Publishers hope classics, DVDs can be match made in heaven

CHICAGO - For more than a year, Chamberlain Bros., an imprint of the Penguin Group publishing giant, has been experimenting with a new hybrid product - paperback editions of classic books packaged with DVD versions of the story.

The company is betting that customers will like having the chance to read "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo, and then watch Lon Chaney Sr. in the title role. Or to work their way through "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy, and then watch the 1948 film starring Vivien Leigh.

"It's a really cool idea," says publisher Megan Newman.

But so far, the Chamberlain Bros. book-DVD packages, priced from $15 to $19, aren't moving. "We really did have high hopes for them," Newman says, "but sales have been lukewarm, in all honesty."

In a case study of the allures and mysteries of marrying new and old technology, Chamberlain Bros. is now trying to figure out if a cool idea can make good business sense.

Across the industry, many publishers are conducting similar experiments. This fall, DVDs were included with a wide range of books - from "Baby's First Bible Stories" by Allia Nolan (Reader's Digest) to "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" by Robert Greenwald (Disinformation).

And some publishing houses have had great success.

Rugged Land, for example, hit big with "Payton" and "Favre," book-DVD packages on NFL greats Walter Payton and Brett Favre, both of which have sold more than 110,000 copies and made The New York Times best-seller list. Also reaching that list was "War Stories" by Oliver North (Regnery), which included a DVD of North's Fox television series of the same name.

The puzzle of book-DVD packages is one that Newman inherited last October when she was named Chamberlain Bros. publisher following the departure of Carlo DeVito, who founded the imprint in April 2004. (Newman also heads the Penguin imprints of Avery and Viking Studio.)

She has already put on hold a parallel line of products that packaged non-fiction books and DVDs together - such as the combination of "13 Seconds," Philip Caputo's look back at the 1970 shootings of anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University, and the Emmy award-winning documentary "Kent State: The Day the War Came Home."

But she isn't ready to give up on the classics experiment - not just yet.

In the coming months, Chamberlain Bros. will be publishing book-DVD combinations of Boccaccio's "Decameron," W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage," Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and "Romeo and Juliet," and a collection of four plays by Eugene O'Neill.

The DVDs, provided in small white envelopes attached inside the back cover of these books, offer a look at some legendary actors - Bette Davis in the 1934 film of the Maugham novel, Paul Robeson in the 1933 movie of O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones" and highly respected ensemble casts in the two Shakespeare plays produced in 1978 and 1980 by the BBC.

Yet, for all the great acting, most of the movies are more than half a century old and filmed in black and white.

That's because the publisher can only afford to include films for which the rights are free or relatively inexpensive. Modern versions, such as the "Romeo and Juliet" featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, are out of the question.

"To attract younger customers, we're going to have to tweak our packaging to make it look up-to-date and essential," Newman says. "There's nothing now that screams: `Wow!'"

The book covers are a bit dowdy. But, more important, the future of these book-DVD editions rests with determining their market - and, surprisingly, given past history, that may be college campuses.

Academics used to heap disdain on movie versions of great literature, but no longer. In contrast to their predecessors, many college literature professors today routinely bring films into the classroom to complement the reading of the classics.

At Goucher College in Maryland, for example, Jeff Myers recently had his freshmen students read Philip K. Dick's science-fiction short story "Minority Report" and watch Steven Spielberg's film version, and then write a paper comparing the two.

"Then I had them take another short story by Dick and make changes of their own to it and, in groups of four, do a radio drama," Myers says. "The results were quite impressive."

For graduate students, Myers leads a seminar that goes through "Hamlet" line by line, and part of the course involves watching several cinematic and live productions of the play. For him, the only product that would make sense would combine an authoritative edition of the play with four or five DVD versions.

Myers gives high marks to Chamberlain Bros. for offering the BBC versions of Shakespeare. "Their productions are very good. They are the closest to the text," he says. And $18.95 for the book and DVD is "a good deal," he says. Normally, the DVD of one of the BBC plays alone goes for $35.

James Butler, an English professor at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, focuses on the novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley and the many cinematic versions that have followed as a way of looking at cultural conventions from era to era.

"I teach the novel first," he says. "Once I do that, what happens with (the story) in popular culture is quite interesting to the students."

Some, however, complain that the image of an actor in a film can override the mental picture they developed of the character while reading the book. "That's quite frequent," Butler says.

At the University of Denver, English professor Eleanor J. McNees says, "If the publisher were to approach me (about using the book-DVD combos with her students), I'd be game. Anything that can pull them into the literature is worth a try."

And, far from being a drawback, McNees considers the older films a plus, and believes her classes would, too. "It is kind of interesting for students to see a black-and-white version," she says. "I'm almost more intrigued by that idea than seeing some of the more recent ones which we have in our (university) collection."

Not everyone in publishing, however, is sold on bundling books and DVDs.

Naperville, Ill.-based Sourcebooks Inc. made a name for itself a few years ago by offering lavish, photo-filled, coffee table-size books with audio CDs included. The publishing hybrids, on subjects ranging from major news events of the past to famous sporting moments, sold in the hundreds of thousands and spent weeks on The New York Times best-seller lists.

But the publishing house hasn't taken what might be considered the inevitable next step - packaging books and DVDs together.

"We've looked at a lot of DVD projects," says vice president and editorial director Todd Stocke, "but it's extremely difficult to make the content work, and make the costs work. There are a lot of (publishers) who have been unsuccessful with DVDs."

Stocke argues that books go together with CDs in a much more direct way than they do with movies. "There's a theater of the mind that people experience when they're reading a book, and there's a similar theater of the mind when people are listening to something," he says. "Video is a different experience for the brain."

In contrast to the Chamberlain Bros. book-DVD editions of Shakespeare plays, Sourcebooks recently published new editions of "Romeo and Juliet" and "Othello" with audio CDs containing key speeches from two or three productions. Some of the productions date as far back as 1890, including one with famed actor Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth, as Othello.

At Chamberlain Bros., Newman remains cautiously upbeat. One positive sign, she says, is the interest that Costco and other price clubs have shown in the products.

"This is an interesting experiment," Newman says. "We're taking a wait and see approach about whether there's a viable idea here."

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(c) 2006, Chicago Tribune. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.