books locked out of prison

The Texas Bureau of Prisons does not want hazardous materials in the hands of its inmates, according to an expose in the Austin American-Statesman, so it has banned 89,795 books and magazines, including works by Alice Walker, Edwidge Danticat, Pablo Neruda, John Grisham, and – wait for it – Jenna Bush. I guess she set a bad example or something, and Neruda was a socialist, but I’d like to know the charges against Danticat. Provoking thought in a dangerous manner?

Texas prison officials said restrictions on reading material are for the good of both guards and inmates. “We have to protect the safety and security of our institution, but also aid in the rehabilitation of our offenders,” said Jason Clark, an agency spokesman.

“And what may not be judged inflammatory in the public at large can be inflammatory in prison.”

No shit. Mention unalienable rights or free speech in there and no telling what might happen. But one thing you can say for Texas officials. They keep very accurate records of how many books they’ve banned.

photo courtesy of curium.

public service announcements and reps x two

First, a funny video riffing off the side effects listed in pharmaceutical television ads. Nice job, Unbridled Books! I especially love the literary references to Tolstoi et al.

Second, reported in Shelf Awareness, NAIBA begs publishers to keep reps employed and connected to independent booksellers. This is a part of the process of bringing books to the public that isn’t much known to readers but has a profound effect on book culture. Reps are the link between the publisher and the bookstore shelves, and they are ethnographers of the communities they serve.

Restricting field reps to large stores will give publishers a skewed view of what is a very diverse world–independent bookselling. Sales reps take the time to know our stores, what our customers like, and what is on our shelves. They are the industry worker-bees, travelling the region, taking ideas and trends and pollinating other stores. We learn about other stores from them, what others are reading and loving; what is selling; marketing tips; event ideas; what the publisher is doing; and what authors have books coming out in the next season. They make fans for authors out of our frontline booksellers. They cut through the catalogs to make sure we carry what we’ll be able to sell, and their endorsements are why we buy what we might have ignored.

These reasons are why cuts in field sales reps devastate us. Have you really thought about what this stricture will mean to you? Fewer book sales. Without a doubt, we are not ordering as much through telemarketing. We are definitely not focusing on your backlist through tele-sales, and we definitely miss titles from the frontlist. We also don’t buy as much direct, which makes independent bookselling a less profitable business. The vicious cycle is that we buy less because we don’t have sales reps, and then you devalue our business because we aren’t buying as much as we used to.

Cory Doctorow has previously praised the sales force. Three cheers for reps (and three extra ones for Tom Leigh.)

Finally – squeeeeee! The first book review for Through the Cracks came out in Publisher’s Weekly. “Sociology professor Jill McKenzie hires PI Anni Koskinen to find the man who raped her in Chicago’s Lincoln Park 23 years earlier in Fister’s strong sequel to In the Wind (2008) . . . Koskinen connects with an array of well-drawn supporting characters, including other rape victims, the lead investigator on the McKenzie case, and the attorney who helped overturn Taylor’s conviction. Thoughtful attention to the complexities of police work and social justice lift this gritty mystery well above the norm. Koskinen’s empathy with both cops and victims as well as her fierce, brittle independence make her easy to root for.”

another fine mess – Patterson, Amazon, and the commodification of reading

I’ve been mulling over how to respond to the amazing profile of James Patterson ™ in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, but this morning’s news that Amazon has instantly removed Macmillan’s books over a dispute on e-book pricing adds an interesting wrinkle.

“Removed” is an oversimplification;  used copies are on sale, because Amazon and the seller make money on those, but Macmillan and their authors do not. There is no indication, of course, that new books exist and could be bought elsewhere. Amazon will sell you the book, just not share profits with the publisher and, by default, the author. Full disclosure: I am one of Macmillan’s authors. I love my editor, and I appreciate them publishing me, but I also enjoy my day job and it’s a good thing because I’d never make a living writing crime fiction. I’m not too bothered that the listing for my forthcoming book is among los desaparecidos. I’d rather you buy it from an indie, anyway.  This is not about me. It’s about books and their future.

