Did You Know Netflix Has a Book Club?
It launched in November 2021, so why am I just now hearing about this?
On October 13th, 2021, Netflix announced a new project to launch in November — the Netflix Book Club. As a semi-professional book nerd, I consider myself relatively well plugged-in to book news, and yet… I didn’t hear a thing about this until a banner ad on Goodreads caught my eye today, four months and four book-to-screen picks later.
A quick note on the name “book club” for ventures like this. I think the term, originally referring to a group of people gathering together to discuss a book or books, has become increasingly diluted in recent years thanks to the possibilities granted by the internet.
I am all for nontraditional ways to connect around books, but I wonder if a series of videos discussing books that Netflix has adapted to the screen can really be called a book club, when I see no clear attempt at a community/conversational element that goes both ways? It’s an interesting experiment and I am tentitively here for it, don’t get me wrong. Yet … a book club it may not quite be.
But I digress. Let’s get to the basic info about what, exactly, the Netflix book club is, since I’m making the tacit assumption that you, too, might not have heard of it yet.
