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”.
Rumors and stories have been circulating over the past couple of years about the “top book reviewers” at Amazon.com. I’ve read everything from Amazon secretly pays the top reviewers to theorizing the reviewers don’t actually read any of the books (their number one reviewer has reviewed 45 books a week over the past couple of years…. hmmmmm).
Here is a fun little palce to visit from time to time… it’s a site displaying short videos of librarians reviewing and recommending books they have read. All the videos are 60 seconds or less. Finding book recommendations online is nothing new, but it is fun to see the people behind the review and with the videos it’s fun to see just how much fun they are having producing the 60-second spots.
I can’t remember where I ran across the site, but I think I read that they started the One-Minute Critic reviews as part of a bigger program and the reponse was big enough that they just kept going. Their site says that the videoa are produced and maintained by the Fort Vancouver Regional Library up in Washington state.
