Ebook sales are being driven by downmarket genre fiction - Page 12

Redcard · 02-10-2012, 02:08 PM

I bet the readers of Charles Dickens would be quite amused to find out he's "classic"

Prestidigitweeze · 02-12-2012, 07:13 AM

I think what's annoying to readers like me is the idea that books by people like Proust and Thomas Bernhard need to be disparaged and their audiences called snobbish just because certain twits enjoy making obnoxious public pronouncements about the supposed collective deterioration of the human race.

Twits like to use biased and simplistic readings of popular taste to justify their conclusion that ordinary people are stupid and shallow. Twits have been doing this since popular artists first smeared bison likenesses on cave walls. There was actually an Ancient Greek "pessimist historian," as the Oxford Classical Dictionary refers to him, who insisted that, in his lifetime, people were getting smaller, animals less meaty and fruit trees less fecund. Genre fiction is simply a later example of this kind of superficiality's many targets.

I can understand why a person who reads SF or horror (let alone D.H. Lawrence with bonus sex and ripped clothing) might be irritated at the twentieth article that dismissed them as dolts whose only means of creative expression was dressing their cats as butlers.

But genre enthusiasts should also understand why a reader like me, who honestly prefers indecorous experimental and literary fiction -- the stuff that doesn't get invited into drawing rooms or adapted by PBS or the BBC -- to most genre fiction would object to the idea of being considered snobbish by definition.

First, a number of strange and important books were originally conceived as genre novels (at least in terms of their audience). The distinction between these and novels initially conceived as experimental and/or absurdist is frequently arbitrary. Yes, J.L. Borges and Juan Goytisolo were fans of the detective novel, but their stories don't actually read like Raymond Chandler. Whereas J.G. Ballard really does read like William Burroughs and John Hawkes (even though he was as original as they) but was consigned for most of his life to being a genre writer peering at mainstream and even avant garde acceptance from science fiction's "golden ghetto" (William Gibson's phrase).

We're all listening to the echoes of the report of reactionary gunfire.

The worst thing you can say about literary vs. genre fans (if you even believe in such arbitrary distinctions) is some of us have trouble being understood when talking to the other side about the things that excite us most.

But it isn't true that a genre reader always reads to repeat the same experience with the same sort of book -- that they're literate Pavlovian lab rats (which is what that description suggests to me).

It isn't a question of the ratio of "convention to invention," as someone said before. It's a question of different readers having different ways of expressing their sense of a book's value no matter what kind of book it happens to be.

§§§§

Throwing a punch at someone here for something obnoxious said elsewhere seems a bit unjustified.

No need for us to devolve into intellectual or anti-intellectual snobs. Our love of eReaders and books has brought us together. Let's not allow some conventional-minded ass's disdain to get in the way.

The Mobile Read library, after all, contains many different sorts of books. There's something in it to appeal to every one of us.

frahse · 02-12-2012, 12:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

I think what's annoying to readers like me is the idea that books by people like Proust and Thomas Bernhard need to be disparaged and their audiences called snobbish just because certain twits enjoy making obnoxious pubic pronouncements about the supposed collective deterioration of the human race.

Twits like to use biased and simplistic readings of popular taste to justify their conclusion that ordinary people are stupid and shallow. Twits have been doing this since popular artists first smeared bison likenesses on cave walls. There's actually an Ancient Greek pessimist who insisted that, in his lifetime, people were getting smaller, animals less meaty and fruit trees less fecund. Genre fiction is simply a later example of this kind of superficiality's many targets.

I can understand why a person who reads SF or horror (let alone DH Lawrence with extra sex and ripped clothing) might be irritated at the twentieth article that dismissed them as dolts whose only means of creative expression was dressing their cats as butlers.

But genre enthusiasts should also understand why a reader like me, who honestly prefers indecorous experimental and literary fiction -- the stuff that doesn't get invited into drawing rooms or adapted by PBS or the BBC -- to most genre fiction would object to the idea of being considered snobbish by definition.

First, a number of strange and important books were originally conceived as genre novels (at least in terms of their audience). The distinction between these and novels initially conceived as experimental and/or absurdist is frequently arbitrary. Yes, J.L. Borges and Juan Goytisolo were fans of the detective novel, but their stories don't actually read like Raymond Chandler. Whereas J.G. Ballard really does read like William Burroughs and John Hawkes (even though he was as original as they) but was consigned for most of his life to being a genre writer peering at mainstream and even avant garde acceptance from science fiction's "golden ghetto" (William Gibson's phrase).