Comments on news threads like this tend to fall into patterns:

• E-books are way too expensive.
• DRM sucks.
• My words as an author are MY PROPERTY and you will pry DRM from my cold, dead hands.
• Traditional publishers should die already.
• I’m a writer. How’m I supposed to make a living?
• Amazon is great.
• Amazon sucks.
• Why isn’t everyone acting like  Baen/O’Reilly/Cory?
• Self publishing is the future.
• Self-publishing sucks.
• Cut out the middleman. Sell direct.
• But what about indie bookstores?
• Indie bookstores suck. I get much better deals at Amazon.

[Sunday update: Amazon blinked, grudgingly. Their relationship remains "it's complicated."] But let’s set all that aside for now. Here’s what struck me about the Patterson profile (which didn’t go into his psychology as a fictional FBI profiler would … now wouldn’t that be interesting ? But I digress.)

Transformers – More than Meets the Eye

The subtitle of “James Patterson Inc.” is “How a Genre Writer has Transformed Book Publishing.” There are really two stories here: one aggressively business-minded author has created a highly successful brand and sold millions of books; publishers drool over big hits, and he’s hit his home run farther than anyone other than God when he wrote The Bible (but damn, forgot to inscribe “copyright shall last forever” as the eleventh commandment or he would be rolling by now. Think of all the derivatives! The children’s versions! The movie rights! But I digress.)

The other story is about changes in the book industry that set the stage for Patterson, inc.

Like movie studios, publishing houses have long built their businesses on top of blockbusters. But never in the history of publishing has the blockbuster been so big. Thirty years ago, the industry defined a “hit” novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies.

The story of the blockbuster’s explosion is, paradoxically, bound up with that of publishing’s recent troubles. They each began with the wave of consolidation that swept through the industry in the 1980s. Unsatisfied with publishing’s small margins, the new conglomerates that now owned the various publishing houses pressed for bigger best sellers and larger profits. Mass-market fiction had historically been a paperback business, but publishers now put more energy and resources into selling these same books as hardcovers, with their vastly more favorable profit margins. At the same time, large stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were elbowing out independent booksellers. Their growing dominance of the market gave them the leverage to demand wholesale discounts and charge hefty sums for favorable store placement, forcing publishers to sell still more books. Big-box stores like Costco accelerated the trend by stocking large quantities of books by a small group of authors and offering steep discounts on them. Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers became less and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard their resources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books that publishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didn’t. And the blockbuster became even bigger.

What did Patterson add to the mix? Television advertising. Swift and strategic development of new product lines for children and romance readers. Outsourcing the actual writing to hungry midlisters. Trusted product that has little swearing or challenges to family values (in one series the manly detective is a single parent of 12 adoptees – “’Cheaper by the Dozen’ meets ‘Die Hard,’ as Patterson describes it”).  But there’s lots of violence, particularly against women – you may want to avert your eyes from this tidbit:

The thriller genre is generally not for the squeamish, but Patterson’s tend to be especially graphic, and the violence often involves sociopathic sexual perversion and attractive young women. For instance, the villain in his second Alex Cross novel, “Kiss the Girls,” is a psychopath who kidnaps, rapes and tortures college girls in an underground bunker; at one point, he even feeds a live snake into the anus of one of his victims.

I can’t help but be reminded of a recent post by Peter Rozovsky on the most disturbing noir song ever, “He Hit Me, but it Felt Like a Kiss.”  But I digress.

The Ecosystem of Books and Reading

This is I’m taking away from all of this.

Books produced this way are like meals at McDonald’s. They are filling and they’re fast. They provide a satisfying meal for people who have little time and can’t afford to try things they may not like because they work two jobs and just want a little predictable escape for a few hours. These kinds of books are bad for you, not because the nutritional value is harmful so much as the ecological harm they do.

