[HN Gopher] Beware of Book Blurbs
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Beware of Book Blurbs
Author : samclemens
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-03-03 22:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (themillions.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (themillions.com)
| fwlr wrote:
| I don't think I've ever paid attention to a blurb in my life.
| They are in the same category as those banners at the top of
| pages and the modals with convenient "X to close" in the top
| right.
| Swizec wrote:
| Blurbs affect you even if you think they don't. They're funny
| like that.
|
| I'm reading a great cyberpunk novel about biotech and AI right
| now (biopunk?). Fun book, very enjoyable. On the cover it has a
| Neal Stephenson blurb: _"Autonomous is to bio and AI what
| Necromancer was to the internet"_
|
| And without even thinking, that's exactly how I describe the
| book to anyone who asks. It's like the Neuromancer of the tech
| wave that we're on the cusp of.
|
| I probably would never be able to come up with that on my own.
| But I thought I did! I literally thought that was my own
| description until a few days ago I realized it's the
| description I see every time I open the book to read another
| chapter.
|
| And yes it's a great book. Totally recommend reading.
| goldfeld wrote:
| Maybe if the blurbs are not worth any attention then the book
| itself and how it's been edited is barely even deserving of
| that same attention? I'm sure the free classics from
| gutenberg.org which one can download on a kindle showcase no
| blurgs.
| pilarphosol wrote:
| The disease of blurbs is not that anyone consciously takes them
| seriously, but the fact that not having them has become a black
| mark. People are used to chatty book covers. This is just one
| of the many tools a dying industry uses to keep its unfair
| advantages.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Blurbs in book marketing: exactly the same comic content as in
| movie marketing.
|
| *The greatest story ever told! -- Jonas Logroller, Punxsutawney
| Herald
|
| if you think reviews are better, be aware that the NYRB is often
| referred to as "The New York Review of Each Others' Books."
| bonkersbonkers wrote:
| aka 'logrolling'.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logrolling
|
| Those in the UK will be very familiar with the satirical column
| in Private Eye that does precisely this (albeit for UK
| Publishers).
| wwarner wrote:
| Now chatgpt makes makes meaningless writing especially ugly. I
| predict the blurb's swift demise.
| pilarphosol wrote:
| The good and bad news is that publishing's social proof is
| about to lose 98 percent of its value once NLP gets to the
| point of having as much predictive value as publishing's
| signals. We might be there already. That doesn't mean a program
| can decide what is and is not great literature. It doesn't have
| to. It just to be better than the curators we have. That could
| probably be written in a hackathon with a decent labeled
| dataset.
|
| The good news is that this will make it a lot easier for good
| writers without connections or preexisting celebrity to be
| discovered. The bad news is that there will be a few people who
| reverse engineer the AI graders and get millions of readers
| despite not being all that good.
| lapcat wrote:
| 6 books of the Expanse series have the exact same blurb on their
| front covers from George R. R. Martin: "Interplanetary adventure
| the way it ought to be written."
| ruricolist wrote:
| It's true there's often a tenuous relationship between blurbs and
| books, but setting up reviews as the more reliable alternative to
| blurbs is untenable. Most reviews I read, especially in literary
| publications, have little to do with the book nominally under
| review. Mostly the book is there to provide the occasion for an
| essay, and the only part of the book that actually makes an
| appearance is the title.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| That's true, but that's why I read reviews of books I have no
| intention of ever reading. Conversely, GoodReads or Amazon are
| for books I _might_ read someday.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Book as occasion for essay is a great genre of essays though.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| This feels like you've never used goodreads, which demonstrates
| that short form reviews aren't merely tenable, but actually
| useful and about the contents of book?
| MrJohz wrote:
| Eh, I find Goodreads reviews really difficult to get a handle
| on. Moreso than, say, Rotten Tomatoes, where even if the
| aggregate rating is different to the rating that I'd give a
| film, the reviews are at least useful enough that I know what
| I'm going to get. With Goodreads, it's much more difficult to
| get a feel for what a book is going to be like based on the
| reviews.
|
| I wonder if this is because the literary world is a lot not
| heterogenous. Making a film is very expensive, so only a
| (relatively) small number get made each year, and they tend
| to fit into specific categories. If you know what sorts of
| films you like, it's easier to find more films that match
| what you want. Books, in comparison, have far more niches,
| and those niches often seem shallower, so that a single book
| often fits in multiple spaces for different reasons. I think
| this makes it harder to know exactly what sort of things work
| well for you in a book, which makes reviews harder to
| compare, because other people will often be reading a book
| very differently to you.
