Lately, I’m
surprised at how prescient and pertinent the stories of Jorge Louis Borges have
become. “The Library of Babel,” published
over sixty years ago envisions a kind of infinite library filled with not only
the greatest books ever written but assemblages of total random characters and
everything between. One of the most
interesting aspects of the story is its foresight of humanity’s response to the
existence of an apparently infinite library.
Librarians are understandably suicidal, cults arise, some seeking to
purify the collection others to search for the perfect, all-knowing critic, “the
Man of the Book.”
Internet
access and the vast collection of books accessible through online book sellers
as well as more particular sites mean that we live day to day with an
approximation of Borges’ abstraction.
Crushing, international price and margin competition exacts not just a
financial toll from the traditional book publishing industry as it struggles to
adapt and reinvent itself. New
strategies for manipulating, even corrupting the book reviewing process emerge constantly. One of the most important innovations in
retail, democratic starred reviewing is actively and fiercely gamed. In 2013, Forbes reported the existence of
companies specializing in elevating
books to the New York Times Best Seller’s List. At the same time, the Humanities have become
balkanized. The question of what one
should read has probably never been more fraught with controversy.
I worry the
most for difficult books, books which are not pleasant or compelling at first,
books that are a struggle, that nevertheless are sometimes the most important
ones we ever read. If there’s no one you
respect telling you it’s worth the effort, why try?
Sadly, there
are very few reviewers I trust these days, among them are George Packer, Nick
Paumgarten and Adam Gopnik. Whilst they’ve
pointed to some very important books, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, for example, their purview doesn’t completely
intersect with my own. Finding and
identifying not just pretty good books, but extraordinary ones remains
incredibly difficult.
A good
friend and former colleague, Mark Watkins, shares my concern. He’s passionate about it. For years he’s imagined solving it with an
online system built to serve the reader and the reader only. And not just a generic reader, but each,
necessarily unique reader with her or his particular interests, requirements
and aspirations. And now he’s building
it. I have had the privilege of beta
testing it for the last several months:
each morning I have an email with a selection of new books and stories
about books which his system has created by crawling the web for the previous 24
hours and matching them to my particular interests.
And it
works. It finds extraordinary books,
books I feel I have to read. And, by the
way, it is way more fun, first thing in the morning, to look through a small
collection of new good books instead of mostly tired, often horrific news. That can come later in the day, don’t you
think?
Mark has
just launched a Kickstarter project to support the project. Why Kickstarter? Remember, I said it serves the reader and the
reader only. It serves you. Go take a look at the Hawaii Project.
It’s one of
those “things to come” that was never more needed. (Apologies H. G. Wells.)
1 comment:
That is Well Said. Better than I'd have said it myself!
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