Archives of Amazon

• Thick as Thieves, the excellent young Seattle-based comics newspaper, is running a Patreon to fund future issues. If you put in $5 a month, you'll get five copies of every new issue of the paper. (Admittedly, Thick as Thieves is a free paper, but I don't have to explain to you that art is worth money, do I?)

• Yes, Bill Clinton and literary sweatshop owner James Patterson are "collaborating" on a novel about a missing president. No, you shouldn't read it. Anything that Patterson touches turns into a soulless brick of commercial fiction.

• In the Fantagraphics Free Comic Book Day comic, Pepe the Frog creator Matt Furie killed Pepe once and for all. Furie had tried to do battle with the Trump-loving white supremacists who ran off with his creation, but it's almost impossible to reclaim a symbol like that, once it's been turned into a sign of hate.

• In a masterful show of trollery, Amazon is opening its 13th brick-and-mortar Amazon Books location in a Washington DC space that previously was home to a Barnes & Noble store.

• In a shitty show of trollery, Amazon is changing its deal with booksellers and authors. In response, an author named Brooke Warner published an essay titled "How Amazon, Once Again, Is Driving Down The Value Of Books And Undermining Authors." That headline is pretty much evergreen.

• Some good advice for booksellers and librarians everywhere:

Booksellers/librarians:

"I need a book rec for a 6yo."
✅ "Cool! What do they like?"
❌ "For a boy or girl?"

Thanks in advance.

— Jay Elliot Flynn (@jayelliotflynn) May 8, 2017

• You can add poet Sarah Galvin to the short list of Seattle authors who have gone on a European tour. Starting on Sunday, Galvin will be traveling to bookstores in Amsterdam, Krakow, Paris, Berlin, and Reykjavik in support of her terrific new collection out from Gramma Press, Ugly Time. If you know anyone in or near those cities, let them know by sending them a link to the tour page.

• Heidi MacDonald at the Beat broke some pretty big news this morning: Jim Demonakos, the Seattle-area comics retailer who started Emerald City Comicon, has left the organization. Two years ago, Demonakos sold ECCC to ReedPop, an international producer of comic book conventions. "I’m not leaving for another job, I don’t have an immediate new project," Demonakos wrote in a Facebook post announcing the change. This means that next year's ECCC will be the first time the show is not produced by its founder. It'll be interesting to see if the convention can maintain its essential Seattle-ness without Demonakos at the lead.

• At Strong Towns, Kea Wilson wrote a piece about why urbanists need to talk about Amazon:

Amazon has made it their business model to make you think that way: they market themselves as your friendly, invisible big box store, with all of the benefits and none of the massive, concrete drawbacks of the K-Marts of the world that you’ve (rightly) come to distrust. All you see is the website, algorithmically manipulated to show you everything you want and need—and two days later, a little brown box on your doorstep with a smile printed on the side.

• Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is launching an interesting new news organization. I don't know if Wikitribune will actually work, but it's always worth your attention when people try new models of journalism.

• The bookstore that trolled Piers Morgan on Twitter is now in the middle of a crowdfunding campaign to stay open.

• This 2011 video of a carwash for books is making the rounds on Twitter and it's so terrific that you should watch it again:

• I'm quoted in this very good short sendoff for the APRIL Festival in this month's Seattle Met, by Darren Davis:

The party may be ending this year with a send-off event, but it leaves having made its mark on the local literary scene. “APRIL took readings out of bookstores and into bars, onto the street,” says Paul Constant of The Seattle Review of Books, who started noticing younger crowds at readings after 2012.

• Blogging service Medium announced yesterday that they're going to start selling memberships for $5 per month. A whole lot of blogs that we like, including The Awl and Electric Literature, moved over to Medium last year. Then, Medium laid off a bunch of employees. Hopefully, they'll figure this out, because there aren't very many blogging options available to people anymore. I remain skeptical that a subscription, which offers "exclusive stories" and an "offline reading list," is going to be lucrative enough to support the company, but I wish them luck.

