Welcome to Inside the New York Times Book Review. I'm Pamela Paul.

Hard to believe that it's been 10 years since Inside the New York Times Book Review first hit the podcast to Airwaves.

Are there even airwaves for podcasts?

In any case, last week, I sat down with three of my favorite people in the literary world to talk about the history of the show.

Dwight Garner, former senior editor of the Book Review, and current book critic at the times, came up with the idea to do the podcast back in 2006.

Sam Tannenhaus, former editor of the Book Review, was its host from launch to 2013, and Gary Stongart, novelist, memoirist, and generally very funny person, was our very first podcast guest.

So, podcasts are now the super hip and cool thing, but you guys started it when they were not so hip or cool. Dwight, it was your idea. How did you come up with this?

Well, you know, flashing back to 2006, I mean, we didn't have the iPhone yet. We had the iPod, and I think 2006 was just about the year when it sunk in that print might actually really die.

I mean, we sort of knew before, but that was about the time when I think it started to think in and thinking about some other ideas.

And podcasts were just getting popular about that. I remember liking one by Ricky Treves at the time, and I also think I wanted to impress my boss Sam Tannenhaus, so I said, Sam, let's try one of these things.

I had no idea what it was talking about. So, did you know what it was going to be? I mean, we also started our blog, the paper cuts, the format blog, so you were sort of coming from the internet and starting up all of these things.

Did you have an idea of what a Book Review podcast should be?

I had no idea. And I think that Sam actually found the tone because he's sort of a natural. I'm the kind of person who, when I went into, you do my part of the podcast, I'd write Sam's line, Sam asked Dwight X, and I would read from my answers.

And Sam just has this Charlie Rose ability to leap in and just take it. So I think that was the initial dynamic, unless I'm mistaken.

I think he just said that I interrupted everybody all the time because that's the Charlie Rose. He doesn't do it as much as he is.

Actually, I remember the first idea Dwight had for it, which was that it would be much longer than it is, and it would include a reading, like a 20-minute reading by an author, because that was still the idea we had.

I was pretentious. Well, no, there's sort of, because that's what it was kind of an amalgam of what you might hear in NPR, plus if you went to an author reading at a bookstore, and I think that was the idea Dwight had, and he wanted to find a...

Maybe you wanted to find an NPR person to be the host.

As if we could have afforded it, first of all, to be honest.

That's really quite well. You wanted a professional interviewer, because I remember there are innumerable ways in which I'm utterly obnoxious, but one way in which I'm not, I don't think, is that I wouldn't inject myself in something unless I thought it might make sense.

And I remember thinking over the weekend, well, why don't I do it? Why don't I be the host?

First of all, it doesn't cost us anything.

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