Think about McDonald’s. We stopped growing people food to grow corn to feed cows to butcher and grind up in enormous, karma-destroying meat factories, shipping the resulting pink sludge in ozone-destroying trucks, subsidizing crops that are genetically engineered intellectual property owned by giant corporations that will sue your ass if you save seeds or if seeds accidentally end up growing in your fields without their permission; we import real food from Chile and elsewhere that lots of people can’t afford even if there was a grocery store in their neighborhood. And we wash that burger down with sugared beverages sweetened by subsidized corn in a production process that exhausts both water and land but makes big brands like Coke and Pepsi rich and exportable to the world.

You can’t really blame people for eating at places like McDonald’s if they’re working hard and need fast, cheap, filling food that they can count on. But it’s ruining our planet and our health.

Likewise, if we alter book production so that it’s streamlined, predictable, easily accessed by people who can’t afford to experiment by buying books they might not enjoy, then corporations will be able to churn it out. Okay, there’s a power struggle of Godzilla proportions going on between the book equivalent of agribusiness and McDonald’s, but in the end they’ll settle their differences and readers will suffer.

Some people have already joined the equivalent of a “slow book” movement. Some people will save writers like saving seeds. There will be independent bookstores just as there are local farmers markets and food coops helping members savor flavors they wouldn’t discover otherwise. Lots of people are growing their own stories. But none of that works for the person who works long hours, has little paycheck to show for it (or has a big paycheck but doesn’t read except on airplanes), and can’t spend a lot of time seeking new authors when they know a book with James Patterson on the cover will give them the escape they enjoy. Everything else is for elitists and snobs.

The analogy, thank goodness, doesn’t really hold up.

First, the government doesn’t provide subsidies to publishers to plant more James Pattersons. Avid readers constitute a significant share of the book buying market and they have adventurous pallets. We are likely to see a growing divide – with small publishers providing variety and the big six focused on fast food, or folding because the big bets they place on finding the next Patterson don’t work out. But not all of our arable land will be planted with Patterson-engineered stories because the book business hasn’t swung subsidy deals as agribusiness has.

Second, our ace in the hole: public libraries. They do a good job of helping people get their hands on the books they enjoy without passing judgment, and they are great advisors about what to read while you’re on  a waitlist for the latest James Patterson. Libraries grow readers, and readers love books. All is not lost. But we’re in for some interesting times.

photo courtesy of Libby taken at a free-for-all when a book warehouse in Bristol let people take what they wanted last year. The business’s lease had run out.

what?!?

A task force on the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has advised that 47 inmates should be held indefinitely without trial, officials say.

This is a US task force, mind you. We have a Constitution. I thought rule of law was back in style. Guess not.

And this, on the day when by executive order, Guantanamo was to be closed. And it said “The individuals currently detained at Guantánamo have the constitutional privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.”

Well, damn.

yo, public librarians (at least those who loan book club kits)

I was able to get some copies of In the Wind for cheap from my publisher and – not wanting to do any harm to the independent bookstores who have invested shelf space in my books – I thought I’d give them to libraries. Specifically, I’m having a drawing for libraries who offer book discussion kits. The libraries that win the drawing will get 8 copies with a discussion guide to any librarian who thinks it would fit their program. (It’s hardcover, so I’m thinking 8 is about all that people would want to hoist – ?) It has political themes as well as threads on families coping with mental illness and plot twists that should make it discussable; at least someone told me he hated the ending, which is usually promising for discussion. (His hasn’t been a universal reaction, but it doesn’t totally surprise me. I kind of hated it too, when I realized how it would end.)

If you’re wondering “errr, I don’t know, would we even want this?” – it did get pretty good reviews.  But I realize space and resources for cataloging/promoting this kind of kit are limited. So if it doesn’t seem a good fit for your library, no worries.

