RSSThe Problem With Book Buying
Mar 17
I like media. Love it. All different kinds, all different ways we can tell stories, express ideas and create entertainment, but I’m reading less books now then ever before. And it’s not that I’m not reading. I’m still reading plays, scripts, comics, news stories, in depth articles, and essays.
But books are falling by the way side and that bothers me. It’s not that I’m incapable of reading a good juicy book (I am), but it’s finding them. Of all forms of media we currently have books seem to be the hardest to have a Genius-style “if you liked” genome project. They also take the largest initial commitment to determine whether or not you’ll like them.
Take a moment to think about the amount of investment required in just sampling a book. You can give a song 3 minutes, a comic 15 minutes, a sitcom 22 minutes, an hour long drama 44 minutes or a movie 2 hours. In all those cases you can take in the full work and determine whether or not you liked them. A play may only take a few hours to read (a movie script maybe 70 minutes). But a book. Try reading a book at random off the shelf in a genre you enjoy from an author you’ve never heard of.
How fast do you read? Give yourself 22 minutes or 44 minutes and then decide if you like the book and/or the author. It’s a hard task to do.
And the idea of finding a book off the shelf at random is a massive time consuming ordeal in itself. Unlike any other medium the amount of pre-entrance knowledge for newer books is low. If you’re going to read Harry Potter for the first time you’re fine. With a movie, you can seek out trailers, they are TV commercials and clips. With something like a song or a comic, there’s very little pre-knowledge needed. Video games spend their entire development cycle creating material to get people interested: synopsis, interviews, walkthroughs, pictures, trailers…
And while I’m aware that a book cannot do that (or at least well, most trailers for books tend to be very lame at the best), but that only makes it harder to find a needle in the book stacks. As it stands, the lack of a true genome project for books (and it may be something that can never exist) is a detriment for me. For example, I like the John Sandford Prey novels but really can’t be bothered with almost all other crime/detective fiction (not that I find it bad, just not my cup of tea.) I like the work of Brad Meltzer, but can’t stand John Grisham. I like the fantasy crafted by Neil Gaiman (Coraline, Stardust) and Gregory Maguire (Wicked) but have trouble connecting with similar authors. Short stories can help introduce you to authors (as was my introduction to the genius of Junot Diaz), but even sorting for short stories can be ridiculous.
This puts me in the position where I have to buy blind once I’ve purchased every book from an author I enjoy. And so far I’ve had pretty good success. I’ve discovered the works of Alexandra Robbins (Pledged, The Overachievers) and Alan DeNiro’s bizarre and wonderful Total Oblivion, More or Less. But each time I become more and more reluctant to pick up a new book. The debate takes longer. Eventually luck runs out.
Which makes me feel bad. I’m sure there are many talented authors out there with brilliant books that I’ve yet to experience. But without a system to find them and with such a high cost of barrier to determine like/dislike, it may be a long time before I do find them.