Some large book publishers are running the equivalent of movie trailers on the web to attract new audiences to their books.

Random House, Workman Publishing, Scholastic and other publishers are running videos on sites catering to readers as well as general-interest sites such as Yahoo and YouTube to cheaply promote their books, writes the New York Times. Some firms offer to film and place book videos for as little as $4,000, and one online publishing information service, VNU's The Book Standard, has devised a contest for film students, who compete to make the book videos.

The sites have been running videos as content, not advertising, so publishers don't pay for clicks. Moreover, the videos have a long afterlife in searchable archives.

Random House unit Bantam Dell ran a series in which Dean Koontz told funny stories about writing and editing. Workman's video for Stitch'n Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker - a how-to book about crocheting - is a takeoff on West Side Story, with a rumble between a knitting gang and a crochet gang.