We're all listening to the echoes of the report of reactionary gunfire.

The worst thing you can say about literary vs. genre fans (if you even believe in such arbitrary distinctions) is some of us have trouble being understood when talking to the other side about the things that excite us most.

But it isn't true that a genre reader always reads to repeat the same experience with the same sort of book -- that they're literate Pavlovian lab rats (which is what that description suggests to me).

It isn't a question of the ratio of "convention to invention," as someone said before. It's a question of different readers having different ways of expressing their sense of a book's value no matter what kind of book it happens to be.

§§§§

Throwing a punch at someone here for something obnoxious said elsewhere seems a bit unjustified.

No need for us to devolve into intellectual or anti-intellectual snobs. Our love of eReaders and books has brought us together. Let's not allow some conventional-minded ass's disdain to get in the way.

The Mobile Read library, after all, contains many different sorts of books. There's something in it to appeal to every one of us.

Well said.
If some one says to me "let's do the Chinese restaurant," or "let's do this Mexican restaurant," or "that Korean restaurant" or the like, I will usually ask what else is available. The truth is I am not certain about those foods, which dishes I like, what I want at that restaurant. If there is not a choice because of who is suggesting the place, I will try to find a dish close to American, usually chicken.
But if someone says "let's do the Chinese buffet" or "the Mexican buffet" or "the Korean buffet," I will say "Great!"
I know then that I can taste and sample and there will be something I like. There always is. I used to love a restaurant in a town nearby that was a buffet of three foods, Mexican, Chinese, and American. I would take visitors from out of town there, relatives like my mother, my sister, friends, business associates. The food wasn't the "top of the cuisine line" but it was good and more important "varied" and if you tasted something that looked good or interesting and it wasn't up to your expectation, then simply put it down and move on. For my picky brother in law and a few others, I would throw in some wine and he was a happy camper.

I am willing to try anything and judge it on the spot, but I don't like to be stuck with what is a bad choice for my tastes. I try to give others that same kind of opportunity of choice.

(More Karma will be coming your way as soon as I get more powder and balls for my small Karma cannon.)

Prestidigitweeze · 02-12-2012, 08:26 PM

The saddest thing to me about the article in question is that it was published in the Guardian. In the internet's early days, I used to turn to that paper when news media in the States proved too compromised to offer useful information.

Fourteen years later, the Guardian is no longer the champion of the working class. These days, they publish pieces like the one we're discussing, which might as well be called "Kindle Readers: N.Q.O.C.D."

And do keep in mind that this article isn't just trashing genre readers but rather all Kindle owners. Besides which, the insults are directed at readers like me as much as they are at readers who prefer romance novels:

Quote:

Reading has always been a competitive sport. Why else would anyone have read Ulysses? Consider those boys who read ostentatious poetry to pull winsome girls; the girls who read Vanity Fair to let the poetical boys know that they are clever and minxy.

Apparently, writer Antonia Senior has never met or understood anyone who reads Joyce for the beauty of the language, the depth of the allusions and the brilliantly poetic elisions of the interior narrative, which really starts with certain stories in Dubliners and develops further in Portrait of the Artist. Apparently, she's never met people who read challenging poetry because it speaks to them and ignites their linguistic imaginations. Hart Crane's apparent obscurity has energy and is even viscerally exciting to many of us.

Like William Fowler, Senior's convinced that the only reason to know obscure things is to aspire to a higher class, which is not only a doomed strategy, as everyone knows, but fails to explain the work of isolated mathematicians and chemists. What class are they aspiring to, exactly?

Perhaps it is the work that satisfies the reader apart from all class aspirations, and perhaps to ascribe all obscure tastes to social climbing is to confess that you yourself are obsessed with that same imaginary ladder.

Senior does what any middle-class snob with social aspirations might: Disparages working class tastes as beneath her and rarefied tastes as pretentious and grasping. This was precisely Fowler's strategy in Modern English Usage: Idealize the stylistic lethargy of the ruling class, treat its idiosyncrasies as virtues and ape them fastidiously -- all while ridiculing the taste of anyone who disagrees as either woefully unsophisticated or inefficiently solicitous.

§§§

One thing surprises me: No one has brought up the sheer illogic of Senior's Guardian piece even if one accepts its premise.

