Daily Thoughts 8/25/2010
I have been reading more of Bring On The Books For Everybody. I like Jim Collins description of many of the newer womens novels being "romantic consumerism". It fits nearly perfectly with books like The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger. He also uses another term postliterary novel for books like The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Jay Fowler which has a nice ring to it. He is showing how books and films are tied in knots together. I can see how shows like Sex and The City are a natural extension of modern "chick lit".
On the subway home, I finished reading Bring On The Books For Everybody. Jim Collins excerpts a paragraph from The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon in the final chapter of the book. It is about the "cemetery of forgotten books" one of my favorite places in literature. The author is challenging the idea of Fahrenheit 451 in the final chapter, offering us a vision of popular culture which combines literature with visual mediums like film and television. It is much closer to my own view of the future of books.
Today was another quiet day. We discussed vendors today. I am going to take a look at Ingram. Ingram has slightly better discounts than the other vendors for hardcover and paperback books. We also discussed how we are going to keep track of missing books. I spent quite a bit of time on the floor helping patrons with reference.
Last night was kind of interesting. I had to work on cleaning up a trojan on my machine. There were a lot of attacks on computers focused on companies spoofing other peoples machines and asking them to buy their antivirus software. The warning comes as a popup, then says your machine is not properly protected. I went through Computer Associates, Microsoft, and another company to get my machine back up. It took many hours to clean up. Microsoft had me use a company called Esoft to finally clean up my machine.
I also had a chance to read a bit of the Facebook Era. There is a concept which is introduced called the "online social graph" which is a map of all the people on the internet and how they are connected. Clara Shih reminds us that the internet is about people. In her view social and consumer networks are beginning to merge and old fashioned advertising is no longer working.
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