There has been a steady shift from books as a source of knowledge and inspiration to books as souvenirs. Souvenir is memento, a chachke you get on your travels, something simple to remind you later about the great feeling you had on your vacations. Souvenirs are deliberately useless objects; their only function is to trip your memory about some pleasant occasion. Today books are also souvenirs. You might have an emotional connection to a celebrity or become a fan of some blogger. You will get that book to remind you about the pleasant interactions you had with the writer. That’s why every writer is into branding, myth before art, etc.
If a book is only a souvenir, why does it have to be a hundred pages? Lately I am reading some books that could have been perfectly reduced to a blog post. I guess the publishing marketers feel that people buy books buy the weight and would not shell out $15 for less than 100 pages. Perhaps they got a point there. But I think it is the time to try something new, publish a ten page book and sell it as a souvenir for $10. I smell a new format!
Photo by roevin on Flickr
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