The most interesting part of the piece concerns kids' series like Scholastic's The 39 Clues, Book One: Maze of Bones that come with multimedia tie-ins that are only slightly secondary to the books themselves. While some of these experiments might be no more than marketing gimmicks, Ms. Rich writes, there are those who believe that some of them "may push creative boundaries" and "extend storytelling beyond the traditional covers of a book."

One wonders what Heroes creator Tim Kring and his new friend Dale Peck would say about all this in relation to the project they're working on, an alternate history thriller series distinctly not just for kids that will be accompanied—the way TV shows like Heroes and Lost have been—by an immersive alternate reality game (ARG) that readers can participate in online. Publishers showed enormous interest in Kring and Peck's project when it was pitched to them back in April; Crown, the imprint of Random House that ended up securing the rights, paid $3 million for it.

Another interesting figure who could weigh in on this stuff is former Hyperion editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe, who retired from traditional publishing earlier this year to pursue a project rumored to involve some fusion of books and video games.

• First, the Fighting Fantasy series, which celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2007, has been reissued in full.
• Second, there's a book called You Are a Miserable Excuse for a Hero, which takes mundane contemporary life as its subject and forces the reader to make decisions like, "If you want to have sex with your ex-girlfriend, consider getting back together with her, then think better of it, go to page 183."
• Third, there are some Web sites that post stories in installments and let readers vote on what should happen next.

Barnett also links to this site, which belongs to a small publishing house that puts out choose-your-own-adventure books by a guy named Ray Montgomery. There's a ticker at the bottom of the page that tells you about the number of possible endings in each of the books they've published. House of Danger has 20. Escape:27.

Is this the way to make reading an interactive process, which Web 2.0 theorist/enthusiast Clay Shirky says it must do in order to survive? Maybe, except that as Barnett points out, a lot of this recent choose-your-own-adventure projects seems fueled more by nostalgia rather than an impulse towards narrative innovation: People read these books in 2008 the same way they might play the original Nintendo. Even those Web sites that let you vote on what the author does next are kind of regressive (despite being on the Internet!), channeling American Idol more than the immersive alternate reality games created for TV shows like Lost and Heroes.

Which reminds us: Heroes creator Tim Kring is working with Dale Peck at this very moment on a three-book series called The Flag of Orpheus, an alternate history thriller that will come fully equipped with a rich and intricate online component meant to draw readers into the fictional universe in which the books take place. Crown signed this series up in April, paying a whopping $3 million for it and beating out a number of other houses for the privilege. One wonders why no one else has taken up a similar project since.

If Barnett is right, and choose-your-own-adventure really is back, we may soon start hearing about more of them.

Speaking of Ms. Couric, John Koblin looks at how a whiff of a story (Katie Out at CBS?) becomes conventional wisdom in our Print 2.0 world. The New York Times. 'It used to be you came in the next day and your editor would say, "Well, we won today," or she’d say, "Looks like we got beat like a drum," and that would be the end of it. Now it’s this ongoing game of catching up and staying ahead.'"

Leon Neyfakh has more on Dale Peck and Tim Kring's whopping $3 Million book deal. "'Truth be told, when Tim got into the room and talked about what he had done with Heroes, what he had planned to do and how he had conceived of this book as a transmedia project, it was lightning in a bottle,' said Richard Abate, head of the New York-based literary division of the Hollywood talent agency Endeavor..."

Irina Aleksander attends The Paris Review's Spring Revel along with literary lights like Richard Price, Joan Didion, E.L. Doctorow and Tinsley Mortimer. “Literary magazines publishing today are more glamorous than The Paris Review was when it began; they tend to come out of university communities,” Doctorow says. “But we need every one of them.” Plus: Meredith Bryan attends a Vogue/Gap bash along with Amy Sedaris. "I like the guys bringing around the food. You know, they’re models," says Ms. Sedaris.

And that’s what Crown is paying for. Mr. Kring has in mind an elaborate, interactive blitz using the Internet, TV, video games and possibly even movies. He tested this formula with Heroes to great success. To date, the show has spun off into a novel, a weekly comic book and an alternate reality game called Heroes 360 in which participants immerse themselves in the show’s fictional universe and solve mysteries together by sharing clues and secret URLs.

Publishers were swept off their feet when Mr. Kring told them he wanted to try doing all that with a book. After years of boneheaded attempts by publishing people to harness new technology—Video trailers on YouTube! Author blogs! “A mixed reality” book party on Second Life!—here, finally, was someone coming up with an idea that didn’t sound totally lame.

“Truth be told, when Tim got into the room and talked about what he had done with Heroes, what he had planned to do and how he had conceived of this book as a transmedia project, it was lightning in a bottle,” said Richard Abate, head of the New York-based literary division of the Hollywood talent agency Endeavor, who conducted the auction between Crown and four other publishers. “People were like, ‘Wow. This is where we want to be with all of our books 10 years from now.”

