Ricky Gervais famously ended his two successful TV series, The Office and Extras, after the second season, saying of the third instance of anything successful, "It's going to get criticised whatever isn't it?"
Ah, very true. Starting today, Malcolm Gladwell's third book, Outliers, is available to the public. The early outlook is that he will survive his "difficult third" intact.
It is rare for a nonfiction book to enjoy this level of advance interest. Indeed, rival publishers are watching it carefully for signs of the health of the industry. In Jason Zengerle's profile from last week, a competing publisher was quoted as saying, "I don't care that it's Little, Brown's book. We all desperately need some good news."
Most of the reviews are positive, but nearly every reviewer makes a point of noting that Gladwell's thesis flirts with the obvious. Overall, interest and enthusiasm are high.
You can buy the book today, or, if your portfolio has taken a hit recently (I'm told such things happen), you can point your mouse at the following online resources.
Time Magazine profiles the author (profile pic is "rugged").
Newsweek won't let Time monopolize that sweet sweet hype.
The Guardian (UK) looks at "the man who can't stop thinking." (I remember an old Kurt Russell movie like that.)
Slate's Book Club takes up the book. (John Horgan likes this one more than The Tipping Point, of which he was notedly critical.)
Entertainment Weekly gives it an A. (The Tipping Point got a B+.)
Reader's Digest offers two brief but illuminating interviews. Gladwell says that he would not want his child to try to become the next Michael Phelps; I wish more people would say this sort of thing. Profile pic = "pensive," in front of a bizarre hand-drawn gallery of facial hair.
The Wall Street Journal has three items, including an excerpt with a baffling typo in the headline.
Other profiles:
USA Today
Independent (UK)
Other reviews:
New York Times (Michiko Kakutani; reg. req'd)
Boston Globe
CNET News
San Francisco Chronicle
Los Angeles Times
Salon
Financial Times (UK)
NY Daily News
There have been lots and lots of tweets recently.
And finally, now seems a good moment to revive two enjoyable New Yorker Conference videos: 2007 2008.
GreenPrint is a nifty quick download that maximizes your printer's output to save on paper and ink. There's a version for Windows (free) and a version for Macs (which costs $29 and has a 30 day free trial). Either version of the software highlights and removes unwanted pages, creates PDFs with one click (OK, that's worth it right there), helps you decide what to print and not to print, and keeps a tally of paper, trees, and money saved. How neat is that?
The MaintainIT Project has a new cookbook: The Joy of Computing: Planning for Success. In this one you'll find lots of good ideas and resources, just like in all their other cookbooks. It covers planning, decision-making, communication, maintenance, security, and a lot more. These cookbooks really help libraries of all sizes, and if you work in IT, you should definitely take a look at what they're offering you for free.
Through a conference contact a little while back, I got in touch with Rosie Merlin, the Program Outreach Librarian
for the San Francisco Public Library. She organized a Book Mob (flash mob) to coincide with the library's "one book" program that was super-successful and something other libraries could easily model. I heard about and saw the success of the program through their Flickr photos, so asked Rosie some questions. Here is the result of our email interview.
Can you tell us what a flash mob is, and how a book mob fits in?
Quoting Wikipedia, if I may, a flash mob is “a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse.” In San Francisco we see lots of flash mobs including zombie mobs, pillow fight mobs, dance mobs (Thriller in Dolores Park was a special one), and others.
The idea for a book mob came up when we were trying to brainstorm new and crafty ways to launch our One City One Book program. 2008 is our fourth year hosting a citywide book club and we knew we wanted something public and exciting and that went beyond more traditional “set up a table and hand out materials” type outreach (though we did some of that during the morning on mob day). With the help of Mary Abler who works at Friends of the SFPL, Jon Worona, SFPL’s BLIP Bookmobile Manager, and a variety of other smart thinkers, we came up with the idea of San Francisco’s first book mob.
We googled “book mob” early on and didn’t find anything along the lines of what we were plotting. I’m happy to say that if you google “book mob” now, you’ll find LJ’s blog post about our event.
Where did you get the idea to add a book mob as part of your book event publicity?
For One City One Book in San Francisco we’ve hosted a variety of really wonderful events and discussions at the library and in partnerships with local bookstores and literary organizations. For the book mob, we really wanted to get out on the street and be visible to people who may not have come across the program otherwise. Although we have advertising outside (street banners, billboards), we knew that creating a real public spectacle would be new and eye-catching. We also wanted to do something that felt a bit more whimsical and spontaneous than our traditional programs.
We adapted the Bookmobile with decals so that it said “Bookmob” and set up near the Ferry Building, where our One City One Book author Tamim Ansary would be doing a radio interview on West Coast Live that morning. (The radio program was streaming on a laptop, connected to an amped speaker in the window of the bookmobile, and played Afghani music the rest of the time for people within earshot.) We had 50 copies of the West of Kabul, East of New York: An Afghan American Story (courtesy of Picador, the publisher) to give out to book-mobbers and each book is tagged as a Bookcrossing book, to encourage people to pass the book on to others after reading it. A number of people brought their own copies of the book to the book mob. Of course, we also had all of our program guides, bookmarks, and buttons that said “I’m Reading It. Are You?”
How did you publicize the book mob to library users?
We set up a yahoo group to get people to sign-up in advance so that a bit of anonymity about the organizers was maintained and used mostly online outreach: staff emails, our One City One Book Facebook and MySpace page, various library blogs, personal blogs, lots of email outreach to friends and contacts, posting on web calendars and sites like Laughing Squid, craigslist, upcoming, etc.
Were there any resources that you found helpful in holding a successful book mob?
A great team of organizers that was really excited about creating something unique for the library and the city!
We also checked out a variety of web sites for background and ideas including:
What did you like most about your book mob?
It was a really interesting process trying to figure out how to do this – what exactly did we want the mob to “do” after they showed up? Sit down and read the book quietly all together? Read out loud from any part of the book? A little of both? We decided we definitely needed to make some noise.
We handed out instructions to everyone that told them to wait till the final bell tolled at noon and then begin reading from pg. 15 (first page of the book) and continue reading for 5 minutes, tell the air horn blared.
We had about 60 people reading aloud around the Book(mob)ile and on the plaza. It was really interesting how people formed these little distinct groups to sort of read the book aloud together; I guess the book group is an organic mob. The sound of so many people reading aloud together was terrific.
What would you do differently if you were going to hold another book mob?
Test out the air horn first :) We ended up using a combo air horn/bell/voice process to end the mob.
I would also think about more finely tuning the outreach during the 3-4 days right before the mob so that a concerted online push really hits all at once, rather than rolling it out as far in advance as we did.
Is there anything else you want to tell us?
It was really a blast! And I highly recommend it as a way to promote reading and library events by being outside of the library, and by being visible and vocal. People strolling by were very intrigued, locals and tourists alike.
Here are some fun links about One City One Book & the book mob – if anyone has questions about it, please let me know!
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