A ton of people (most recently Slog tipper Steve) have sent me a link to this video that's making the book blog rounds. It apparently started as a presentation in a marketing conference and then went viral on the liternet. If you'd like to watch it without my commentary, do so now. I'll discuss it, and why I haven't posted it on Slog before now, below the video:

I'm just not that fond of the video, to be honest. Leaving out the egregious "of" that is added in on the rewind (Call me nitpicky, but it's a huge mistake for a video that is basically one gimmick to fuck its one gimmick up,) it doesn't make any goddamned sense.

What is the point of the video? If you turn illiterate people upside down, they'll become readers? That's not the point; the down customer and the up customer are clearly two different people. The down customer will never buy a book, period. And the traditional argument that publishers buy into (which I don't agree with, but this would definitely require a whole other post to explain) is that fewer people are reading these days; this video says nothing about that.

I guess the statement is supposed to be that if you look at something in a new and different way, you'll find a new and different approach, but that's not illustrated in this video either; the up-customer seems to be anti-e-book and anti-new in general, except for her willingness to market the book for the publisher. So if you look at something in a new and different way, you'll find that the same old approach you've always used will work just fine?

It's just a bit of brainless feel-good marketing frippery, and some meaningless razzle-dazzle, which is what the video itself is supposed to be decrying. I don't mean to piss on the feel-good publishing parade, but this video is total bullshit.