After limited success with Margaret Atwood’s device at the Edinburgh Book Festival – enabling Norman Mailer and Alice Munro to make “appearances” – the book-tour substitute device will make its debut into a record store and several bookstores in Canada, the United States and England for a trial run that could bring fans and their idols closer together. The London Free Press reports that kiosks will be set up at the World’s Biggest Bookstore and HMV’s flagship record store in Toronto, Barnes & Noble in New York and Waterstone’s in London beginning after Labour Day, and could expand elsewhere if successful.

And at only $2,000 per “appearance,” I’m sure publishers will be all over this to promote their up-and-coming authors.

Where did the idea come from?

As I was whizzing around the U.S. on yet another book tour, getting up at four int he morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the minibar at night as I crawled around on the hotel-room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, “There must be a better way of doing this.” With LongPen, the author could make “appearances” in different countries all in one day. The in-store book signing would be enhanced. You could have an event with three different authors: a big one, a medium one, and a local one, in the same store on the same afternoon, one after the other.

Pringle food objects! Man, The price of celebrity is rough. I’m glad there’s an impersonal, mechanical object capable of making life easier for certain authors and totally commodifying the author event experience.

For those unfamiliar few, the LongPen is a huge machine that allows readers in one place to “communicate” with an author through video-conference technology, and more importantly, get their book “signed” by a .

Or, as the LongPen people put it:

The LongPen is a pen, like any other pen, except it operates over the Internet using electricity and fiber optics. But from your perspective, it still works via your brain, eyes, arm, and hand, like any other pen. It’s just that the nib and ink are at a different location from you.

For the autograph session itself, you [the author] sit in a chair with an electronic writing tablet on the table in front. This tablet shows what you are signing at the event location. There is also a vertical screen at face level that shows the fan at the other end. That person sees you too. You have direct eye contact and can talk together.

According to fans, this is a more intimate experience than a traditional signing, as you are looking directly into the face of the fan, as opposed to briefly looking up from your chair when signing in person. The video conferencing also makes it easier for the fan to be expressive about your work, as the technological distance makes them less nervous.

More intimate? Really? I really love intimate encounters mediated by technology . . .

The book, or CD, or other object that you will autograph is placed under the pen at the other end. It is captured on camera, so you see it on the electronic tablet in front of you. You pick up the magnetic pen and sign it. You treat the tablet just like a piece of paper – you can rest your hand on it. Then you push “Send” and the pen inscribes the object, in real ink, at the other end. It writes everything exactly as you have written it at your end.

What’s most inane is that the LongPen is now marketing itself as “green,” and includes a of metric tonnes of carbon emissions saved by “pioneering” authors participating in the project. I can’t even type a snarky comment about how lame this is.

I have a million bones to pick with this—especially with the overly aggressive LongPen sales folks who pester people at BEA—but all I want to do for now is revise my statement that I “refuse to believe this will catch on,” to “I sincerely hope this idea dies a quick death.”