• The latest issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice features an article titled "A Comparison of Traditional Book Reviews and Amazon.com Book Reviews of Fiction Using a Content Analysis Approach.” The idea is to determine whether traditional book reviews or Amazon reviews are more helpful for librarians. Here's the conclusion from the abstract:

Although Amazon.com provides multiple reviews of a book on one convenient site, traditional sources of professionally written reviews would most likely save librarians more time in making purchasing decisions, given the higher quality of the review assessment.

• I interviewed former Elizabeth Warren staffer Ganesh Sitaraman at Town Hall last night about his new book The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution. Sitaraman is an incredibly smart man who had a lot to say about the history of income equality in this country, and the audience Q&A portion of the evening was fantastic. You should read Sitaraman's book, which will influence political theory for years to come. And if you would like more information before you pick it up, I'd encourage you to read this wonderful Atlantic interview with him.

• If you're looking for a fun way to support the Short Run Comix & Art Festival, you should consider joining their Mini-comics club, which supports the festival's micropress.

Help support Short Run’s Micropress by joining our Mini-comics Club! Want mini-comics delivered to your door every month? Donors at the $120 level will receive a Short Run tote bag and 1 mini-comic every month to fill it up. We have curated a selection of Pacific Northwest artists who represent the look and feel of Short Run.

• Tickets for the May 23rd Seattle appearance of Arrested Development and Transparent actor Jeffrey Tambor went on sale yesterday. Seattle Arts and Lectures is bringing him to town to celebrate the publication of his memoir Are You Somebody?

• Cory Doctorow is launching an online ebook retailer codenamed Shut Up and Take My Money, which he bills as the world's first "fair trade" online store.

As an author, being my own e-book retailer gets me a lot. It gets me money: once I take the normal 30 percent retail share off the top, and the customary 25 percent royalty from my publisher on the back-end, my royalty is effectively doubled. It gives me a simple, fair way to cut all the other parts of the value-chain in on my success: because this is a regular retail sale, my publishers get their regular share, likewise my agents. And, it gets me up-to-the-second data about who's buying my books and where.

• Amazon is not just threatening bookstores anymore. Turns out, according to Naked Capitalism, Amazon might be putting 12 million non-book retail jobs at risk, too. Amazon's growth is increasing, mall retail stores are collapsing, and Amazon only needs half as many employees as brick-and-mortars.

• This tweet is making the rounds:

Kafka's diaries show the real fun side of writing. pic.twitter.com/h7UWC7UFVR

— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) March 19, 2017

• Regarding that tweet, to aspiring writers: for God's sake, don't suffer for your art. Just write every day, no matter how difficult it may be. You will improve and it will get easier. Writing doesn't have to be a Kafkaesque experience.

For years, Amazon has offered commissions to book bloggers who link to books on Amazon. In other words, if you were reading a review on a blog and you clicked the link on the blog to buy that book on Amazon, you'd be sending a small amount of money the bloggers' way. It's called the affiliate program. Some book blogs have grown to depend on affiliate revenue over the years, and Amazon relied on affiliates to serve, effectively, as handsellers for the company.

As of today, that deal has changed. Nate Hoffelder at The Digital Reader notes that Amazon is cutting the amount they pay to affiliates by a significant amount:

Amazon is saying that they don't want to pay as much they used to; they no longer value the more active affiliates. That is their right; Amazon is in business to make money, and I can understand why they made this decision...I have been crunching my numbers, and I expect to lose about a fifth of my Amazon affiliate income. That's going to hurt, and I won't be the only one to feel the pinch.

This is what happens when you're the only game in town: when you decide to change the rules, there's nothing anyone else can do.

What does this mean for you? Well, it's likely there'll be even fewer book blogs for you to read in the months and years to come. A few of those bloggers are in the comments on the Digital Reader post. One notes, "Lots of people wanted to believe Amazon was altruistic and a force for good in the publishing world. Well it ain’t, and we’re seeing it more and more."

If your business relies on Amazon — whether you're a self-publisher or an affiliate or a used bookseller — you should remember that: pretty much everybody who partners with Amazon gets the shaft eventually.

