James Patterson Wants Bailout Money. Wait, What?

I don’t know James Patterson personally. I have no doubt he’s a kind and thoughtful man; I have absolutely no reason to believe otherwise.

But his recent ad (shown below) that ran in the New York Times Book Review and in Publishers Weekly (along with the follow-up article in Salon) proposing a government bailout for failing bookstores and publishers is one of the most atrociously ludicrous ideas I’ve ever heard.

(And that’s saying a lot when you’ve got guys like Scott Turow who keep opening the...