Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. Jim Collins. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 288 pp.
During the last two decades, the popularity of books has grown exponentially. According to Bowker, book production through traditional avenues in the United States alone has grown from just over 100,000 titles in 1993 to nearly 300,000 in 2008, and the number of fiction titles has more than doubled. This does not account for the more than 750,000 self-published and print-on-demand books published in 2009 alone. In a nutshell, books are big business. In Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins, professor of film and television and English at the University of Notre Dame, explores the impact of the convergence of literary, visual, and material cultures on the book publishing industry.
Collins begins by analyzing the audience—readers, starting with a historical examination, including readers of Ladies Home Journal in the early twentieth century, who were encouraged to “read only the best books” as a means of obtaining culture. He discusses the difference between “high-brow” professional readers—literature scholars and critics—as opposed to “middle-brow” unprofessional readers. As literacy rates have increased, the popularity of books, particularly literary fiction, progressed naturally. By the 1990s, the growth of the book superstores such as Amazon.com, Borders, and Barnes & Noble, along with the rising popularity of book clubs, took book discussions from the hallowed halls of academia into the homes of ordinary, everyday people. Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, for example, created instant bestsellers, although his discussion of Oprah’s Anna Karenina show is a laborious and tedious transcript that serves only to challenge Winfrey’s authority as the “national librarian” for those Collins views as unprofessional readers.
While film adaptations of books have existed since the silent era, Collins presents the “Miramax formula,” which garnered the Weinstein Brothers more than 200 Oscar nominations in the last two decades. Many of these book adaptations intertwine sexual passion with a love of all things literary, resulting in a “quality cultural experience” that, combined with intensive marketing, guarantees grand box office success. Collins supports this argument by providing comparative textual analyses of Shakespeare in Love, The English Patient, and The Hours both as books and films.
Collins closes by exploring the literary bestseller, and questions what is, indeed, “literary.” Should literature be appreciated because one resonates with the characters on the page or is the author’s craft more important? While he discusses the rise of “change your life fiction,” which he refers to as quality fiction on the bestsellers’ displays in the superstores, he does not explore what really makes a book a bestseller. Many would argue that bestsellers are not written, but rather created by marketing strategies—cooperative advertising in stores that places the title in prominent places, media coverage, and sometimes the author’s own good looks and sex appeal.
Collins’ discussion of the hybridization of book distribution through electronic delivery systems such as films and television is an important one in examining how literary culture becomes popular culture. Since a book is simply content that is packaged in the format of a book, the impact of e-books and other new technologies are worth exploring. While e-books have been around as long as the Internet, the introduction of the Amazon Kindle in 2007 made this format more popular and accessible. Less than three years after the release of the Kindle, Amazon sold more e-books per quarter than traditional paper-and-ink books. Other retail outlets like Barnes & Noble and Borders followed suit with their own e-readers. Rather than reinventing itself, the book industry has allowed electronic companies to create new technologies to direct its future.
The rapid growth of self-published books and print-on-demand technology has also affected literary culture. During the last decade, the number of non-traditionally published new titles has increased from 30,000 in 2002 to more than 750,000 in 2009. When some self-published books sell well enough to go to auction and garner advances up to seven figures, many have challenged the assumption that self-publishing is only for those who aren’t good enough to land publishing contracts with one of the six major publishing houses. Technological advancements mean that authors no longer have to wait for a contract from a traditional publisher and, in effect, give authors the power to control their own literary destinies.
There is a multitude of reasons why literary culture has become popular culture. While Collins provides in-depth analyses of literature and film, the proliferation of new titles and the accessibility of content through electronic delivery systems are certainly worth exploring in detail. As content and marketing avenues become more readily available to the consumer market, the popularity of content packaged in the form of books or e-books continues to increase.
TREVY A. McDONALD
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill