Publishing Saw Upheaval in 2020, But 'Books Are Resilient' (apnews.com) 20
Book publishing in 2020 was a story of how much an industry can change and how much it can, or wants to, remain the same. From a report: "A lot of what has happened this year -- if it were a novel, I would say that it had a little too much plot," said Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp. Three narratives ran through the book world for much of the year: an industry pressed to acknowledge that the status quo was unacceptable, an industry offering comfort and enlightenment during traumatic times, and an industry ever more consolidated around the power of Penguin Random House and Amazon.com. To its benefit and to its dismay, publishing was drawn into the events of the moment. The pandemic halted and threatened to wipe out a decade of growth for independent bookstores, forced the postponement of countless new releases and led to countless others being forgotten. The annual national convention, BookExpo, was called off and may be gone permanently after show organizers Reed Exhibitions announced they were "retiring" it.
The industry had long regarded itself as a facilitator of open expression and high ideals, but in 2020 debates over diversity and #MeToo highlighted blind spots about race and gender and challenged the reputations of everyone from poetry publishers to Oprah Winfrey, from book critics to the late editor of Ernest Hemingway. Employees themselves helped take the lead: They staged protests in support of Black Lives Matters and walked off the job at Hachette Book Group after the publisher announced it had acquired Woody Allen's memoir, which Hachette soon dropped. Through it all, books managed to sell, keeping a steady pace at a time when film and theater, among other industries, faced dire questions about their future.
The industry had long regarded itself as a facilitator of open expression and high ideals, but in 2020 debates over diversity and #MeToo highlighted blind spots about race and gender and challenged the reputations of everyone from poetry publishers to Oprah Winfrey, from book critics to the late editor of Ernest Hemingway. Employees themselves helped take the lead: They staged protests in support of Black Lives Matters and walked off the job at Hachette Book Group after the publisher announced it had acquired Woody Allen's memoir, which Hachette soon dropped. Through it all, books managed to sell, keeping a steady pace at a time when film and theater, among other industries, faced dire questions about their future.
Hm (Score:1)
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If it were a summary, I'd say it had a little too much logorrhea.
I started to skim the article so I could provide an example of a three-sentence summary, but got bored by the author's belief that their own flair with words is the reason people might read the article.
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So, your attention span is so long that you think anything more than flash fiction (1000 or 1500 words) is too long to read?
Why's an illiterate posting to the story, anyway?
Identifying Cancel Culture. (Score:5, Informative)
...debates over diversity and #MeToo highlighted blind spots about race and gender...Employees themselves helped take the lead...and walked off the job at Hachette Book Group after the publisher announced it had acquired Woody Allen's memoir.
This is a group being "offended" over the memoir of an old white guy, and their actions to cancel him being supported by a loud but ignorant portion of society.
Going forward, let's make sure we recognize the the significant difference between fighting for Justice, and Cancel Culture bullshit.
Re:Identifying Cancel Culture. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly this Get Woke, Go Broke bullshit is poisoning Comics [youtube.com] such as Marvel [hollywoodintoto.com], Movies [youtube.com], TV shows [youtube.com], Games [criticalhit.net]. This poison is slowly seeping into other industries [oneangrygamer.net]. Hollywood has been pandering [wsws.org] #MeToo for years. Hell, even advertising [youtube.com] isn't immune to this virtual signaling.
Notice how the Polygon review [polygon.com] of CyberPunk 2077 spends the first 7 paragraphs whining about "trans" problems in a video game even though the game has one of the most gender customizable character creations seen in a game.
The easiest sign are hijacking existing, long standing character and gender swapping, and/or turning them into a Mary Sue. The ultimate form of laziness -- because it would take "work" to be original. When a movie has to pander to gender / gender swapping to sell a movie, [google.com] instead of good writing, director, character development, pacing, then you know it is drinking the Kool-Aid and shouting "Look at me! I'm still relevant"
-- :-( People with mental illness deserve our compassion not on condemnation.
