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The death of non-narrative books
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Thanks for clarifying. By "non-narrative" I thought you were referring to postmodern fiction. The use of the term in this article is new to me. I find his discussion too general to accept his claim. Also, I have problems with Manichean conceptualizing, forcing into two boxes.
Oh - a lot of words there that I don't understand. Non-narrative in this case means something very simple: a book that contains no sense of narrative - no story.
"10 greatest things about sharks" is not going to sell much these days. I've got wikipedia for that.
"The great shark story" might sell.
Cookbooks are pointless? I disagree. Sure, you can look up millions of versions of chicken piccata, and I've done that, but my favorite recipes are easily bookmarked in a hard or soft cover. When I've used an online recipe, the bookmarks get buried deeply. And I can easily make extensive notes. But then, I hear more everyday how the wives of the future (and of the present, many of them are New Brides) can no longer cook. Btw, it's obvious to those of us who can.. Most of them basically cook from canned ingredients, sadly. In my own personal experience, a niece who recently married says her new husband loves the waffle iron I purchased off their register. Because, in her family, her dad "makes the bread stuff". She has no interest, other than take out.And searching for a decent, quickly dashed off recipe, is a real pain. At least the act of publishing into a "real book" (since according to an article I read just after this one won't exist much longer) gets looked at by copy editors many times over. I find SO MANY errors in e-format, the book (or recipe) is useless.
Wikipedia is awesome also, but it is a constant work in process, and also contains errors, which many younger than I still accept as infallible information.
Please continue the discussion. Am I misguided in my opinion?ive used the example of cookbooks because it's more immediate to my own experience.
And I've not even explored the Art Instruction genre. And, in defense of books, they still aren't reliant on a power source, once you buy one. Oh, and they aren't pulled back electronically after a time either. That has also happened. When I bought the ebook, I wasn't informed that it was a long term "rental". I thought I'd bought it, silly me.
I admit that I didn't read the article, but just wanted to quickly chime in that my bookshelves and Kindle are full of non-fiction non-narrative books. I mostly buy them if I enjoy the author and what they have to share. The ones I have enjoyed, I refer back to time and time again. I think there is a huge market for these books, especially in the self-help genre :)
I think Appleby is being far to general in that he may not be considering all reader audiences. I'm in the same boat as Leila: my Kindle is full of non-narrative books which I consider to be just as useful and enjoyable as the narrative stories I've kept, as are most of my friends. And let us not forget the grade school audience, where "Ten Greatest Things About Sharks" would likely sell in tandem with "The Great Shark Story."
This topic was suggested by a few members in my last discussion. I brought up what I see as the biggest change in publishing that no-one seems to be talking about.
In an age of information, non-narrative books are already pointless.
To start with, this is a really good article that I mostly agree with. It won the Bookseller essay competition back in 2014.
http://www.thebookseller.com/feature/...
I am considering collating various thoughts on the topic into a blog to appear on the Reedsy Blog blog.reedsy.com sometime soon.
Any thoughts on the above, keep them short, astute and to-the-point.
Thomas