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The start of Open House “weekend of words and ideas” in Toronto is still a day away but already the inaugural event has been deemed a success by its major organizer.

So much so that this week the organizer, Random House of Canada, confirmed the literary festival is a go for next May, while naming a third beneficiary, the Toronto Public Library Foundation, to the two already being supported, PEN Canada and Frontier College.

Wholly owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann, Random House ranks as Canada's largest trade publisher, home to such imprints as Knopf, Doubleday, Anchor, Vintage and Dell. It began to work on the Open House concept last year, driven by two impulses: a belief that the annual BookExpo trade show (and its predecessor, the Canadian Booksellers Association convention) was, after 50 years, on its last legs; and a need to have its roster of authors engage more directly and vibrantly with readers.

Random Canada's vice-president and director of marketing strategy Scott Sellers readily admits Open House, which is sponsored by The Globe and Mail, is hardly an original venture. It's patterned largely on the hugely successful festival The New Yorker magazine has been hosting in and around Manhattan each October since 2000.

“We looked at The New Yorker Festival in terms of it bringing fiction and non-fiction people together, the eclecticism of its programming,” Sellers said the other day. “But being as this was our first time out of the gate, we wanted to get it as right as we could so we kept our scope fairly limited.”

Indeed, Open House has a total of only eight events, all at the University of Toronto, all paid admission: four readings, four panel discussions. One of the panels – “A Crisis in Leadership” featuring The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, historian Margaret MacMillan, author John Ralston Saul and Naomi Klein of No Logo/ The Shock Doctrine fame – has seen its 425 tickets snapped up.

Two other events – a reading by British-American novelist Zoë Heller and Elizabeth Hay, the 2007 Scotiabank Giller laureate, among others, and a panel on urban economies including Toronto mayor David Miller and urbanists Richard Florida and Jeb Brugmann – are close to being sold out.

Another limitation this year is that virtually all its participants have ties with Random House imprints or associated publishers, and it's their books which will be sold, by University of Toronto Bookstore, at Open House venues.

Sellers promised Open House 2010 will be “a little more interesting,” with more and a greater variety of activities. One way he hopes to achieve this is by enlisting the participation of other publishers. “There can be healthy competition among publishers,” he said. “But there's also a point where we all have to work together.”

But how keen are other publishers? Sarah MacLachlan, president of House of Anansi Press, Canada's largest independent literary publisher, isn't.

“I don't know how it serves Anansi as a company to say, ‘Sure, Random, take my writers and put them in a program with your writers,'” she said this week. “It just doesn't feel great. I want to be able to show my writers that we can do things with them and for them. Why give our writers to another publisher to show them what they can do?”

Also, “I don't actually understand why Random would want to invite other publishers coming into their fold because [Open House] is serving a beautiful purpose for them right now,” MacLachlan said. “They've managed to get all these companies to pony up as sponsors and look sexy [besides The Globe and Mail as media sponsor, 2009 supporters include TD Financial, Bravo!, the Hal Jackman Foundation, Transcontinental Media, Metro supermarkets and the Rotman School of Management]. So I'm not sure why they'd want to be generous toward us, unless they want to buy pieces of all of us and run the world.”

The genius of The New Yorker Festival is that, for all the variety of its participants, sponsors, readings, brunches, walking tours and performances, they're all cogs in an exercise of brand reinforcement for the magazine that gives the event its name. Certainly, there's not much branding going on with Open House, at least not yet.

For Sellers, “the authors are the brand. What you have to think about is, why do people buy books? Do they buy a book because it's a Random House book? Or do they buy books because it's by John Grisham or Naomi Klein? I think it's the latter.”

Richard Bachmann, owner of Burlington, Ont.'s A Different Drummer, one of the country's most highly regarded independent bookstores, says he's “all in favour” of Random's experiment in event programming.

“Everyone, big or small, has to be clever in their way. ... My mantra about book promotion used to be, ‘If we knew what worked, we'd do it again.' I now say, ‘Nothing works but everything helps.'”

He added: “It would be immensely stupid to be against Random House because they're big. The books they have are good, for the most part. The editors they have are good. The designs are good. It's not like they're just sitting in an office and writing cheques.”

The Globe and Mail Open House Festival takes place at the University of Toronto May 8-10. For more information, visit http://www.randomhouse.ca/openhouse/ .