The Observer's Killian Fox is the latest reporter to fall under the spell of promotional trailers for books, scoring an interview with a HarperCollins Canada online marketer who says they're not just for the Internet anymore. The promo for Gautam Malkani's Londonstani, for example, is already turning up on cable and at the Toronto cineplexes. But while most authors solicited for opinions greet the prospect of trailers with some enthusiasm, Patrick Neate wonders if the money wouldn't be better spent on, say, more co-op. "I'm sure something big is going to happen with publishing and the internet," he tells Fox, "but this ain't it."

What might that something be? Over at The Institute for the Future of the Book, they're talking about MediaCommons, a proposed network where media studies scholars "can write, publish, review, and discuss, in forms ranging from the blog to the monograph, from the purely textual to the multi-mediated, with all manner of degrees inbetween." The network element is key to their proposal: "The more we thought about the purposes behind electronic scholarly publishing," writes Kathleen Fitzpatrick, "the more we became focused on the need not simply to provide better access to discrete scholarly texts but rather to reinvigorate intellectual discourse, and thus connections, amongst peers (and, not incidentally, discourse between the academy and the wider intellectual public)."