Book Wars, or the one who sells the most wins, and the Re-mix is on

I like listening for book news on the television, it always surprises me what comes up.  Apparently Ann Coulter and  Bill O’ Reilly got into an argument about who sells the most books. It was a sibling type disagreement more along the lines, “Mom likes me better”, ”NO she likes me better”.

 Ann is hitting the talk circuit with her new book, Guilty. She told O’ Reilly when he suggested she take some advice from another conservative, Bernie Goldberg,  ”my general policy is to take advice from people who sell more books than me not fewer books…”. Then O’ Reilly said something along the line of you should take my advice since I sell more than you. Then the following: no you don’t; yes I do; no you don’t ; yes I do, etc.

Interesting, since if that were true she’d be taking most of her advice from J. K. Rowling.

My take on this whole silly political book business, that make the rounds on the talk show circuit, both conservative and liberal, is that it results in additional money in the pockets of the bookseller and publisher. If this is what it takes to support an industry to keep us in books worth reading then I’m fine with it.  Keep selling, keep publishing, keep arguing about who sells the most and keep giving me the choice of what I want to read.  

Then on the Colbert Report, Lawrence Lessig, was interviewed (or harassed) by Colbert about his new book, Remix. Since copyright issues are something that drive librarians up the wall, this is a particularly sore subject with me as well. Of course all talk of copyright is best left our of social dialogue or you will not be asked back to any parties.

But if you go to Lessig’s Blog, you can hear a fascinating remix of his interview. It’s on the January 9th  entry.

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