It begins by characterizing the tastes and affect of the typical Kindle-reading bibliophile and the nature of their interests. It then tells us that publishers aren't able to predict trends due to Amazon's secretiveness: their practice of not divulging the numbers.

But if those numbers are so secret, then why does writer Antonia Senior feel confident in imposing her stereotype of the typical Kindle owner? On what data, exactly, are her dismissive portraits of various kinds of readers based?

The writer also makes predictions about readers' tastes based on their first purchases of inexpensive editions of public domain books, which, as we all know, are often premature choices made by newcomers who haven't yet experienced those heartbreakingly bald but superficially reformatted Gutenberg scans and the availability of much better versions of those same books at sites like this.

It's the knowing tone and unsupported assumptions that amaze me about Senior's piece, not any particular agenda the article seems to support.

b0ned0me · 02-13-2012, 08:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Fourteen years later, the Guardian is no longer the champion of the working class. These days, they publish pieces like the one we're discussing, which might as well be called "Kindle Readers: N.Q.O.C.D."

Huh? The Guardian has always been the champion of moderately well-off liberal-leaning types who know with a bone-deep certainty that they could solve all the problems of the long-suffering salt-of-the-earth lower classes if only the grotty little proles would take instruction from The Guardian instead of from The Sun, The Daily Mail or whatever other low-brow rag they prefer to purchase with their dole money.

The fact that they bemoan the lower classes reading 'pulp entertainment' rather than 'improving literature' is about as much of a surprise as an article bemoaning that the proles eat too much deep-fried potato/chicken product and too little brown rice and salad.

It has, historically at least, had some pretty decent journalism but, like every single media outlet in the entire universe, you have to adjust for their worldview.

murraypaul · 02-13-2012, 09:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by b0ned0me

Huh? The Guardian has always been the champion of moderately well-off liberal-leaning types who know with a bone-deep certainty that they could solve all the problems of the long-suffering salt-of-the-earth lower classes if only the grotty little proles would take instruction from The Guardian instead of from The Sun, The Daily Mail or whatever other low-brow rag they prefer to purchase with their dole money.

I had the same 'say what?' reaction to the idea of the Guardian being the champion of the working class

The Guardian is the champion of middle class guilt.

LuvReadin · 02-13-2012, 01:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by murraypaul

I had the same 'say what?' reaction to the idea of the Guardian being the champion of the working class

The Guardian is the champion of middle class guilt.

Ditto!
Middle-class trendy liberal guilt.

Prestidigitweeze · 02-13-2012, 05:27 PM

It's possible my early memories of the Guardian were colored by the circumstances in which I first read it: during a week-long visit with my father in the UK. On that visit, reading it seemed a partial remedy for the behavior of certain people in the area in which he'd decided to live, and those around the site where he worked. The latter seemed to dislike him because he had chosen to hire, at every level of a complex project, working-class employees whom he felt deserved the first shot.

When he worked on other projects in the States and in India, I'd been accustomed to either seeing or picturing him treated with respect. Yet in this setting, ostensibly the one he'd come from himself, it seemed clear that certain people didn't like him. Certain of his neighbors, in particular, seemed quite annoyed with him, perhaps because of his abrupt appearance in the neighborhood, the prominence of the house he chose (he had an obsession with living on the tops of hills), his hiring practices and, of course, his American wife.

About that: My step-mother told me a story. One afternoon, a gathering of ladies from the neighborhood called her up to insist she have tea with them at once. She politely declined, at first, explaining that she was in the process of cleaning out the garage and hadn't dressed properly for a social event. Nevertheless, the woman on the phone kept insisting she must come right away and at last my step-mother gave in. When she arrived there, she was mortified to discover that every other lady in the house was dressed to the nines. She realized in that moment she'd been set up to fail. The ladies had fun smirking at her getup. They also professed to be bewildered at her activities, and asked how she herself could possibly stoop to cleaning out her own garage instead of having someone do it for her.

To escape what I felt was a rather unwelcoming climate, and to elude the effect of those disapproving individuals, I found myself riding into the city rather often. In my favorite pub (which would not serve any lunch item, even an appetizer, one moment past lunchtime), the Guardian seemed to offer something decidedly more progressive and humane than the ever-present Sun as I waited for the kitchen to reopen.

Then, too, we had never really had tabloid papers at home. My true mother was a teacher and tabloids seemed manipulative to her: overly broad and overtly opinionated, telling you what to think when all you wanted was enough information to work it out yourself. This is what she tried to teach her students as well as her own children.

