Podcast
Rumpus Events
Rumpus Book ClubHuffPo Books
The Huffington Post has launched their books section. This is a good thing, right?
On the front page there are currently three posts, including two news features and one blog, about Sarah Palin. The very top of the page is dedicated to In Praise of Slowness, Arianna’s first book club selection. There are three polls including one about silly book titles like What’s Your Poo Telling You. There’s some stuff on libraries and book review sections and a book review roundup. There’s also a news post about a book written by an “abortion addict.” There’s a lot of stuff on censorship, a news piece on Dan Brown, and a couple of posts on e-books.
I guess what I’m looking for but is currently missing is the literature section. The book review roundup highlights some literary reviews and there’s a partnership or something happening with the New York Review of Books that has its own square on the upper right. But there are simply no HuffPo articles about literary novels. Bill Maher, check. Heartwarming story about saving a local library, check. Drew Peterson’s stepdaughter writing book on years of alleged abuse, check.
In the featured blog section on the left side of the page there is at least one awesome standout post. Praveen Maden and Christine Evans talk about leaving their corporate jobs to purchase Booksmith, an independent bookstore in San Francisco’s Haight District.
It’s just the beginning for Huffpo Books, but right now it mirrors corporate publishing’s own failures. The “gatekeepers” are obsessed with celebrity memoirs so the readers who prefer to read something more challenging no longer trust them. When you push celebrity memoirs that’s your brand and it’s not enough to publish some good novels if so much of what you are printing is trash. Big publishers have been telling us for years that they have to publish garbage to stay viable and publish the good stuff. That was a lie when it was first told and the road it’s led us down has been fairly disastrous. Smaller presses, like McSweeney’s, Softskull, and Two Dollar Radio, have easily proved the absurdity of these assertions.
It would seem to be good to have another place dedicated to books. But if most of that space is focusing on Dan Brown and celebrity memoir, with a dash of conflict, it’s hard not to see it as just one more step in a direction we shouldn’t have taken in the first place.
October 6th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
Wasn’t the Rumpus originally going to be part of HuffPo? I don’t remember why I think that.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
It does have the unique distinction of having a giant photo of Arianna right on the front page.
October 6th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
The photo could be a bit bigger, though. Hard to see.
October 7th, 2009 at 8:20 am
Thank you for your kind words Stephen! We will endeavor to keep our blog posts weekly, relevant, interesting, and useful. Praveen has an early draft of #2 on Why re-invent independent bookselling?… to some it’s obvious, to others no so much.
Adriane Tomine told me that he had been very disappointed when an Amazon executive bought several copies of the June 9, 2008 New Yorker cover showing a store owner opening his bookshop glancing over at his neighbor collecting her box of books from a UPS driver:
http://www.loganberrybooks.com/blog/NYer-amazon.jpg
Apparently the executive plastered the cover all over the office walls as a proclamation of success that they were putting independents out of business!
Our sense of urgency is clear, we must re-invent or die.
October 7th, 2009 at 9:32 am
I fully agree with your point here, Stephen, that publishers and venues covering publishing do not have to publicize the trash in order to get to things with more literary merit. I thought the point of moving things online was that costs would go down, allowing places to take risks. Does the Huffington Post really need to protect themselves so much, with coverage of hyper-trade garbage and endless parterships, given the success of the site in general and the reality, that much of their content is either produced elsewhere or produced by folks, including celebrities, who are clearly not counting on their HuffPo paycheck to pay their bills? Let’s hope they get a stronger vision and start taking risks. Thanks for pointing it out, and maintaining Rumpus where risks are part of the fundamental equation!