THE ONION SYNDROME

They were trying to be funny. Publishers Weekly's PW Daily for Booksellers actually published this in an email distributed to subscribers:

Books Too Boring Compared to TV

Trade book sales fell 100% to $0.0 in 2003, according to the Association of American Publishers, as a bumper crop of compelling reality shows ranging from Average Joe to Queer Eye made reading seem boring in comparison. The figures, released today, sharply conflict with year-end statistics released by the AAP just yesterday, which indicated that trade book sales rose 43.2% to $13 trillion.

An AAP spokesperson explained that the 2003 figures unveiled yesterday were found to be incorrect under the organization's newest formula, by which annual book sales totals have been re-calculated going back to 1970. The spokesperson explained that the sales growth and totals have been refigured against a baseline of $0.0 in 1970. "Before the 1970s, cable television and home video games were not widely available, so book sales really didn't count," the spokesperson commented.

AAP numbers for 2003 also differ from statistics released by market research firm Ipsos-NPD. An NPD spokesperson cleared up the discrepancy by pointing out that its numbers are based on a weighted formula in which purchases of books bought only to be displayed on a coffee table to impress visitors were not counted, while books that consumers really wanted to read (defined by NPD as "bathroom books") counted twice.

In other statistics news, 2003 chain store book sales also were also revised downward, after it was discovered that the majority of revenue attributed to book sales was actually brought in by scones and cappuccino. The U.S. Census Bureau is expected to release its 2003 figures as soon as it finalizes its definition of "book."

The seemingly contradictory nature of this latest batch of statistics has led to renewed calls for more reliable industry figures. For its part, BookScan has issued a press release offering to clear up the confusion for anyone willing to "pay through the nose" for the information.

Hello?

April 23, 2004 9:02 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on April 23, 2004 9:02 AM.

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