Using an Internet connection, the program’s digital signing technology, LiveSign, allows for a secure, authentic, trackable, and verifiable reproduction of an author’s live signature on e-books (regardless of DRM protection) and flat-surfaced objects, including print books – all while the author interacts with audiences via live video during in-person and virtual events.

From iDoLVine’s press release:

Authentic remote signing is only one element of a virtual platform that emulates the entire tour, including a pre-event gathering place for readers, author-to-fan meeting via live video on the Internet, and a virtualized stage that makes it truly engaging.

The technology also allows suppliers to securely add the author’s signature before forwarding DRM-protected e-books to online retailers.

McArthur & Company, one of the program’s publishing parnters, gave its staff a sneek peek at the program last week at the company’s sales conference. Illustrator Dušan Petričić demonstrated LiveSign by autographing and doodling on the e-cover of Wandering Wenda, his upcoming children’s book with Margaret Atwood. Other publishing partners include Random House, Harlequin, McClelland & Stewart, Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, O’Reilly Media, and HarperCollins.

Atwood will be on-hand at BookExpo America to demonstrate the new virtual book tour technology, along with authors Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Erica Jong, Mark Jeffrey, Peter Meyers, Bryan Lee O’Malley, Gena Showalter, and Svetlana Chmakova. The full launch is expected in fall 2011.

The interactive video broadcast will allow festival participants to engage in a question and answer session with Atwood. Atwood will sign books for fans in Vancouver and Halifax using the LongPen, allowing her to talk with each fan via private video chat and to transmit a genuine, personalized autograph instantly to their copy of the book.

The writer, Marc Weisblott, traces the evolution of the WBB from its awe-inspiring early days when it dwarfed all the other book stores (which were all 5’x11’ or smaller and sold flour and sugar too) to its Indigo-owned present day, when barnlike stores are the norm and one of the WBB’s biggest-selling titles is Mood Your Change – How to Mind Your Think by Feeling Your Toes (or something like that), which Weisblott takes as a marker of the store’s current identity.

Weisblott lumps the WBB in with such much-loved icons as Sam the Record Man and Honest Ed’s, but its history, while varied and quirky, has brought it to its present state of fluorescent lighting, grubby lino flooring, and Conrad Black via LongPen. Meanwhile, as Weisblott points out, the Yonge and Dundas intersection on which it squats is rapidly cleaning itself up. How long before the condo developers come calling?

So do you want to save the WBB? Do you want to save things just because they’re old and rich with history, or do you have to actually like them too?

Last night, Black appeared on CBC’s Rick Mercer Report doing a Martha Stewart-style celebrity tip on the proper techniques for waxing brightly coloured fall maple leaves. In the sketch filmed at his home in Palm Beach, Florida, he wryly suggested that it is necessary to press the leaves in books first, using weighty volumes such as his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt or his latest of Richard Nixon, The Invincible Quest, for instance.

Showing off the results of his efforts, he added:

Here we have a perfectly waxed maple leaf, a great solace to everyone and especially to those who, for complicated reasons, can’t at first-hand observe the changing of the seasons this autumn in Canada. (Canadian Press)

Black is scheduled to make another appearance in Canada via Margaret Atwood’s LongPen at Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore on the evening of Oct. 15 to autograph copies of The Invincible Quest.

Depending on how many books Black might write if he is incarcerated, the LongPen may be a useful tool for any future book tours.

Author Stephen Henighan attended the failed test signing at the Bookshelf in Guelph in early March, and was struck by the low turnout for an event that was billed as historic. “The forty numbered tickets designated for the general public were not exhausted at the time the event was called off,” Henighan writes in his column in Geist magazine. “If Margaret Atwood came to Guelph in person, The Bookshelf could not contain the crowd. The reading would have to be held in the church across the street and the organizers could charge admission and still fill the building. (This happened when Ann-Marie MacDonald came to Guelph.)”

Provocatively, if dubiously, Henighan also draws some parallels between Atwood’s entrepreneurship, her writing, and her very culture. “By enshrining the author as a remote talking head, [the LongPen] harks back to an older vision of the writer as inaccessible authority figure,” he writes. “The device’s conception is counterintuitive to the logic of virtual culture. LongPen recapitulates the yearning for distance rather than engagement, ironic detachment rather than emotional involvement, that characterizes Atwood’s fiction; it evokes the diffidence of traditional southern Ontario WASP culture.”

Related links:
Click here for Stephen Henighan’s Geist column on the LongPen