For the sake of transparency, when you click on a book that the Seattle Review of Books reviews, that link will almost always take you to IndieBound, the online retailing site for the American Booksellers Association. IndieBound does provide an affiliate-like service, meaning if you were to buy a book through a link on our site, we'd get a (very small) amount in return. It's not part of our operating budget at all. If you want to support us, you should buy a sponsorship with us.

• Tomorrow is the Seattle 7 Writers Holiday Bookfest, which I wrote about for this week's Literary Event of the Week column. This is a great event and you should go, for all the reasons I explained. However, I made one error in the column that I want to amend here: I wrote... "...And if you’d like to make your neighborhood a more literate place, feel free to bring some 'gently used books,' which Seattle 7 Writers will then distribute to little free libraries around the city." That is actually slightly wrong: Seattle 7 Writers will definitely accept your used books, but they will instead use them for their terrific Pocket Library program, which is even better than donating them to Little Free Libraries. Here's what the Pocket Libraries are, from their own website:

Pocket libraries at a wide variety of sites provide invaluable reading material for women, men, and children who are currently without bookshelves of their own. Since 2010, we have donated over 30,000 books to local shelters, food banks, literacy organizations, recovery and counseling sites, and detention centers.

• I regret the above error. Please give to Seattle 7's Pocket Libraries if you can.

• While we're referring back to old posts, that British Amazon ad about religious tolerance I was talking about a couple days back has finally been made available to American audiences.

• Does the world need more hatchet job book reviews? DJ Taylor at the New Statesman seems to think so.

• Is it time to retire the phrase "graphic novel?" Glenn Weldon at NPR seems to think so.

• Jean Riley wrote a great roundup of the state of independent bookselling in Seattle for Seattle Magazine.

The past few decades have been challenging for independent bookstores, with each decade seeming to bring on a new threat: First, there were the huge chains that dominated the retail landscape. Then, there was the shift to online shopping, followed by the invention of electronic–reading devices. And now, the entry of Amazon into brick-and-mortar territory with its first store in Seattle. Yet despite some trepidation expressed by area booksellers leading up to Amazon’s store opening last year, the indie scene here is undergoing a quiet renaissance, as evidenced by the spring opening of Third Place Books in Seward Park, bookstore buyouts and one of the most successful Independent Bookstore Days the city has experienced.

• Speaking of Amazon and brick-and-mortar stores: is Amazon really getting into the convenience store business? Apparently, the online retailer is planning on shops that would function like the"bodegas and convenience stores found in larger cities, offering customer the ability to quickly purchase both perishable and non-perishable products, like milk, meats, peanut butter, and other items." It's unclear if they'd carry books, too.

• Here's a time-lapse video of the New York Public Library's Reading Room as staff prepare it for its grand re-opening after renovations:

• And speaking of the New York Public Library, did you know that the NYPL has secret apartments? Atlas Obscura takes you on a tour.

Every Friday, Cienna Madrid offers solutions to life’s most vexing literary problems. Do you need a book recommendation to send your worst cousin on her birthday? Is it okay to read erotica on public transit? Cienna can help. Send your questions to advice@seattlereviewofbooks.com.

Dear Cienna,

I refuse to buy books from Amazon, either in physical or ebook format. The way they shut down bookstores was morally reprehensible.

But I’m ashamed to even type this — I buy everything else from Amazon. Groceries, bedding, electronics. I even got an Echo recently, and now I talk to Alexa when I’m home alone with the thing.

I’ve built up this hypocritical firewall in my brain that somehow just because I buy my diapers and detergent from Amazon, my money isn’t going to the books portion of the company. I’m just lying to myself, right? I’m putting bookstores out of business because I like things to be convenient. Should I pack up Alexa and put her in the garage?

Claudia, Fremont

Dear Claudia,

Here is a brief list of people more hypocritical than you:

• Football fans who scream "Constitutional freedom!" when it comes to their guns but condemn quarterback Colin Kaepernick for opting out of the national anthem.
• Animal lovers who kill spiders.
• Any feminist who has thought about Paul Ryan's abs while in bed.
• Everyone who loves children so much they let them make all of their clothing and electronics.