I'm not saying the Guardian's target audience was working class. I'm saying their political conscience used to support it. There's a difference between a publication's being written for a group of people and simply defending them. Call me clueless, but in the early 90s, when I visited my father, I had the impression certain writers and editors at Guardian respected and cared about the working class. At the very least, they had its economic back.

I don't really have a problem with the Guardian's waxing self-righteous, though perhaps my own guilt-laden background makes middle-class guilt seem natural.

What I didn't expect was that they would become to the Morning Star what the New York Times or Salon is to Indymedia.

Even now, when the Guardian seems more complacent and snobbish than it ever should have been, I can't quite comprehend why anyone thinks the Sun is closer to showing true concern about the working class. Have the people who feel this way not fully appreciated Mr. Murdoch's methods, which amount to pseudo-populist transvestism?

Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas? details the ways in which American conservatives, largely through old school cold war alarmists, Newscorp and right-wing think tanks, learned to gut the economic concerns of social activism in the 30s but retain its language and project its working class contempt for elitism. The difference was that the elitists were now fingered as people who supported liberal social programs. A sleight of hand caused people who worked hard for a living to wrongly associate their work ethic with the idea that government purse strings should be tight even when their neighbors couldn't find work, their own children were sick, and people well above them were siphoning off taxpayers' money for social umbrellas and fattening their bank accounts with the spoils. This recycled rhetoric's subversion was not done in direct opposition to the good of America's working class. It also sought to subvert their thinking in ways that did them the most harm when they thought they were looking out for themselves. People are fond of calling Americans stupid for falling for that sort of thing, but I don't feel that's true. It was a very carefully manipulated substitution of one system of symbols for another that looked identical to most people, and its implementation in the language of the news media allowed conservatives to change people's perception of government and political language on a subconscious level.

That's what Murdoch's other publications seem to be doing in other countries as well.

I laughed when I read B0ned0me's comment about "liberal-leaning types," as his characterization of the Guardian was intentionally funny and it succeeded. But I can't help noticing that this dismissal of it as the paper of well-off liberals is exactly how certain right-wingers in the States like to describe publications that support ideas like national health care.

Namekuseijin · 02-14-2012, 03:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Redcard

I bet the readers of Charles Dickens would be quite amused to find out he's "classic"

Just give it time to anything. Rhapsodes of Homer times were pretty much like rappers.

Steven Lyle Jordan · 02-15-2012, 09:49 AM

As nice as it is that downmarket genre fiction (and I prefer to think of it as simply "popular fiction"--"downmarket" sounds so elitist), it would be as nice if the "popular" segment was as enthusiastic about new authors and new ideas. It seems it takes a lot to penetrate the barrier held by well-known authors and themes, and only a very few at a time manage to become noticed by the public; though, once that point is penetrated, the floodgates are open.

Andrew H. · 02-15-2012, 01:01 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan

As nice as it is that downmarket genre fiction (and I prefer to think of it as simply "popular fiction"--"downmarket" sounds so elitist), it would be as nice if the "popular" segment was as enthusiastic about new authors and new ideas.

I was kind of confused by "downmarket genre fiction," too. At first I thought that she was distinguishing between "big publisher genre fiction" - selling at, say $7; and "downmarket" genre fiction - self published and sold for like $3.

But as I read on it looks like that wasn't what she was talking about. In which case I'm not really sure what "downmarket" means. A book by James Patterson or Stephen King doesn't sell for less than a book by Jonathan Franzen or John Fowles.

JD Gumby · 02-15-2012, 01:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

I was kind of confused by "downmarket genre fiction," too. At first I thought that she was distinguishing between "big publisher genre fiction" - selling at, say $7; and "downmarket" genre fiction - self published and sold for like $3.

But as I read on it looks like that wasn't what she was talking about. In which case I'm not really sure what "downmarket" means. A book by James Patterson or Stephen King doesn't sell for less than a book by Jonathan Franzen or John Fowles.

In the context used, it's referring to (literary) quality rather than price - being ''downmarket'' implies low quality for the masses.

RDaneel54 · 02-15-2012, 01:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JD Gumby

In the context used, it's referring to (literary) quality rather than price - being ''downmarket'' implies low quality for the masses.

For the downtrodden?

MrsJoseph · 02-15-2012, 01:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JD Gumby

In the context used, it's referring to (literary) quality rather than price - being ''downmarket'' implies low quality for the masses.

