Why the Mark Zuckerberg Book Club Is a Great Development
(No irony or sarcasm intended)
Mark Zuckerberg, guilty of the crimes of being too powerful and too rich for someone with so little seeming experience of the world, can’t seem to catch a break so far with his recently launched book club, A Year of Books, which anyone with a Facebook account can follow.
The Washington Post checked in with a choking-on-its-own-snark update, headlined “Mark Zuckerberg’s book club is off to a pretty lame start,” which cast aspersions on the Zuckerberg effort to get people to read, claiming “the Internet” reacted “hysterically” to its launch. Damn, I hate when Internets do that. Reporter Caitlin Dewey then went on to point out — uh, is anyone still new to Facebook? — that the social media giant’s platform actually sucks when it comes to hosting a coherent discussion string.
Well, in fairness, this graf was pretty good: “Among the 137 ‘questions’ that followed: several requests for a pirated PDF of the book, a conspiracy theory involving Saudi social media and the price of oil and a photo of a Maltese wearing a frilly dress, along with many more on-topic, but still fairly stupid, questions.”
Even the New Yorker, weighing in via a Talk piece, seemed more interested in meandering remembrances of (cue up some sappy music) the glory days of Oprah and her original Book Club, the publishing world equivalent of the first days of girls screaming their lungs out for John and Paul and Ringo and George, with not much time to ponder what this choice by Zuckerberg means. So here are some points to ponder.
Mark Zuckerberg is actually reading books
OK, OK, now I’m the one going snark, but it’s a serious point: I’m the author of nine books, including four Times best-sellers as a co-writer/ghost, and I’ve been repeatedly bowled over the last decade by the doom and gloom in New York publishing. There was a craze to fret that e-books were going to ruin traditional New York publishing! Then there was a boom in talking up e-books as the financial salvation for New York publishing! Then came the fussing over modest growth in e-book sales! Like moon-faced high school sophomores staring goggle-eyed at the captain of the cheerleading team and not even noticing the book-loving knockout next door with the killer sense of humor and great smile, far too many key players in New York book publishing talk themselves into a desperation that justifies spending huge sums to snag this or that trend-of-the-moment title that won’t earn out but might make people feel good in-house for a while. It’s all stupid and self-defeating when the real task at hand is simple: Get back to your core mission of celebrating book reading, in all forms, and getting people to read. We need influential people to talk up book reading. We want them all to start book clubs and bring people along for the ride. We want this not because of the dream of Oprah-esque instant best-sellers to make lots of money, but because every time someone dives into a book, we always have a good shot at creating another passionate book-reader. Better to go reader by reader than forever stare up into the glare of stratospheric super-best-sellers.
Other book clubs will pop up via social media
I’ve been scratching my head in recent weeks whenever I check in at Facebook, which (admittedly) is not that often any more: Every day, I have new followers for a modest little effort I started at Facebook years ago called the Baseball Book Club. I’m a baseball author myself, and love baseball books. Activity at the site had pretty well flat-lined, then I started noticing new likes. On January 16 there were 14 new likes, then seven more the next day and nine more the day after that. This for a site that just cracked 600 likes total. I’ve asked these new arrivals to my book club what brought them, and the answer was “Facebook.” My theory: the surge in interest in Zuckerberg’s club is having a spillover effect. Prediction: Soon many more will launch their own book clubs via social media, San Francisco crime fiction to Maine minor-league baseball to cross-dressing surfers. In fact, have you considered starting your own book club? Why wait?
Time for some new technological bells and whistles from Facebook propeller heads
I’m willing to bet that even as I’m typing out these words, one or more tech wizards at Facebook are noticing that the big boss needs some help with the functionality of his book-club page. There has to be a way to tweak the software so that my tiny Baseball Book Club and Zuckerberg’s massive-and-growing A Year of Books (272,923 likes as of today) offer a more hospitable environment for consideration of the book at hand, instead of so much that is random and jumps all over the place. And if Facebook introduces such changes, it will be an improvement in the site that emerges not from some devious back-room scheming about long-term money-making or data-mining, but out of a comparatively unambiguous impulse to serve the community.
Zuckerberg’s tastes are going to evolve
Oprah famously started out recommending books that tended to meet certain criteria, and with time, her tastes broadened. She recommended books no one expected her to recommend. I can see why Zuckerberg has started with meaty ideas books like the current choice, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. He might consider Ahmed Rashid’s brilliant Descent Into Chaos as well. But he has a year of book-reading ahead of him and sooner or later, he’s bound to want to mix it up. Maybe a little California history? Or some Latin American fiction?
I for one think Zuckerberg deserves a little credit for going to the trouble to get people reading, and whatever comes of this experiment, I count it as all to the good. I know I’ll be watching his choices with interest — and I’m even going to step in and offer some thoughts at the Facebook page for the club. Not that anyone will notice …
