The Caravan Project: 23 Good Books Any Way You Want

The Caravan Project has announced plans to release 23 books from seven leading nonprofit publishers in simultaneous print, digital, and downloadable audio formats. With funding support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the project is developing a website, www.caravanbooks.org, that contains information about the books and plans for their release through booksellers. The books are being released under the motto: "Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now." Caravan also announced that it had become a project of The Century Foundation and will continue to be supported by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for its coming seasons.

The Caravan Project, which is the brainchild of Peter Osnos, the founder and editor-at-large of PublicAffairs Books, who also serves as Caravan's executive director, is a partnership of nonprofit publishers, the nation's largest book wholesaler, and a group of independent and chain bookstores. The goal of Caravan is to provide book lovers with an on-demand choice in format, similar to those available to consumers of music, film, and television.

Utilizing emerging digital and time-tested technologies for the manufacture of books, The Caravan Project was created to offer serious nonfiction consumers a menu of formats, both print and digital, from which to choose how they read a book. The goal is to make the distribution of these books more efficient by placing them where and when they are needed.

Below is a list of the first 23 books from the Caravan Project:

Beacon Press

American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment by Sasha Abramsky

Can We Talk About Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation by Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D.

From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America by Chris Finan

Council on Foreign Relations Press (CFR)

Beyond Humanitarianism: What You Need to Know About Africa and Why It Matters

Island Press

The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum M. Roberts

The Most Important Fish in the Sea by H. Bruce Franklin

Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist by Joan Roughgarden

Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America by Bruce Babbitt (New in Paperback)

The New Press

The Big Eddy Club: The Stocking Stranglings and Southern Justice by David Rose

Iran: A People Interrupted by Hamid Dabashi

War in Heaven: The Arms Race in Outer Space by Helen Caldicott and Craig Eisendrath

University of California Press

Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class by Robert H. Frank

Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education by Peter Sacks

To Save Her Life: Disappearance, Deliverance, and the United States in Guatemala by Dan Saxon

Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home by Pamela Stone

University of North Carolina Press

The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained and Wielded Global Dominance by Michael H. Hunt

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz

In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement by Michael Lienesch

In Pursuit of the Almighty's Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism by James Hudnut-Beumler

Yale University Press

Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries, and Deadly Games by Tennent H. Bagley

Charm Offensive: How China's Soft Power Is Transforming the World by Joshua Kurlantzick

What Really Matters: Service, Leadership, People and Values by John Pepper

Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization by Nayan Chanda