The Big Bad Book Blog

There isn’t much to say about YouTube that hasn’t already been said, but it would be careless to exclude this mammoth of social media from our series. And “mammoth” is no exaggeration: YouTube is big, hairy, and, er, tusk-wielding. Well, at least it’s the first of those three, unless we were to explore some extended metaphor. Get this: YouTube has the eighth largest audience on the Internet, pulling in 55 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings. Read: YouTube’s no fad. Google doesn’t pay $1.65 billion for fads. And fads don’t hold this much book marketing and publicity potential.

So, what exactly does YouTube—or at least the technology it employs—mean for book publishing? continue reading

A federal judge ruled last week that Valerie Plame cannot reveal the dates of her employ at the CIA in her upcoming autobiography Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House. Plame and Simon & Schuster filed suit against the agency when the CIA Publications Review Board decided that the memoir was fine–except for those dates. Thing is, the dates had already been widely reported and published in the Congressional Record (and are on Wikipedia). Judge Barbara Jones says, however, she was swayed to bar the dates from the book by a letter from the CIA. What did it say? Even S&S and Plame don’t know, since that letter was classified.

The publisher hasn’t said whether it will appeal the ruling, but the book seems to still be on track. You can already order it on Amazon! (Current user tags: “neocon garbage” (4), “glorified excrement” (5), and the succinct “Evil” (3).) Plame’s looking fetching on the cover, but the lack of classic spy imagery is disappointing.

Related books:

• Plame’s less hot husband Joseph Wilson wrote a door stopping account of the leak (The Politics of Truth, Carroll & Graf, $16.95) that was well-reviewed, but failed to reach sales of hotcake proportions,

The history page on Simon & Schuster’s website proudly declares that its founders made it “the first publisher to offer booksellers the privilege of returning unsold copies for credit—a practice that revolutionizes the book business,” happily oblivious to all the anger and controversy their little invention has caused. continue reading