Parenthetical.net

I wanted to link to John Green’s recent post about genre because I think this thought is so damn neat:

The main reason books are organized the way they are is that it makes it easier to sell them at bookstores and circulate them at libraries. As acquiring (and reading) books become less physical experiences, we’ll have the opportunity to think differently about how we relate one book to another. (In fact, the Internet is already doing this in some interesting ways.*)
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*Like, for example, my YA novels do not live in the same part of the bookstore as Katrina Vandenberg’s brilliant book of poetry. But our audiences have gotten so intertwined that Amazon says we are “frequently bought together,” the online equivalent of being in the same genre. These books have nothing in common except that the same people like both of them, but I would argue that “the same people like them” is the ideal definition of genre.

I’m fascinated by genre as intertwined audiences; it’s almost like Amazon is defining genres of people. (Clearly the next step is to add an online dating component. “These items are frequently bought together… by these single men in your zipcode!” Why hasn’t Amazon done this already?)

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