Full disclosure: this is part of my Cunning Plan to coax a few more readers out there to sample the first Anni Koskinen book before Through the Cracks, the sequel to In the Wind, comes out this spring. This is the Gateway Drug theory of reading. Also, it’s to give back to public libraries, which have been feeding my habit for decades. (Mrs. Wiebel, it’s all your fault that I’m a book junkie! Bless you.)

If you are interested, send me an e-mail (to bfister @ hickorytech . net – with the spaces removed) with a contact name and your library mailing address. I’ll be pulling a couple of names from a hat by the end of the month. It’s always a good feeling to find books a new home.

things found on the Internet when I should have been working, no. 4

Vintage advertising, by topic and by decade at Vintage Ad Browser (which has an equally tempting  Cover Browser sister site). Here are some book-related ads.

1960s

1980s

1890s

crime fiction top ten for 2009

Selecting our top ten is an annual custom at 4MA, and winnowing down the list is a good way to revisit the year in books – before I replenish my To Be Read list by browsing others’ tops. I read a lot of good books this year, but these are the ones that had the most awesomeness. Two of the ten are on my list because they were discussed at 4MA and I found myself liking them better after the discussion; serving as a witness for the defense can make you find all kinds of worthy points you might otherwise overlook. I should also note (waves to the FTC) that six of these books were provided to me by publishers because I am a card-carrying book reviewer, but that didn’t influence my opinion of the books. I was sent lots of free books that could easily make a bottom ten, but I don’t keep track of those (nor do I review them; life’s too short to spend time reading books I don’t like).

Without further ado, my choice books of 2009, from seven different countries:

Arnaldur Indridason – ARCTIC CHILL
A young boy is found stabbed, frozen to the ground in his own blood. His Thai mother was brought to Iceland by a man who no longer lives with her; her older son has never completely adjusted to life on a small cold island on the other side of the world from his home. Erlendur and his team methodically work out what happened and in the process encounter various levels of discomfort with immigrants and the usual sad, human reasons for violence. Another fine book in an excellent series.

Kate Atkinson – WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS?
A 4MA discussion book, and one that met with varied reactions. I loved it. I remember when reading her first Brodie book being amazed at the coincidences, then coming to terms with what it seems to me she’s doing. She’s not writing crime fiction, and she’s not mocking it or transcending anything. She’s reacting, though (I think) to what crime fiction does, which is take a group of people and a terrible thing (a murder, usually), explore how those people react to the terrible thing, the reason for which or the resolution of which is unknown, then pull it all together into a solution – both of the crime and of the sense that crimes or other terrible things (like sudden death or betrayal or deviant behavior or jealousy or greed) have the potential to challenge the ways we organize our belief (in God, in the police, in the basic goodness of most people in a crisis, in our own untested morality). That’s one of the reasons mysteries are satisfying. They give us dramatic discord and they involve us in resolution, and they do it entertainingly, whether dark or light, take your pick. It seems to me that Atkinson (at least in the Brodie books) is taking all the incident and drama we expect in a mystery, but instead of logic and those social organizations that are there to protect us driving the story line and the weaving together of plot strands, coincidence is what makes things go forward. And it’s not just randomness; Its as if randomness has a strange quality that charges all the particles in the book so they’ll be drawn together. What she’s doing is both giving us the ripping good story we crave, but giving a completely different reason for how the story will move along. Where in other mysteries there would be reasons for every connection that’s made (even if the reasons were a strain, and not reasonable, really, there’d be reasons) here there are no reasons. Just loads of points of connection. As if to say: What if that connectedness and meaning we crave were there, but not as usual? What if they were connected in some other way, an almost opposite way to reason. I find these such joyful books – and I feel the same uplift as when a really good crime fiction writer is in a really generous mood and lets things click satisfyingly into place, though it might be more realistic or more modern to let them stay broken. These books wouldn’t work at all if a) she were not as good a writer as she is – she’s funny and touching and wise and just plain good – and b) she were smirking at her cleverness; look, I’m taking a genre and bending it and aren’t I doing something amazing? She doesn’t smirk at all, at the genre or the reader or the characters. Okay, so she’s messed with the rules of nature, but I like the way she’s done it. Very much.