It's easy to identify values that resonate with us but nearly impossible to live by them all, so we pick and choose our favorites. For instance, I espouse a healthy basement lifestyle: every morning I start my day with six crunches and a half-minute of calisthenic door squats. At bars I brag to attractive strangers that I am healthy, very popular with introverts, and have never given birth to anything human.

But as my spiders like to point out, only half of them are introverts and my eating habits are actually pretty unhealthy – I have a serious sweet tooth. They say sugar is poison, I say they drink too much, and here we are at an impasse: Who is actually healthier and why do I routinely find myself with a mustache full of cookie crumbs, arguing with wine-soaked spiders about type 2 diabetes on a Friday night?

That is my cross to bear. Yours is the albatross of Amazon.com. For what it's worth, I doubt local booksellers care where you buy your diapers. If you're trying to support local booksellers, buy books from them. Boycotting Amazon, while symbolic, won't pay their rent. (If it helps, I've found chanting, "I condemn thee" at my cookies before I eat them makes me feel better about my personal choices.)

And don't let Alexa control your life. The lights, maybe, but make sure to draw the line somewhere.

Kisses,

Cienna

Of course, there was no such thing as a midnight Harry Potter party when the first book in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was released in the United States back in 1998. I was a bookseller at a Borders when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone debuted, and the books gradually gained attention thanks to a word-of-mouth campaign spurred by the book’s popularity in Britain and a succession of breathless media reports ranging from newspapers to NPR to daytime talk shows.

By the time the final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released in 2007, the midnight release party had become a beloved ritual for a whole generation of kids. They grew up with the books, and every new release in the series brought with it an ever-increasingly more elaborate series of bookstore events. Booksellers dressed up like wizards. Kids participated in raffles and trivia contests and ate snacks lifted from the novels.

The Harry Potter party craze couldn’t have arrived at a more fortuitous time for the publishing industry. Even as Amazon’s popularity seemed to increase exponentially with each passing year, independent bookstores gently trained a whole new generation of kids to look forward to congregating at bookshops with other book nerds. For once, the passive pleasure of discovering a brown cardboard parcel on your doorstep paled in comparison with the pageantry of actually visiting an actual bookstore staffed with actual human beings.

And now is the time for this generation of twentysomethings to wallow in the kind of nostalgia that has suffocated every American generation before it. The latest in the Harry Potter series, a play titled Harry Potter and the Cursed Child co-written by J.K. Rowling, is being released at midnight on Sunday, July 31st—Harry Potter’s canonical birthday—and both University Book Store and Elliott Bay Book Company are hosting release parties for millennials to relive the good old days. Festivities at Elliott Bay begin at 10 pm on Saturday, July 30 and continue well past midnight on the 31st. University Book Store's party starts at 11 am on the 31st.

Both stores are hosting performances of excerpts of the new play by local theater troupes. University Book Store promises birthday cake and other treats. Elliott Bay is acknowledging the advanced age of the Harry Potter demographic by promising (presumably alcoholic) “Hogsmeade libations,” a trivia contest, and what sounds like a Potter-themed drinking game.

It’s hard to think of many other characters who have been allowed to age with an audience like this. Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole books come to mind as peers of Potter, but for the most part, kids’ book characters like Nancy Drew and the Magic School Bus kids stay young forever, trapped in a permanent, moisturized fog. Unlike most relationships between readers and favorite fictional characters, this devotion is so strong that it takes up physical space in the world every few years. It makes you wonder if one day a generation of weeping, middle-aged adults will gather at bookstores around the world to show their respect at a funeral for a lifelong friend.

Sam Henderson’s Magic Whistle comic recently transitioned from a one-cartoonist show to a humor anthology comic, and it’s very much been a delight. But you should know that the latest issue, number 3.2 — no, I have no idea what kind of numbering system he’s working on — opens with a comic that every Seattleite should read.