A man mutilating his genitals doesn't make him a "smart" woman -- it makes him a dumb man for not respecting his body. "Fixing" an external symptom instead of treating an internal problem doesn't make the problem go away! It should come as no surprise that the suicide rate is almost 40% among the transgender.
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But were the suicides because of some "gender mental illness" or how society treated them?
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But were the suicides because of some "gender mental illness" or how society treated them?
Of course I'm not a trained professional in this area, but I'd say it's more the illness when you consider this particular problem afflicts such a minuscule fraction of the entire human population.
My main point here is we treat and medicate those identified as suffering from a mental illness or disorder measured proportionality far less than gender dysphoria, and we treat and medicate to great success. With all given science, I don't believe it is necessarily wrong to say those who are suffering from gen
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Of course I'm not a trained professional in this area, but I'd say it's more the illness [of gender dysphoria which cause increased suicides]
You didn't need to mention you aren't a trained professional in this area given the content of your post. The medical industry no longer considers gender dysphoria (formally transsexualism) as a mental disorder. In most of the developed world it was already treated far differently than mental illness, as you point out, so this change was primarily to adjust laws and perception as opposed to changing medical practices. The science was already clear (for those with the training you lack) long before this chan
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Of course I'm not a trained professional in this area, but I'd say it's more the illness [of gender dysphoria which cause increased suicides]
You didn't need to mention you aren't a trained professional in this area given the content of your post. The medical industry no longer considers gender dysphoria (formally transsexualism) as a mental disorder. In most of the developed world it was already treated far differently than mental illness, as you point out, so this change was primarily to adjust laws and perception as opposed to changing medical practices. The science was already clear (for those with the training you lack) long before this change in terminology and designation.
Being transgender is a rare thing, but being rare doesn't make something a disorder. Doctors no longer try to stop a transgender individual from becoming comfortable with their body than they do to stop a tall person from growing.
Tall people account for 15% or more of the human population, and doesn't result in spikes of attempted suicide. Not exactly a suitable analogy there, and I'm far more concerned about the over-normalization of this than anything else. This is extremely rare for many valid reasons, but now we've managed to commercialize it with awards and spotlights for the most famous examples.
Unfortunately, mass narcissism feeding copycat behavior is rampant in social media today, so the end result of this over-normalizat
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"their actions to cancel him"
Should they be forced to go back to work at Hachette?
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"their actions to cancel him"
Should they be forced to go back to work at Hachette?
If they're that triggered over the writings of Woody Allen, perhaps they have no place at Hachette or any print distributor for that matter. They would need clutches upon clutches of pearls to make it through one shelf of emboldened historical writings that make Allen pale in comparison, which is exactly why this reeks of targeted Cancel Culture Crapola.
It's not the fact they walked off the job. Work wherever the hell you want. Just don't come forth with hypocritical excuses regarding unemployment.
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Going forward, let's make sure we recognize the the significant difference between fighting for Justice, and Cancel Culture bullshit.
Let's go even further and recognise how this growing selfishness leads to more people becoming vulnerable to manipulation, and to a political landscape that seeks to exploit it on either side.
It has been here before and has already been seen prior to World War I and II, where it led to these wars as a result of people taking it as far as genocide. The "modesty culture" (as opposed to "cancel culture") we have experienced since then is the result of these wars and we only have been blessed with it for so lon
Books are best (Score:4, Insightful)
They can't take back ebooks I rip, either. (Score:3)
Dead tree media have their uses but are mostly a waste of space requiring considerable storage to maintain. The general solution to tracking is of course piracy, which tracking makes a reasonable response.
Books are resilient (Score:1)
No, they are not, one quick dip in the bathwater and you can throw them away.
Looking at buying a bookstore (Score:2)
Mergers and takeovers (Score:2)
Meaning that fewer original books get published*, and more freakin' bean counters want unending sequels and clones of a good story. They'll buy more formulaic crap.
And, please, don't talk to me about self-publishing. The number of folks who are actually sucessfull at it - we're talking selling over 10k copies - are miniscule.