Sometimes, if you want to sell books, you’ve got to go where the people are: that is, bars, community centres, planes, trains, the Internet, and now, thanks to an emerging trend, people’s offices. According to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle, companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Starbucks have been hosting book events for their employees. In the case of Google, the company sweetens the pot by buying a ton of books to hand out free.

“There are so many distractions out there,” said Yelena Gitlin, publicity manager for Bloomsbury Books, who started bringing authors to Microsoft and Starbucks in 2003. “It’s hard to get people into bookstores these days, so book publishers and sellers have to come to readers — and they are often at work.”

Indeed, companies like Google are offering so many perks or “enriched lifestyle” options, as they are called — fitness classes, massage services, dry cleaning, financial advice, ski trips, round-the-clock meals and now lunch hours with famous authors — that the novice might not realize that health, well being and community were previously sought outside work.

At Yahoo, there’s even an employee by the name of Judy Moore whose title is “party princess.” Among Moore’s duties is to oversee high-profile book events.

The corporate author event originated at Microsoft Research in Seattle in the late ’90s, when science and technology authors were invited to address employees of the company’s think tank division. The program became so popular that in 2000 Linda Stone, Microsoft’s “Virtual Worlds” director, expanded it to include all kinds of authors and all of Microsoft, with the help of Kim Ricketts, Seattle’s University Bookstore event organizer. Two years later, SmartMoney magazine picked Microsoft’s author events as the employee “perk of the month,” and according to Ricketts, a new business model for bookselling was born.

“We sold and do sell a lot of books at companies,” Ricketts said. “It immediately became clear to me that this is a more efficient way to sell books.”

It sounds like a sweet gig for the authors – after all, nothing else says “captive audience” like a group of clean-shirted cubicle dwellers. The flesh-and-blood aspect is probably key, though – we’re thinking that the offices of Google and Microsoft are at least a couple of venues where Margaret Atwood’s LongPen would seem less like a novelty and more like business as usual.