Friday, April 30, 2010

A new campaign is needed!

I have written about the painfully stupid publishing deals made for "books" that start as websites, as blogs, as Twitter accounts, but now someone else, with a better platform has made the case. Head over to this CQ article by Sean Fennessey, who rightly calls out publishers for acquiring utter crap. As he states outright at one point, "Tumblr and Twitter book deals are completely out of control."

We clearly need to start a movement to end these deals, which are filling the world with bad books. Such publishing lessens the values of books as a whole, as consumers wonder why they would buy the book when the internet offers THE SAME CONTENT for free. They then think, "why buy ANY books?!" This is unacceptable. If we care about "the survival of the book," we must end such acquisition abuse.

We need a campaign to end such acquisitions. Perhaps we here at SotB should work on coming up with a clever acronym and start tracking this trend - and naming names. Watch this space!

2 comments:

Meytal Radzinski said...

I suppose I agree, but... what about sites that are meant to be books? I'm thinking of webcomics or novel blogs - if those get popular enough, doesn't it sort of make sense for them to be turned into books, as was the original intention?

The amount of internet crap now found in bookstores is crazy, but it's just another step in a long line of embarrassing publisher acquisitions. Personally, I'd rather see the campaigning politician memoir go first. Lots of noise and little point...

Anonymous said...

I agree. Alas the only thing that will stop people from publishing this tripe, is if customers stop buying it. The upside is it will go out of print at rather record rates. The downside is it will arrive in ungodly quantities on bargain tables.