Melville House Books

A few years ago, when Michael Wolff was still writing for New York magazine, he wrote a fun column taking the book business to task: “I mean, books suck. Most books are dopier than television or movies or even advertising (many books tend to be just collateral promotions or the lesser offspring of dopey television, movies, and advertising). Even if there are precious exceptions, the overwhelming number of big-money, industry-sustaining books are incontrovertibly dum-dum things. More cynical, more pandering than any other entertainment product.”

The “books suck” comment, he says, led to his being subjected to “much middlebrow opprobrium.”

But now, Wolff says in a scathing new column at Newser, “I’d like to revise that line: Books are evil. They’re pernicious. They represent themselves as being one thing, when they’re insidiously the opposite.”

What is Wolff — the author of several books himself — talking about? He cites recent books by Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, books that are not written by the people whose name is on the cover, and aren’t really meant to be read in any traditional sense. He’s worth quoting at length:

This sort of book once fell into a particular publishing category called a vanity book — it was not to be taken seriously. It was to be dismissed, or tolerated only with the clearest condescension.

But now the most valuable and therefore well-looked-after books are vanity publications.

If there are still good books, they are largely irrelevant to a form and business that is largely about the creation of the artifact-identifier, symbol, leave-behind, brand enhancer.

Books are a sales tool. They’re propaganda.

And they’re fake. A lie. So many are just simply not written by the people the publisher tells you they are written by. Somebody should sue.

It’s a sleight of hand. A bait and switch. It’s not that there is anything wrong, or at least out of the ordinary, with salesmanship or promotional copy, or with even saying you wrote what your ghostwriter wrote. This is the stuff of speeches, advertising, and testimonials. What’s insidious here is that these forms, which are understood to be insincere and a confection, are now in the guise of a book, which is understood to be genuine and substantial.

And, indeed, people are fooled. And, to the extent that readers are not fooled (and reading just a few paragraphs of these books, if you do read them, ought to raise questions), the form of the book itself is undermined. Books lose value and meaning. Real readers come to understand there are fewer and fewer real books.

Publishers publish fake books because, if you have an “author” who has some larger cause to promote, the publisher gets free promotion. What the publisher has traded for such an abundance of promotion is its own brand. HarperCollins does not really believe Sarah Palin has written a valuable book–or even that it is really a book, not in the way that HarperCollins has historically understood books, or in the way that people have counted on HarperCollins to have understood a book. But, these are desperate times and real books are an increasingly equivocal proposition anyway, so almost all publishers are willing to engage in the strategic mix-up between real books and fake books.

This really isn’t quibbling. We have created a giant system of national agitprop, in which books and the book business have become one of the most effective tools.

So what’s the solution? Says Wolff, “Literate people should boycott books.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.