A progressive book club?
It’s easy to make jokes about the publishing industry being full of liberals, or churning out books about liberals for liberals. I think the bigger problem is probably region bias. Consider this title that I just found on my office’s “free books” shelf: How the Other Half Hamptons, by Jasmin Rosemberg. Now, I get that people in New York City might find this book incredibly clever, but I defy you to find anyone not living in the Northeast (or, possibly, in L.A.) who uses “Hamptons” as a verb.
Back to my main point: the idea of a progressive book club isn’t necessarily ridiculous, insofar as the conservative book club is a modest success and there’s no liberal counterpart. Except that it kind of is ridiculous. Judging from the titles referenced in the New York Times piece, I don’t really see how this club will differ from, say, the main table at the front of your local Borders. Or Books-a-Million or whatever other bookstore you shop at that is probably staffed by hippy-dippy English majors killing time until they can get a real job in academia. The whole point of the conservative book club, back when it was getting started, was that you couldn’t find red meat like Ann Coulter or Dinesh D’Souza at the bookstore.
As much as I might dislike Coulter’s work, she fills a niche and wouldn’t have been able to do so without the advent of the conservative book club and the Internet. In addition to run-of-the-mill ideological bias at bookstores, there was no known market for her (or any conservative’s) stuff. But what, exactly, the progressive book club is offering is unclear. You can probably get the books cheaper on Amazon. If you want “social networking,” you can go to Facebook or Daily Kos. If you need recommendations on what to read you can go to any of those three sites or hundreds of others. This project strikes me as the dead-tree counterpart to Air America–the company heads are filling a niche no one is asking them to fill. Liberal talk radio didn’t take off because we already have NPR; the liberal book club probably won’t take off because we already have Amazon and Borders.