking in everyday readability, for it to have any attraction. Yeah, it's pretty and uses all the latest and greatest Web 2.0 features. (You'd better be using a new browser.) And there are some published authors involved (I can't recall who offhand). But it's not useful, because it's such a damned pain to get around the site and actually FIND anything.

As to the NYTimes report, that's news to me, but sounds like they intend to get into print-on-demand, where anyone can demand to be printed. If that's all it is, great and wonderful, POD could probably use more competition. But if it's a foray into fee-based publishing, I expect that will backfire.