Yes. It's her nice way of calling it "reading for the unwashed masses."

QuantumIguana · 02-15-2012, 01:46 PM

Downmarket refers to a cheaper product. Since genre books are not cheaper than other books, the term doesn't apply. My car is downmarket, but it meets my needs quite well, I don't need a larger car and I like the gas mileage. I am not driving something inferior, merely something cheaper.

I've read some of these so-called "upmarket" books myself. I'm not saying they are inferior either. My preferred genre is science fiction, and there is at least as much exploration of ideas in the "upmarket" books.

02-12-2012, 07:13 AM	#167
Prestidigitweeze Fledgling Demagogue Posts: 2,384 Karma: 31132263 Join Date: Feb 2011 Location: White Plains Device: Clara HD; Oasis 2; Aura HD; iPad Air; PRS-350; Galaxy S7.	I think what's annoying to readers like me is the idea that books by people like Proust and Thomas Bernhard need to be disparaged and their audiences called snobbish just because certain twits enjoy making obnoxious public pronouncements about the supposed collective deterioration of the human race. Twits like to use biased and simplistic readings of popular taste to justify their conclusion that ordinary people are stupid and shallow. Twits have been doing this since popular artists first smeared bison likenesses on cave walls. There was actually an Ancient Greek "pessimist historian," as the Oxford Classical Dictionary refers to him, who insisted that, in his lifetime, people were getting smaller, animals less meaty and fruit trees less fecund. Genre fiction is simply a later example of this kind of superficiality's many targets. I can understand why a person who reads SF or horror (let alone D.H. Lawrence with bonus sex and ripped clothing) might be irritated at the twentieth article that dismissed them as dolts whose only means of creative expression was dressing their cats as butlers. But genre enthusiasts should also understand why a reader like me, who honestly prefers indecorous experimental and literary fiction -- the stuff that doesn't get invited into drawing rooms or adapted by PBS or the BBC -- to most genre fiction would object to the idea of being considered snobbish by definition. First, a number of strange and important books were originally conceived as genre novels (at least in terms of their audience). The distinction between these and novels initially conceived as experimental and/or absurdist is frequently arbitrary. Yes, J.L. Borges and Juan Goytisolo were fans of the detective novel, but their stories don't actually read like Raymond Chandler. Whereas J.G. Ballard really does read like William Burroughs and John Hawkes (even though he was as original as they) but was consigned for most of his life to being a genre writer peering at mainstream and even avant garde acceptance from science fiction's "golden ghetto" (William Gibson's phrase). We're all listening to the echoes of the report of reactionary gunfire. The worst thing you can say about literary vs. genre fans (if you even believe in such arbitrary distinctions) is some of us have trouble being understood when talking to the other side about the things that excite us most. But it isn't true that a genre reader always reads to repeat the same experience with the same sort of book -- that they're literate Pavlovian lab rats (which is what that description suggests to me). It isn't a question of the ratio of "convention to invention," as someone said before. It's a question of different readers having different ways of expressing their sense of a book's value no matter what kind of book it happens to be. §§§§ Throwing a punch at someone here for something obnoxious said elsewhere seems a bit unjustified. No need for us to devolve into intellectual or anti-intellectual snobs. Our love of eReaders and books has brought us together. Let's not allow some conventional-minded ass's disdain to get in the way. The Mobile Read library, after all, contains many different sorts of books. There's something in it to appeal to every one of us. Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 02-12-2012 at 07:34 PM.

