Ho‘ohana Aloha

A timely essay, in light of my post for Talking Story yesterday: Why I blog, circa 2011 (and about ‘real books’).

As Ehrenreich writes:

The emphasis shifts with each telling, but every writer, editor, publisher, bookseller, and half-attentive reader knows the fundamental story.  After centuries of steady climbing, book sales leveled off towards the end of  the 1900s.  Basic literacy began to plummet.  As if television and Reaganomics were not danger enough, some egghead lunatics went and  built a web—a web!—out of nothing but electrons.  It proved a sneaky and seductive monster.  Straight to our offices and living rooms, the web delivered chicken recipes, weather forecasts, pornography, the cutest kitten videos the world had ever seen.  But while we were distracted by these glittering gifts, the internet conspired to snare our friend the book, to smother it.

Opinions flourish on the “death of the book” with those opinions are rooted in our reading and writing habits, and that’s natural I think; our feelings intensify to the degree of our engaging in those processes. My post yesterday was an example, being (in part) about what I consider ‘real books’ to be, and as such they’ll never get away from me completely, or from others like me willing to publish them ~ and I think I have lots of company in that.

I enjoyed the historical coverage of Ehrenreich’s essay, and do recommend it. It is fairly long, but very well written.

“Writing has been bottled up in books since the start,” wrote American poet and journalist Robert Carlton Brown in 1920.  “It is time to pull out the stopper.”

Seth Godin rolls out the news of his work with a team at Amazon.com to “fundamentally change many of the rules of publishing trade non-fiction.”

I’m late to this, but good-late since I can catch up with all on the blog he has set up for his newest “tribe” (and so can you)… like watching your favorite tv series on DVR or by buying the season CD instead of sitting through the commercials and getting impatient for the next release.

Even if you don’t care about the publishing intent of this, his intro post alone may stir up reinvented thoughts about team for you. Seth Godin has worked with an amazing assortment of people since he left Yahoo.com to strike out on his own, essentially remaining a solo entrepreneur ever since.

Yes, he has much bigger clout than most of us have, being able to partner with Amazon.com in this way, but you can’t tell me there isn’t some kind of reinvented partnership possibility waiting in the wings for you too: So what will it be?

Yet another reason self-pub and e-pub is more and more attractive?

The first shots were fired last summer, when Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult called the New York Times Book Review a boys’ club. (I weighed in then, too, calling on the Times to respond to statistics posted by Double X regarding the disparity between books by male authors and female authors reviewed in their pages.) Now, the war is on…