While the amount of money Crown paid for the book was bewildering—messiahs are expensive—more bewildering still was the fact that Mr. Peck was involved. Because, wait, Dale Peck? The notorious literary critic? The really aggressive one who despised all his contemporaries and denounced them as charlatans in the pages of various esteemed publications? How strange that this writer, who had all but disappeared from the public eye when he retired from literary criticism five years ago amidst overpowering hostility from the literary world, was suddenly working on a project that publishers thought could save their business from the 21st century.

Mr. Kring, whom Mr. Abate had approached about doing an experimental book project a few months before the writers’ strike, didn’t know any of this when Mr. Peck’s name was floated as a possible collaborator.

“I went online immediately and got very educated on who he was, and was very intrigued by some of his, you know, some of the controversy that surrounded him,” Mr. Kring said in an interview. “It was actually sort of hard for me to see where it came from because he’s got a real very sweet quality to him.”

MR. PECK WAS not always a pariah. His first novel, a formally experimental book of vignettes called Martin and John, about a gay man whose lover has died of AIDS, was published to great fanfare by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in 1993. It transcended the gay-lit niche genre to which it might have been relegated, instead entering into mainstream literary culture and even getting assigned in college classes.

“I was the right person at the right time. I was 25 years old and had a nice clean innocent face and wrote a very earnest book,” Mr. Peck said. “That was the heyday of contemporary gay literature.”

Mr. Peck’s second and third novels, also published by FSG, did not do nearly as well as Martin and John, and by the time he was writing his fourth in 1998—The Garden of Lost and Found—he decided to leave FSG and sold the book at auction instead to Rob Weisbach, who at the time was running his own, aggressively commercial imprint at William Morrow.

The move raised eyebrows among people in the industry. “Rob Weisbach is a great promoter,” one editor who pursued Mr. Peck’s fourth novel at auction told The Observer at the time. “But … John [Glusman, at FSG] is a brilliant editor. If I’d been Dale, I would have stayed with him.” FSG was a very prestigious house, after all. For a serious writer like Mr. Peck to give up his membership there in favor of an imprint known for publishing Ellen DeGeneres seemed irrational.

By this point, Mr. Peck had left his original literary agent and signed on with the Andrew Wylie Agency. He was also gaining notoriety as a critic.

Mr. Peck had begun reviewing books shortly after the release of Martin and John, contributing pieces to the London Review of Books and The Village Voice. Then, in 1998 or 1999 (Mr. Peck does not recall), he met Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, and started writing for him. It was under Mr. Wieseltier—himself a polarizing, solitary figure in the literary world—that Mr. Peck’s reputation as a vicious takedown artist started to solidify. In 2003, after being pilloried for his harsh judgments, he announced that he was not going to write any more negative reviews.

“I’d said what I needed to say, and I’d pretty much become the punch line of a joke,” Mr. Peck said. He added in an e-mail later that he felt like “the literary world had already decided what it thought of [him] by that point.”

Around this time, Mr. Peck left the Wylie Agency (“Everything just seemed to grind down to a halt there,” he said) and signed on with Richard Abate, a commercial agent who says Mr. Peck is the best-read writer on his roster. With Mr. Abate at his side, Mr. Peck ran as far away as possible from the literary establishment that had rejected him and spent the next few years working on a young-adult novel called Sprout and a series of books for 10-year-olds called Drift House, an adventure tale about evil mermaids, for Bloomsbury’s children’s division. He also wrote a thriller called Body Surfing, which will be published by the Simon & Schuster imprint Atria.

Until recently, Mr. Peck was thinking about scaring up some rent money by finding a new publisher for Garden, that pesky fourth novel he wrote in 1998 that remains, because of circumstances, unpublished. Then he got a call from Mr. Abate, who was looking for a collaborator for Mr. Kring.

Mr. Peck and Mr. Kring talked on the phone and were soon at work on a proposal. Before they knew it, the deal was done. Both of them were startled by how much money they were offered.

Still, don’t expect Mr. Peck to get all tech-savvy on this project. “I think I’m too old for the interactive aspect of it,” he said. “For me, TV is pretty much TV, and books are pretty much books.”

According to an industry source, the book is set in America, and runs from the 1960s to the near future. The protagonist is a man named Chandler Forrest whose participation in LSD experiments administered by the C.I.A. has given him superpowers.

Richard Abate, who works out of the New York office of the talent agency Endeavor, sold world rights to editor Sean Desmond on the basis of 25 pages of material and what was described as a video trailer that editors had to log on to a Web site to see.

Crown is a unit of Random House.

UPDATE: Richard Abate just called to say that the trilogy, which we identified as a "sci-fi/alternative-history trilogy" based on what someone who'd seen the proposal told us, is only going to have a little bit of sci-fi in it. Mostly alternative history, in other words.