|
| I think this is similar to board games, which also tend to
| have many shallower niches, but at least for myself, I know
| which reviewers match my sort of games, and I know how to
| interpret their opinions. I don't feel like I have that same
| intuition in the literary world yet.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| Goodreads reviews are only useful for getting a lot of funny
| opinions _after_ having finished a book.
|
| not once have I ever used goodreads reviews for anything
| other than "damn, 3.6, this must be a polarizing book" before
| starting it.
| akudha wrote:
| This kinda reminds me of movie ads (previews? Not sure what
| they're called). Those two minutes have the best scenes from the
| 90 minute movie. Then you watch the movie, it ends up being
| ridiculously bad
| bombcar wrote:
| Trailers. I "love" the ones that make a slow paced romcom look
| like an action thriller.
| Algemarin wrote:
| Is there any market research available that shows that blurbs are
| actually effective in driving sales or interest in a book?
| pilarphosol wrote:
| The lack of them is probably more harmful than the content is
| helpful. But I do think they move readers who are on the fence
| about what to buy. It takes a long time investment to learn
| whether a novel is any good, so social proof is, unfortunately,
| a pretty big influence.
| onetokeoverthe wrote:
| [dead]
| ploum wrote:
| I'm always astonished by those blurbs on books in English.
|
| I'm currently reading "The science of story telling" by Will
| Storr. There are 5 blurbs on the cover, one on the back cover.
| The book open with 3 full pages containing 18 blurbs.
|
| That's completely ridiculous. It really deserves the book. It
| makes it look silly and unconfident.
|
| For French book, it is quite rare. When it happens, it's a red
| paper above the cover that you can remove after buying the book.
|
| Is that an American thing?
| ghaff wrote:
| That's a lot. But blurbs are pretty common in US books,
| probably especially non-fiction.
|
| A quick glance through some books on my coffee table shows
| multiple blurbs on the back cover are common, maybe something
| short and pithy on the front cover, and maybe a page of blurbs
| when you open up the book.
| kgwgk wrote:
| > It really __deserves__ the book.
|
| Maybe you meant to say disservices?
| okvdjv wrote:
| "Disservice" is not a verb. You can say "does a disservice to
| the book" or "diminishes" it.
| kgwgk wrote:
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/disservice
|
| https://www.dictionary.com/browse/disservice
| goldfeld wrote:
| I think it's cool and understandable as a sign of
| reciprocity.. if the book deserves the blurbs then really the
| blurbs deserve the book they're stuck with. Of course there
| is not always reciprocity, but apparently aye in this case.
| kgwgk wrote:
| I suspect that the use of "deserve" was just the result of
| a bad translation.
|
| https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/desservir/
| ploum wrote:
| sorry, I was confused by a French similar word. The intended
| meaning was "to harm"
| xhevahir wrote:
| Being American, I've been put off by the French (or maybe just
| Gallimard's?) way of doing things, which is to put the author's
| name in very bold print on the front, and on the back a short
| passage from the book which may or may not be representative of
| the book as a whole. Am I supposed to infer from the style of
| those few sentences whether the book is going to be good?
| Because as a non-native reader of French I don't feel competent
| to do that. (And I doubt that many readers can.) And all those
| cream or off-white covers! Don't get me started.
|
| Having said that, the last American book I bought after
| studying the blurb and the award medallion was bad enough that
| I didn't finish reading it.
| ploum wrote:
| Funny. I find the short passage more telling than "Awesome, a
| masterpiece (John Doe)". But the short passage is rare and
| more "litterary". Usually, it's a summary of the book (often
| written by the author himself/herself). Summary is, IMHO, the
| best way to judge a book. The worst being a summary that
| spoils the book (yeah, it happens...).
| gumby wrote:
| Since so many French (and not just French) books are sold
| shrink-wrapped, the only way to get any idea of the book's
| style is either the except from the text on the back or from
| the author (as in you already like X's writing). You must
| literally judge a book by its cover.
|
| Quite a few bookshops discourage you from opening the
| wrapper, especially, I find, in Germany for some reason.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| No, that's a French thing.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I don't disagree with the first paragraph, but I still find it
| amusing that one of the reasons people should beware of blurbs is
| that it's not a nice sounding word. That's well-written.
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