Karin Fossum – THE WATER’S EDGE
The Water’s Edge is a skillful novel that concerns a particularly vile crime: pedophilia. It also marks the return of Fossum’s austere detective Konrad Sejer and his youthful sidekick, Jacob Skarre, who investigate the psychology of small-town Norwegians as crime interrupts the ordinary rhythms of their quiet communities. The surfaces of Fossum’s mysteries are always deceptively placid; underneath, disturbing things churn in the dark. More at Mystery Scene. This is the best handling of a sensational topic in a way that is totally honest that I can think of. “Integrity” is the word that comes to mind.

Stieg Larsson – The GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE
When I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, I enjoyed it but did find myself wondering what all the fuss was about. Now I agree with Norm – I found this book to be a much stronger, more focused, more engaging book all around than the first in the series. More at Scandinavian Crime Fiction.

Val Mcdermid – A DARKER DOMAIN
A very good book about the lingering effects of a crime committed during the Miner’s strike in 1i984. The plot is twisty, the characters are well developed, and the subject matter heartfelt. These kinds of standalones are my favorite of Mcdermid’s books by a long shot.

Deon Meyer – BLOOD SAFARI
Deon Meyer is known for his muscular, intelligent, and psychologically probing police procedurals set in a complicated post-apartheid South Africa. In Blood Safari, Meyer introduces a new hero, one reminiscent of Jack Reacher, if Reacher had a conscience and fewer super-powers. Lemmer works as a bodyguard, and he’s good at his job, even though his parole status following a stint in prison means he can’t carry a weapon. He lives by simple laws. Lemmer’s First Law: Don’t get involved. Lemmers Second Law: Trust nobody. When Emma Le Roux becomes his client, he isn’t sure her life really is at risk. But he protects her as she tries to find out how her brother, who disappeared into the wilderness twenty years ago, could now be on the news with a new name, accused of murdering three poachers and a traditional healer near the national park where he had disappeared. It doesn’t take long for Lemmer to conclude that someone really does want Emma dead, including a harrowing attempt on her life involving a cobra. As always, Meyer roots his well-paced story in the South African soil, from veld to the Karoo, from the high society of Cape Town to environmental activists fighting to preserve endangered species in the face of tribal land claims. Wealth and poverty, the old South Africa and the new – Meyer brings it all to life in a gripping thriller, seasoned with equal measures of fondness and frustration with his countrymen. The high-energy ending confronts conflicts between nature and development and shows that the bones of ugly apartheid policies lie in a shallow grave.

Reggie Nadelson – LONDONGRAD
Artie Cohen is trying to detach himself from his job as a NYPD detective to take a low-key vacation when his friend Tolya Sverdloff asks him a favor in a way typical for the larger-than-life Russian businessman with a generous spirit and a shady side: “Artie, good morning, how are you, have something to drink, or maybe a cup of good coffee, and we’ll talk, I need a little favor, maybe you can help me out?” Helping Tolya becomes complicated when Artie is flagged down by a small girl who leads him to a desolate fenced-off playground overgrown with weeds where a strange shape wrapped in duct tape is tied to a swing that creaks in the wind. The shape is a dead woman, a young prostitute from Russia who Artie belatedly realizes has a strong resemblance to Tolya’s daughter, Valentina. . . . More at Reviewing the Evidence.  I loved this book.

Jo Nesbø- NEMESIS
Revenge is symmetrical by its very nature: tit for tat, an eye for an eye. It’s an elemental form of justice, simple, brutal, and unforgiving. There is a lot of symmetry in the construction of NEMESIS, the third of Jo Nesbø’s novels to be translated into English. But there is nothing simple about justice in Nesbø’s world. . . More at Reviewing the Evidence. I also liked The Redeemer – and everything else in this great series.

