“We’re kicking off our Q&A now with Moisés Naím, author of The End of Power,” advised whatever poor Facebook employee runs the “Year of Books” community page. “As a reminder, please keep all questions and comments relevant to the book.”
Among the 137 “questions” that followed: several requests for a pirated PDF of the book, a conspiracy theory involving Saudi social media and the price of oil and a photo of a Maltese wearing a frilly dress, along with many more on-topic, but still fairly stupid, questions.
January 16, 2015
Mark Zuckerberg's book club isn't working out too well.
"See, when Zuckerberg actually hosted the first book club 'meeting' — a Facebook Q&A yesterday with the book’s author, Moises Naím — he faced a problem familiar to far more plebeian bookclubs: Hardly anybody showed up. (And of those who did, few had actually read the book.)"
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14 comments:
So what exactly is going wrong in Zuck’s much-touted club? ... It’s also 320 pages long, which means — since the club starts a new volume every two weeks — you’d have to read 23 pages each day to keep up.
Whoa, 23 pages a day?
Heavy Dude. Heavy.
Lame Dude. Lame.
It looks like Mark Zuckerberg’s error was in expecting people who join a book club to actually read the book.
I found that when I join a book club of popular, current fiction, the odds of people reading it are very low. If you go onto a genre fiction website and join a community, they almost, 100%, read the books.
What does this teach me?
Book clubs are most successful when a group of like minded people come together to read things they want, rather than when a top-down authority tells them what important book of the month they should read.
I've tried to find a good book club to join in the Twin Cities and the ones built around genre fiction seem to be the ones where people are actually interested in reading the book. The others that I've tried seemed like they were just an excuse to get together and drink.
Well of course most questions were stupid. That's always the case. That's why crowd sourced ideas always turn out to be the most obvious unimaginative possibility. (When Kasparov plays chess against an opponent whose next move is voted on by 50,000 social media users, is it any surprise his opponent plays like a rank beginner?)
If you want insight, you need somebody to filter out the crap.
Thorley, does that mean you avoid the genre fiction groups?
If you go onto a genre fiction website and join a community, they almost, 100%, read the books.
I would be interested in something like that. Could you give me a link, or a google search term?
Matthew Sablan
Book clubs are most successful when a group of like minded people come together to read things they want, rather than when a top-down authority tells them what important book of the month they should read.
I belong to a book club that has been going for 7 years at a local public library. We vote on the books. One thing I learned the hard way was to look at a book before I nominate it. Just because a book is considered classic doesn't mean you will will like reading it.
This is exactly what would happen if we had a book club at our agency.
I would guess that the usual denizen of a book club like ones Matthew Sablan references (the top-down authority ones) are people who would consider themselves first and foremost as intellectuals. Membership in the book club would be part of their evidence of their intellectualism (along with such things as a knowledge of wines, listening to NPR, voting Democrat, NEVER ending a sentence with a preposition, knowing what a preposition is, wondering what we have done to make them justifiably hate us so, and an affinity for alternative medicine; I'm painting with a broad brush here).
Kind of a cargo cult thing.
I used to participate in a book club that The Record (a local paper Althouse would know) ran. You could ask to participate if you wanted to, so you could pick which books interested you. I usually was selected because I was one of the few men who asked. They would have the author or a "facilitator" to run things. Everyone read the book. It was obvious. Lots of good questions and comments, many I never would have thought of. They don't do it anymore. I miss it.
Sample authors who appeared: Foer, Bohalian (both good in person, and both looked/sounded like what you would imagine). Oates was asked but declined - I would have liked to meet her.
For Oates, we read Blonde. It was 900 pages, ie. more than 23 pages per day.
The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be, by Moises Naim
What an awful book to choose as your kick off. Nobody literate is going to join your club, and anybody who would buy a book like that is not somebody you want to be in a club with. You might as well choose The World is Flat.
No facebook users have the attention span for a book.
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