Seattle cartoonist Tom Van Deusen’s six-page strip “Bezos” opens with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pouring himself a coffee in a nice-but-not-extravagant kitchen. He talks to his cylindrical Amazon Echo device in the corner. “Good morning, Alexa,” he says. “Good morning, Jeff Bezos,” Alexa replies.

Bezos takes a sip of coffee. He stares at his e-reader. Then he exclaims: “I love reading on my Amazon Kindle! Why would anyone want to read a book? All those pages — BLECH!” He turns back to the black cylinder on his kitchen counter: “Alexa, did I ever tell you that I hate books?”

“Yes, Jeff Bezos,” the Echo replies.

The strip goes on from there, opening as a parody of Amazon-style consumer technology but then spinning into outright farce as Bezos goes on a rampage around town. Van Deusen packs a lot of stuff into six pages, and I’d hate to spoil it all. But without giving too much away, I want to tell you that — and in a year that saw the end of Intruder, this is really saying something — this is one of the most important Seattle comics to be published in 2016.

In these six pages, Van Deusen renders the creator of Amazon as a pathetic figure, an egomaniac, a narcissist, a loser, a needy creep, a conqueror, and a sad sack. His Bezos is a prism depicting nearly every single popular belief Seattleites hold about the man, an inconsistent enigma who barely seems aware of the disastrous consequences of his actions because he can barely hold his own fragile identity together.

“Bezos” is sarcastic, furious, funny, and more than a little bit mean. It doesn’t feel like a goofy comic strip about a popular figure. It feels, somehow, like journalism. Somewhere in this spray of black-and-white panels about giant robots and the horror of modern interior design, Van Deusen managed to squeeze in the entirety of Seattle’s current dilemma.

• Last month, Elissa Washuta become one of the most-envied writers in the Seattle area when she became the Fremont Bridge's very first writer-in-residence. UW Today interviewed Washuta about how that's going:

I’ll be spending many summer afternoons in a small, beautiful office in the northwest tower of the Fremont Bridge. The office is mine alone this summer, and it looks out over the Lake Washington Ship Canal. I watch the bridge open and close while I write. I listen to cars, passersby, boats and the yells of coxswains when the rowers come by in the late afternoons. While I’m in the office, I work on research and writing for a project about the bridge — its history, its metaphorical meaning and my relationship with it.

• Alex Shephard at The New Republic has written a great piece about why everyone should hope that Barnes & Noble doesn't go away forever. Here's a taste, but it's much more nuanced than this, and you should read the whole thing:

In a world without Barnes & Noble, risk-averse publishers will double down on celebrity authors and surefire hits. Literary writers without proven sales records will have difficulty getting published, as will young, debut novelists. The most literary of novels will be shunted to smaller publishers. Some will probably never be published at all. And rigorous nonfiction books, which often require extensive research and travel, will have a tough time finding a publisher with the capital to fund such efforts.

• Do you know any young spoken word poets? You should encourage them to apply for a hip-hop artist residency sponsored by the EMP and some local rapper guy:

EMP Museum is proud to partner with Arts Corps and Grammy Award-winning duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis to offer a three-week intensive Hip-Hop Artist Residency focusing on creative songwriting, performance techniques, and beat production.

The Hip-Hop Artist Residency seeks aspiring teen hip-hop artists who want to get paid to learn from and work alongside professional teaching artists and a virtual who’s who from Seattle’s vast hip-hop and creative arts community.

All participants will record an EP of original music at a professional studio, and put on a final performance inside of EMP Museum’s Sky Church.

• If you have an Amazon account, you might have just picked up some free e-book credits from that very long and very uncomfortable e-book lawsuit between Amazon and Apple. I have nothing to add to this, so I'll let our own Martin McClellan have the final word:

I just got $6.28 in my Amazon account “funded” by Apple because of the antitrust settlement. I’d rather have a competitive ebook market.

