Substack cometh, and lo it is good. (Pricing)

The end of the bookstore and the end of genre?

AmericanGods-ReprintThe new TNR seems to be a weird mismash of SJW-clickbait and interesting pieces on aspects of culture which the old TNR probably wouldn’t have thought to publish. I doubt that this version of TNR is long for this world, but I do appreciate pieces such as this conversation between Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishigoru, Breaking the Boundaries Between Fantasy and Literary Fiction. It’s rather self-indulgent, but what do you expect? The main question which they circle around is the nature of genre boundaries. This portion really jumped out at me:

NG: I loved the idea, because it seems to me that subject matter doesn’t determine genre. Genres only start existing when there’s enough of them to form a sort of critical mass in a bookshop, and even that can go away. A bookstore worker in America was telling me that he’d worked in Borders when they decided to get rid of their horror section, because people weren’t coming into it. So his job was to take the novels and decide which ones were going to go and live in Science Fiction and Fantasy and which ones were going to Thrillers.

KI: Does that mean horror has disappeared as a genre?

NG: It definitely faded away as a bookshop category, which then meant that a lot of people who had been making their living as horror writers had to decide what they were, because their sales were diminishing. In fact, a lot of novels that are currently being published as thrillers are books that probably would have been published as horror 20 years ago.

 

When I was an adolescent the way I would decide how to purchase a book, usually a paperback science fiction or fantasy, was to look for specific authors and covers. There wasn’t really that much planning or research ahead of time. There was a great deal of serendipity involved.

Things are different today. Usually before buying something in person I do some research online. Also, recommendation engines are pretty useful, and good at guiding you to a narrower set of choices attuned to your preferences. This obviates the need to some extent for genre categories as guides in the first place.

I’m thinking of this specifically because apparently Spotify Wants Listeners to Break Down Music Barriers (well, according to Farhad Manjoo). It makes sense for Spotify sense it has so much more data to work with than old style radio stations. Similarly, at some point Amazon will have enough reading and purchase information to get really good at pointing you to authors and works that are suited to your interests.

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