It is World Book Night next week and World Book Night is a good thing, because it is fun and helps get books into the hands of people who wouldn’t otherwise read them.
And people should read books. Books are good.
But many are intimidated. One of the reasons people are put off reading is snobbery. You know, the snobbery that says opera and lacrosse and Pinot Noir and jazz fusion and quails’ eggs and literary fiction are for certain types of people and them alone?
There is something innately snobby about the world of books. There is the snobbery of literary over genre, of adult books over children’s, of seriousness over comedy, of reality over fantasy, of Martin Amis over Stephen King. And it is unhealthy. If books ever die, snobbery would be standing over the corpse.
So here is my message to book snobs:
1. People should never be made to feel bad about what they are reading. People who feel bad about reading will stop reading.
8. It does not matter about who the author is. The only thing a book should be judged on is the words inside. [MS: Orson Scott Card anyone?]
26. Stephen King was right. Books are ‘portable magic’. And everyone loves magic.
Michael Sauers is currently the Director of Technology for Do Space in Omaha, NE. Michael has been training librarians in technology for the past twenty years and has also been a public library trustee, a bookstore manager for a library friends group, a reference librarian, serials cataloger, technology consultant, and bookseller since earning his MLS in 1995 from the University at Albany’s School of Information Science and Policy. Michael has also written dozens of articles for various journals and magazines and his fourteenth book, Emerging Technologies: A Primer for Librarians (w/ Jennifer Koerber) was published in May 2015 and more books are on the way. In his spare time he blogs at travelinlibrarian.info, runs The Collector’s Guide to Dean Koontz Web site, takes many, many photos, and typically reads more than 100 books a year.
View all posts by Michael Sauers
It is World Book Night next week and World Book Night is a good thing, because it is fun and helps get books into the hands of people who wouldn’t otherwise read them.
