At the heart of it all, I’m a fan. A fan of books and bookstores. A fan of fiction and non-fiction. A fan of authors and publishers. And most of all I’m a fan of great conversations sparked by books. All that to say - I really need more bookshelves.
Over the past three years, Reed Business Information has pushed the Quills as publishing’s “Oscar night”, even having the literary award show televised. But today, RBI announced the plug has been pulled on the awards and the broadcast. So now we’ll all just have to rely on things like the Pulitzers, PEN awards, the Man Booker, etc. to tell us who is popular and who is not. Much like Jerome Weeks’ post today spells out.
Also, RBI has announced that they are for sale and looking for a buyer. So I’ll be happy to set-up a PayPal account if we all want to go in together and make an offer! I wonder if there would be much backlash if we moved the company headquarters to Birmingham, Alabama?
I ran across thebookseller.com’s “Oddest Book Title Prize” this weekend. So far I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen has my vote. You can vote too, with the winner being announced March 28th.
I mean really “pygmy love queen”? How do you come up with that?
Well, today the NY Times ran a piece that tries to balance out the numbers and logic (or illogic) in Jobs’ thinking. I agree with most of the piece, except when they get to the numbers part. For some reason, “the numbers argument” never holds water for me. I mean just because hundreds of millions of books get printed doesn’t mean they’re any good or that people are reading all of them. That just seems like a bad metric. We need to measure the other end of the process.
But I like the thinking here about “reading is not a product”.