— Martin McClellan (@hellbox) June 21, 2016

This morning, when the Amazon-owned digital comics retailer Comixology announced their new Unlimited plan, the comics and tech media were rapturous. "Say what you will about their effect on the print industry, digital comics have made buying [independent comics] easier," Birth.Movies.Death's Siddhant Adlakha wrote, "especially outside North America. What’s more, it’s about to get a whole lot easier with this $5.99 a month subscription service, which includes, of course, a 30-day trial." Bloggers, many of whom were likely working just from the press release, were quick to label it a "Netflix for comics.”

And on first blush, it’s easy to understand why they’d say that. The new Comixology Unlimited plan includes most of the major comics publishers minus the big two of Marvel and DC. (Marvel owns and operates its own $9.99-a-month Unlimited service.) According to Heidi MacDonald at The Beat, who says Comixology “just hit a slam dunk” with Unlimited, the service includes publishers like “Image, Dark HorseIDW Publishing, BOOM!, Dynamite, Kodansha, Oni, Valiant Entertainment, Archie , Fantagraphics, Humanoids, Action Lab Entertainment, Aspen, Zenescope and more.”

But there are a few problems with the Unlimited plan. Jude Terror at The Outhousers notes that…

…most of the comics available on the service are the first one or two trades of series, meaning they serve more as an advertisement to purchase further issues than a truly "unlimited" reading experience. For instance, you can read the first two Walking Dead and Chew trades, or the first six issues of Saga… And to access the service, you'll need to merge your comiXology account with your Amazon account, because Amazon would really like to store all the data they're collecting on you in one place.

Especially interesting is the fact that it’s looking like a lot of creators weren’t told about Comixology Unlimited in advance. And many of them are not happy about it:

And now with Comixology Unlimited I suddenly understand how all those musicians feel

— Cameron Stewart (@cameronMstewart) May 24, 2016

@PiaGuerra wow. First I've heard of this. :/

— Kurtis Wiebe (@kurtisjwiebe) May 24, 2016

Did any creators hear about Comixology Unlimited before it was announced?

— Jamie McKelvie (@McKelvie) May 24, 2016

Other factors, including how much creators are going to be compensated for their books’ involvement in Unlimited, aren’t public yet. It’s especially surprising to see Image Comics, which prides itself on the fact that every single one of their titles are creator-owned, seemingly signing on to this plan without telling creators first.

It’s unclear if Image told any of their creators, but Jamie McKelvie, whose tweet is quoted above, is the artist of The Wicked + The Divine, which is one of the most popular Image Comics right now. If he wasn’t told, it’s clear that communication between Image and their creators was lax. In a threaded Twitter conversation with McKelvie, cartoonist and self-publisher Spike Trotman said that she "was emailed weeks ago and asked to participate in the launch," and that she "had to sign a contract and NDA and everything!" McKelvie confirmed that she was a publisher and concluded that Comixology "[t]alked to publishers, but not creators," to which Trotman replied, "I hope that's not the case!"

At least partly, it does seem to be the case. In an interview with Comic Book Resources, Comixology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger says that he doesn't "get between our publishers and their creators," meaning that Amazon/Comixology didn't contact any creators on their own. Steinberger also refused to comment about potential royalties.

I have emails out to several publishers and creators. We’ll have more on this story as it develops.

UPDATE 12:17 PM: I've just published Fantagraphics Associate Publisher Eric Reynolds' response to my questions about creator involvement in Comixology Unlimited.

When Amazon bought the book-themed social media site Goodreads in 2013, Goodreads users went through three stages in quick succession. First, they were outraged, publishing angry posts to Facebook about how betrayed they felt. They hated that Goodreads sold out to the evil empire, wondered if their Goodreads data would be accessible to Amazon shoppers, and tried half-heartedly to find an alternative literary social media site.

Second, they mourned. They talked about how they’d never be able to trust Goodreads again, and wondered if everything they ever loved would eventually be absorbed into the Amazon mothership. They tried to pretend to be interested in downloading their data and shipping it somewhere else.

Finally, they accepted it. The people I know who used Goodreads all roundly hated Amazon’s purchase of the site, but it didn’t stop them from using Goodreads. They still post their reviews and make their reading friends and try not to mention the “A”-word, as though their silence could somehow change the reality of the situation. It continued this way for three years.