George Pelecanos – THE WAY HOME
George Pelecanos has been exploring the nature of masculinity since his first novel, A Firing Offense, was published in 1992. One way or another, all of his books are about what it takes to be a man, and how men negotiate the minefield that lies between violence and honor. That path toward manhood often is illuminated by the relationship between fathers and sons, a theme that is front and center in The Way Home. More at Mystery Scene.

Richard Price – LUSH LIFE
A 4MA discussion book. The minute I picked it up, I thought ‘ahhhh…..’ The dialogue feels so real to me, and I love the way Price writes. The initial pages spent with the absurd Quality of Life Task Force (four plain clothes cops, who in their thirties are the ‘oldest white men on the Lower East Side,’ whose job it is to harass people who might be doing something illegal) just took me right into it. Like Lawrence Block there’s a nice sense of the variety of humanity you meet in some neighborhoods of the city, and some of his affection for the city. Like Jim Fusilli, there’s a lot of detail that gives people a real sense of the place and arouses lots of nostalgia for those who know those blocks of the city. But Richard Price is more involved in the different characters’ perspectives than either Block or Fusilli is. The Scudder and Terry Orr books are first person, and that person’s journey is very much where the center of gravity is. In LUSH LIFE the point of view shifts quite a bit, so we see that section of the lower east side from the POV of a kid who lives in the projects, a failed restaurateur/bartender, and cops. It’s much more psychological than Block, much more sociological than Fusilli. All in all, a less feverishly realized novel than FREEDOMLAND which remains my favorite of Price’s books but it’s still as real and as in-depth as it gets.

what is lost

I bought and read my first e-book on a phone this year using an iPhone app. I don’t plan to repeat the experience, not because it was horrible but because I know too many booksellers personally and until it’s easy to buy from them I’m not planning to purchase e-books. But I felt as if I needed some experience with e-books.

The good side? It didn’t weigh much when traveling and I could read it in the dark on the long shuttle ride from the airport. The bad side?

Let me count the ways.

First, the pages look ugly. There’s no other way to put it. There is no page design, just letters poured into a mechanical box, no art in the chapter headings, no thought given to initial capitals, words broken in the wrong place, justified lines full of gaps like bad teeth. And of course no page numbers. The design of a page in a printed book is a nearly invisible pleasure. Page design is something I appreciate more since seeing what is lost when it’s absent.

Second, reading on a phone is fine for e-mail and  for short form texts on a web page, but it’s hard to get lost in a book when you have to turn pages every paragraph or so. I also found it strangely disorienting to have only a bar at the bottom of the page telling me where I was in the book. A sense of place, of orientation in the arc of the story is harder to grasp. (I found this also true when I held my most recently published book in my hands for the first time. The last chapters felt different when measured between the thumb and fingers and the growing weight of the left side than when I was scrolling to the end of a document. Though I did read the galleys on paper, I shifted the pages to the back of the stack as I read and so was surprised by how profoundly the anticipation of an ending affects the reading experience.)

Third – I don’t like a future for the book in which sharing is disabled and ownership of an immutable copy no longer exists. It bothers me that a corporation could reach into my personal library and pluck a book back or alter it. I don’t like the fact that there is no such thing as fair use in a world of licensed content and that I can’t give a friend or family member a book I read and loved. Sure, I could buy them a second e-book version, but it’s not the same as handing on the book I read.

Fourth – this post from the Electronic Frontier Foundation spells out just how much we give away to Google and Amazon when we let them be our “bookstore” and “library.” Real booksellers and librarians have stood up for reader privacy. Personal information is a valuable commodity to these corporations. I don’t like the idea of my reading habits becoming a commodity and I don’t like the aggregation of readers’ behavior becoming a huge data mine of our minds.

