AOL's Book Maven

Last Thursday I attended the first "Starbucks Book Break" at the Norfolk Avenue Starbucks in Bethesda, MD. At the link above you can read plenty of posts from attendees. Here's how it worked: for one evening, at 26 Starbucks stores across the country, groups met to discuss just one title: 'For One More Day' by Mitch Albom. The special twist added to this event is that Albom (despite attending the World Series game that night in Detroit) had agreed to speak to each group via conference call for 10 to 15 minutes.

The size of the groups varied widely -- for example, I was with eight others in Bethesda, while the Los Angeles group was over 25 in number, and the Boston folks were somewhere in between. According to a Starbucks representative, this is exactly what the company had in mind: "We hoped for about 10-15 people in each location, and planned for about 15-20. We didn't want large groups; we wanted to foster community."

This fits with what our group's facilitator Heather Frank told me. Frank is a Starbucks employee, and believes in the company's idea of its shops being a "third place" for people -- home is the first place, work or the office the second, and a local coffee shop/gathering spot is the "third place."

For those of you who either couldn't attend or didn't know about the Book Break, here's how it worked for our group: we gathered (thank you for saving a comfy chair for me, Kenny!), enjoyed coffee drinks on the house, and watched a brief welcome video Albom had recorded for the occasion. We then had about 20 minutes to discuss questions we wanted to pose to Albom for our slice of the teleconference pie.

I got to throw out the first pitch, I mean question, for our group. "Hi Mitch," I said. "This is AOL's Book Maven; remember me?" (For my interview with Albom, click here.) He did... and I asked him why he had his protagonist Chick Benetto accompany his mother on her rounds of hair appointments for dying friends. I won't go through all of the questions we asked, and all of his answers here, but I will tell you that we were all delighted with the back and forth we had. Albom was very generous with his time and answers; he didn't rush through anything.

More to come...

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