But last week, the very coolest people on my social media feeds started talking about a new literary-themed social network called Litsy. Like the coolest new social networks, it’s only available as an app for iPhones right now, though the founders are apparently promising an Android app in the near future. And it is, as someone I follow on Facebook put it, a cross between Goodreads and Instagram. As Litsy describes itself on its website:

Share bookish moments with Quotes, Reviews, and Blurbs. Measure Litfluence to discover your “bookprint” in the world. Explore recommendations from readers, not algorithms.

Oh yeah, want to organize your reading list? Our app has stacks for that, too!

I joined Litsy a few days ago to try it out. (If you’re on there, my user name is PaulConstant.) The appeal of Litsy is certainly easy to understand: it’s a candy-colored world of easy-to-read fonts and photographs. It’s a design that inspires you to take pictures of your favorite quotes, selfies with your beloved books, and artsy photos of your shelves. Everything is kind of slow at the moment—in the five days since I’ve learned of Litsy, it seems to have spread around my immediate community of friends the way pinkeye spreads through a kindergarten class, so presumably Litsy’s founders are experiencing a scalability problem at the moment — but the schtick is pretty clear as soon as you sign up.

The way it works is this: you make a post — either a Quote, a Review, or a Blurb. Then people comment on your post. The people you follow make up your feed, and you can browse through what they’re reading and comment on their posts. If you like the looks of a book on your timeline, you can put it on your to-read list. The more books you review and read, the better your metrics are: Litsy measures your Litfluence through a blend of site-participation numbers that they don’t make clear to their users. Also, whenever you finish a book, Litsy adds the book to your number of total pages read — an especially ingenious twist that gamifies reading in a satisfying way.

I’m not especially persuaded by Litsy on a personal level, much for the same reason I never liked the trend of throwing silent reading parties: it adds a weirdly performative element to the solitary pursuit of reading that never appealed to me. It’s impossible to attend a silent reading party without judging what other people read and, in return, worrying about what people think of the book that you brought along. Judging other people’s reading is a perfectly enjoyable pastime, by the way, and there’s no shame in it; I judge bookshelves at parties and read spines on the bus. But when everybody is seeing what you read and everybody is aware of being seen while reading, it adds an uncomfortable meta-level to the experience that makes me uncomfortable.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with Litsy, or with silent reading parties. Everybody makes their reading life public in one way or another; I co-own a website that publishes the opinions of people who read books, for crying out loud, so obviously I don’t think there’s any shame in that. If Litsy appeals to you, you should join up and use it. And if you join Litsy, you should friend me, too; maybe the joyousness of your sharing will inspire me to rethink how I approach the site.

But I do have some problems with the scale and scope of Litsy. I hate that you can only review books in one of four ways: Pick, So-So, Pan, or Bailed. It’s so simple it’s stupid. And all of the ways to react to the book — I’m not quite sure how “Blurb” is different from “Review,” to be honest — only allow you to use 250 characters at the most. To me, this seems like the biggest problem with Litsy: its refusal to allow lovers of words to respond to long collections of words with their own words. Granted, not every book review needs to be five thousand words long, but presumably most reading experiences are a little more substantial than just over two tweets’ worth of writing.

Again, I know I’m biased toward wordy responses to books. And I know that the internet is becoming an image-based communication medium. I just don’t know if I’m ready for the first post-literate literary social network, a place where you can fetishize the book as an object in a series of photos but you can’t discuss what moved you about the book unless your experience is roughly 125 words or less.

The world is littered with failed attempts at social networks — most recently Ello and Peach — because it’s hard to convince people to migrate to a new online home once they’re already invested in one. And Goodreads has a hell of a head start on Litsy. But it’s possible that Amazon’s involvement might be enough to convince the booksellers and librarians of Goodreads to pack up and move to higher (moral) ground. Of course, there’s nothing to stop Amazon from buying Litsy once that happens, too. In more ways than one, no online community is safe.