Earlier this month I had the opportunity to talk with a workshop for university-based authors, and one of the questions I got was about publishing’s gumminess—about why things can feel slow, with steps along the way seeming sometimes to get bogged down. Regular readers will know I’m usually pretty quick to defend traditional publishing, but there’s definitely something to this criticism. And reflecting on the state of our field, I think one background issue is the time book workers spend responding to thought-leaders’ bad ideas.
Without any pretense of serious attention or analysis, here’s a handful of bad ideas about books, mostly from the past couple of years. My hall of fame uses a wide lens to capture some of the context that book workers are required to navigate in these disruptive times. It’s offered in a spirit of fun, mostly—and my picks are obviously subjective. If you think I’m wrong and that these ideas have merit, let’s talk about it in comments! (And watch for a good-ideas hall of fame, coming soon.)
—What if libraries became company towns where things were cleared out so library workers had a place to live?
—If anybody could look up anybody else’s book sales any time, would the phones at publishers’ offices ever stop ringing?
—How about crowd-sourcing peer review? (There’s a book about this one.)
—One house is committed to publishing with, as they put it, “no deadlines at all.” Sounds disruptive!
—Freelancers are great. But if your editor, designer, and marketers are all freelancers, are you sure you’re signed with a publishing house?
—The New York Times asked whether the “era of the paywalled restaurant is upon us.” While free, unpaywalled food sounds good to me, the comparison to publishing does little to educate readers about business models in either industry.
—I spent eight years in college and grad school, and another twenty working at universities. As much as I respect and admire scholars, I wonder if scholar-led publishing is really preferable to publisher-led publishing.
—Vermont college libraries were poised to get rid of print entirely. What could go wrong?
—And while it’s hard to justify calling this one an idea, I’ll finish with a shoutout to the AI-generated world of trash ebooks flooding Amazon. Cleaning that stuff up, instead of abetting it, would get anyone voted into a real hall of fame.
I'd like to hear more about Vermont libraries wanting to get rid of books altogether. This is one of the more insane ideas I've heard but in a way it does not surprise me given a certain current in American "nonthought" by those who hate activities of the mind- those who are so anally linear that they always try to draw the line somewhere maybe so they can clip artists to them in the same mannear Matthew Shepard was lynched.
It is a long conversation but there is a deep hatred among some Americans of books. And fear. There is fear because they know or sense that some books can open them to new ideas and new worlds and force them to face truths theyd prefer to drown with that fourth or fifth drink or line kof coke.
Some Americans hate books because they went to at best mediocre schools with higo mhly mediocre teachers who didnt know squat about teaching literalyture and, often, did not even LIKE or enjoy the books in the curriculum ( and in some cases and places, not even books but multiple snippets and "excerpts that can kill any given person's enoumnirmous potential.
but you probably know all this? more later about the problem of critics who dont understand books and the tv columnists world of pontificating pundits making ponderous pronoucements like Bloom, Bennet, and David "Duke" blank and illtrained teachers who prattle on forever about the greatness of the symbolism of the Scarlet Letter because they have the teacher spark notes with which they can bludgeon students who have the temerity to have their own ideas.
Beware of crushed ideas! tbc