On Sunday’s Cincinnati Edition, I had a nice conversation with Mark Perzel about my feature on the Bengals, the county, and their ruinous stadium lease. You can listen to it here.

Sunday night (Monday morning in Australia), I appeared on ABC’s The Book Show to talk about authors’ libraries with Anita Barraud. If you want to listen to the interview, click here. And if you’ve found this site through the ABC, check out my original story in the Boston Globe, my supplemental blog post on Markson and Melville, and an NPR segment on it.

On this weekend’s All Things Considered, I got a chance to talk with Guy Raz about David Markson and the surprising fate of many authors’ libraries. The segment was based on my story for the Boston Globe‘s “Ideas” section (see also this blog post), and NPR did a great job expanding on it — they even interviewed Annecy Liddell, the recent college grad who discovered one of Markson’s books and kick-started this whole crazy process.

One more thing: “connectable” is in fact a word. Not a common one — certainly not an elegant one — but a word nonetheless.

As so often happens, that outlet was The New York Times. Politico’s Keach Hagey has a great story on how it all went down, a story in which she kindly quoted me. The only thing I’d add to Hagey’s take is that this sort of thing has a long and equally intense history. Take Woodward (and Carl Bernstein’s) first book, All The President’s Men. It came out on June 17, 1974, but by early April newspapers across the country were running multiple-page stories summarizing the excerpts in Playboy. (The magazine paid $20,000 for two long excerpts from All The President’s Men, which ran in the May and June issues.) Books get fewer big serialization deals these days — I’d guess the online circulation of both the serializations and the summaries had more to do with this than the stories themselves — so the summaries now latch on to the books. And this happens with all kinds of political books: the Times got there first with Bill Clinton’s memoirs, Laura Bush’s memoirs, and Woodward’s last book, to name only a few.

What is new — and pretty fascinating — is the way new media are interacting with books. My story about Carter’s diary and Google Books is one example. Another is Politico’s Woodward fixation: the publication ran 8 separate insider-y stories on Obama’s Wars in the first two days after the Times‘ scoop. That hype sounds unbeatable — until you remember that Woodward and Bernstein sold the movie rights to All The President’s Men a full three months before its release.

This was my first radio interview, and I have to say I’m pretty happy with the lack of ums, ers, and yeahs. Of course, I also managed to say obviously 328 times in 14 minutes.

[UPDATE:] Another day (February 2), another interview—this one with Larry Rifkin on WATR 1320 AM. You can listen to an mp3 here.