Forget the Kindle vs. paper books debate — apparently the days of actually “writing” a “book” are slowly coming to an end. You know, craft, art, substance(s), the actual minutia that all go into making a book a piece of work — it’s all becoming as outdated as banks crash, attention spans diminish, and robots begin serving us dinner in capsule form (OK, that last one won’t happen ’til 2011). In this new cultural landscape, we will need leaders, like the Jonas Brothers, to rise up and, with a firm hand, guide us to new levels of social media interactivity. Fortunately David Pogue, New York Times columnist and author of many books that teach your grandmother how to check e-mail on her eMac, is here to save us via his forthcoming The World According To Twitter.
From the blog of Pogue (David Pogue, not the Pogues the band, because you know very well that I’d heap high praise on anything penned by Shane MacGowan):
It all started with a live demo of Twitter. During a talk, I was trying to demonstrate the real-time nature of Twitter. On stage, I typed: “Anyone got a pun that can fit in 140 characters?” Your responses started flowing within 10 seconds….
Wait, wait, dear Culture Surfer reader, don’t check out yet, it gets better (in the way that “better” means “worse”):
Next, I posted a picture of a squirrel in my yard, and asked for captions. You turned out to be the wittiest caption writers ever!
(Oh, sorry, I added that exclamation point up there. It just needed it, didn’t it?)
That was it. I knew my mission in life: to compile and edit a whole book of (Twitter) responses, written by my 200,000 followers.
(As you can see, that is not actually the real cover of David Pogue’s book that you wrote for him)
In today’s collapsing publishing landscape this book screams both timely and vital. I’ll be greatly looking forward to Pogue’s well-thought-out treatise on Friendster soon!
No, really, all snark aside, this sort of attempt at an of-the-minute cash-grab really irks me. While publishers, authors and other various incidental folk in the book business are actually working, diligently and full of heart, to discover what it’s going to take to turn the sinking ship of books around, Pogue’s trying to ramp up excitement for 200 pages of @SomeGuy tweeting “hey I really like dogs.”
And speaking of @someguy — if you, lucky you, end up being selected to be a part of Pogue’s scam project, you certainly get compensated, right?
Of course you do. Per Pogue himself, he’ll send you “a free copy of the book, inscribed to you personally.”
Oh, wow, lucky day!
Continue reading “@heywritemybookforme” »
Remember James Frey? “The Man Who Conned Oprah,” to quote the Smoking Gun. According to the New York Times, the A Million Little Pieces author who took some, uh, liberties, with the novel’s details (87 days, a couple of hours … who’s counting, really?) has scored a new book deal with HarperCollins via an anonymous pitch.
