Since the fall of Twitter I have struggled to find a place to share links and online articles that I find interesting. So I am now creating small ”link round up” posts and sharing here. Hope this ongoing series or posts surface some interesting news & thoughts for you.
Amazon is massive (that’s the kind of insightful breaking news you get here). But it is so stinking big that they have to automate many of their systems. If you did like many people have done and opted for a cheaper ad-supported kindle, be aware that ads for AI generate books are now in the mix. What a weird time to be selling books.
Here one of the most “fact of the matter” interesting take (or takedown?) on #BookTok and all of its influence. It’s worth a read. “BookTok isn’t actually a community driven by fans, writers, influencers, or even publishers. All of those people are merely a smokescreen.”
This last one is not an article but a 20-page report from the National Endowment of the Arts. It is titled Arts Participation Patterns in 2022: Highlights from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and drops data facts such as, in 2022, only 40 percent of American men read books only 57 percent of women did. Both of these numbers are down from previous years. So now that we know this… why is it so and what do we do about it?
I have never gotten anything useful from BookTok at all. It seems to me to be more the home for people more serious about becoming “influencers” than it is a place for serious readers to spread the news about not-to-be-missed books. They all seem to be from the same demographic and are all reading the same books at the same time.
Those surveys about reading habits of adults are always disappointing to me. It seems as if young people are fast losing the ability to focus long enough on a whole page of print long enough to read a whole book. Screen-scrolling is a bad habit for most of us, I’m afraid, and it’s changed our reading habits for the worse, in my opinion.