Google’s new Google Book Search Project has the ability to track reading habits at an unprecedented level of granularity. In particular, according to the proposed Google Books Privacy Policy, web servers will automatically “log” each book and page you searched for and read, how long you viewed it for, and what book or page you continued onto next . . . your Kindle will periodically send information about you to Amazon. But exactly what information is sent? Amazon’s wording — “information related to the content on your Device and your use of it” — reads so broadly that it appears to allow Amazon to track all content that users put on the device, regardless of whether that content is purchased from Amazon. Some security researchers have indicated that the Kindle may even be tracking its users’ GPS locations. Is this the future of reading?

God, I hope not. Cory Doctorow has put some of this in sharp perspective in “How to Destroy the Book” in which he argues that the true pirates are the corporations who are remaking our book culture so that they can be in the center of it, controlling books for the sake of profits. He contrasts this perspective with that of “people of the book” who love books, want to fill their houses with them, and pass favorites on to their children.

Anyone who claims that readers can’t and won’t and shouldn’t own their books are bent on the destruction of the book, the destruction of publishing, and the destruction of authorship itself. We must stop them from being allowed to do it. The library of tomorrow should be better than the library of today. The ability to loan our books to more than one person at once is a feature, not a bug. We all know this. It’s time we stop pretending that the pirates of copyright are right. These people were readers before they were publishers before they were writers before they worked in the legal department before they were agents before they were salespeople and marketers. We are the people of the book, and we need to start acting like it.

What he said.

photos courtesy of brewbooks and Josh Bancroft.

monetizing your soul

Sometimes I think I’ve woken up on a different planet, the Bizarro World of the old Superman comics, a place that looks somewhat like ours, but all the angles are sharper, values are inverted, and all the people are below average intelligence.

For example, my immediate response to the notion that Amazon will give you some payola for tweeting about a product and including a link that someone uses to buy that product, is “this stinks.” It’s dishonorable to tell someone “I just read a great book” and get paid for it under the table – even if you actually thought it was a great book. Paid tweets should have a notice: Advertisement - the way newspapers used to label those ads that were deliberately formatted to look like news stories about cures for baldness or a breakthrough on back pain treatment. It was a way to draw a line between unbiased information and promotional ad copy.

But no – I’m just out of step. The whole purpose of human interaction is to market yourself or to market goods for others. Relationships are for marketing. The self is for sale.

In so much of Web-based self-fashioning and communication there seems to be no line drawn between “this is what I think” and “this is what I want you to think for my own personal gain.” Why don’t people feel a little bit queasy when they’re disguising a sales pitch as an honest opinion – or when earning money for what may seem an honestly held position? Oh – because there is no line anymore. Our attention – our selves – are just product to be bought and sold. That’s how we know what we and our opinions are worth.

By happenstance, I’m writing this on National Bookstore Day – a grassroots effort to support local independent booksellers. Selling your opinions on Twitter is yet another way to destroy local commerce and all the great things that independent booksellers contribute to book culture. Do you really want to do that? If so, let me introduce you to my friend, Dr. Faust. He can tell you what your soul is worth. Maybe you’re selling yourself cheap. (No pun intended.)

I’m reminded of the character played by Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner making his impassioned statement about selfhood: “I am not a number. I am a human being!” For the 21st century, here’s a new motto : I am not a brand. I am a human being!

image courtesy of Pink Ponk.

only an act

It’s always amazing how language is used to make dreadful legislation sound good. No, this time I’m not talking about the PATRIOT Act, even though it makes me grind my teeth that opponents of crappy and unconstitutional legislation are unpatriotic. No, I’m thinking of John McCain’s “Internet Freedom Act.” You know, the one that makes sure corporations are free to decide who gets to use the Internet.

This little video does a pretty good job of saying why that’s not good for business, not to mention for people in general.

Oh, and by the way – McCain has received over $800,000 from telecom companies. You think that kind of support comes free?