02-13-2012, 05:27 PM	#173
Prestidigitweeze Fledgling Demagogue Posts: 2,384 Karma: 31132263 Join Date: Feb 2011 Location: White Plains Device: Clara HD; Oasis 2; Aura HD; iPad Air; PRS-350; Galaxy S7.	It's possible my early memories of the Guardian were colored by the circumstances in which I first read it: during a week-long visit with my father in the UK. On that visit, reading it seemed a partial remedy for the behavior of certain people in the area in which he'd decided to live, and those around the site where he worked. The latter seemed to dislike him because he had chosen to hire, at every level of a complex project, working-class employees whom he felt deserved the first shot. When he worked on other projects in the States and in India, I'd been accustomed to either seeing or picturing him treated with respect. Yet in this setting, ostensibly the one he'd come from himself, it seemed clear that certain people didn't like him. Certain of his neighbors, in particular, seemed quite annoyed with him, perhaps because of his abrupt appearance in the neighborhood, the prominence of the house he chose (he had an obsession with living on the tops of hills), his hiring practices and, of course, his American wife. About that: My step-mother told me a story. One afternoon, a gathering of ladies from the neighborhood called her up to insist she have tea with them at once. She politely declined, at first, explaining that she was in the process of cleaning out the garage and hadn't dressed properly for a social event. Nevertheless, the woman on the phone kept insisting she must come right away and at last my step-mother gave in. When she arrived there, she was mortified to discover that every other lady in the house was dressed to the nines. She realized in that moment she'd been set up to fail. The ladies had fun smirking at her getup. They also professed to be bewildered at her activities, and asked how she herself could possibly stoop to cleaning out her own garage instead of having someone do it for her. To escape what I felt was a rather unwelcoming climate, and to elude the effect of those disapproving individuals, I found myself riding into the city rather often. In my favorite pub (which would not serve any lunch item, even an appetizer, one moment past lunchtime), the Guardian seemed to offer something decidedly more progressive and humane than the ever-present Sun as I waited for the kitchen to reopen. Then, too, we had never really had tabloid papers at home. My true mother was a teacher and tabloids seemed manipulative to her: overly broad and overtly opinionated, telling you what to think when all you wanted was enough information to work it out yourself. This is what she tried to teach her students as well as her own children. I'm not saying the Guardian's target audience was working class. I'm saying their political conscience used to support it. There's a difference between a publication's being written for a group of people and simply defending them. Call me clueless, but in the early 90s, when I visited my father, I had the impression certain writers and editors at Guardian respected and cared about the working class. At the very least, they had its economic back. I don't really have a problem with the Guardian's waxing self-righteous, though perhaps my own guilt-laden background makes middle-class guilt seem natural. What I didn't expect was that they would become to the Morning Star what the New York Times or Salon is to Indymedia. Even now, when the Guardian seems more complacent and snobbish than it ever should have been, I can't quite comprehend why anyone thinks the Sun is closer to showing true concern about the working class. Have the people who feel this way not fully appreciated Mr. Murdoch's methods, which amount to pseudo-populist transvestism? Thomas Frank's book What's the Matter with Kansas? details the ways in which American conservatives, largely through old school cold war alarmists, Newscorp and right-wing think tanks, learned to gut the economic concerns of social activism in the 30s but retain its language and project its working class contempt for elitism. The difference was that the elitists were now fingered as people who supported liberal social programs. A sleight of hand caused people who worked hard for a living to wrongly associate their work ethic with the idea that government purse strings should be tight even when their neighbors couldn't find work, their own children were sick, and people well above them were siphoning off taxpayers' money for social umbrellas and fattening their bank accounts with the spoils. This recycled rhetoric's subversion was not done in direct opposition to the good of America's working class. It also sought to subvert their thinking in ways that did them the most harm when they thought they were looking out for themselves. People are fond of calling Americans stupid for falling for that sort of thing, but I don't feel that's true. It was a very carefully manipulated substitution of one system of symbols for another that looked identical to most people, and its implementation in the language of the news media allowed conservatives to change people's perception of government and political language on a subconscious level. That's what Murdoch's other publications seem to be doing in other countries as well. I laughed when I read B0ned0me's comment about "liberal-leaning types," as his characterization of the Guardian was intentionally funny and it succeeded. But I can't help noticing that this dismissal of it as the paper of well-off liberals is exactly how certain right-wingers in the States like to describe publications that support ideas like national health care. Last edited by Prestidigitweeze; 02-13-2012 at 06:52 PM.

Similar Threads
Thread	Thread Starter	Forum	Replies	Last Post
eBook sales up big again in June, print sales down	carld	News	0	09-12-2011 02:05 PM
Genre Heirarchy Problem- Sub Genre Showing up in different main genre	collin8579	Library Management	3	08-10-2011 11:11 AM
The Emptiness of 'Literary Fiction' and the Stereotyping of Genre Literature	jgaiser	Reading Recommendations	141	07-14-2011 03:05 AM
eBook format for image driven books	publer	General Discussions	0	06-06-2010 03:58 PM
New IDPF ebook sales figures: June sales surge 87% y-o-y	Smashwords	News	0	09-04-2008 01:15 PM

02-10-2012, 02:08 PM	#166
Redcard Addict Posts: 235 Karma: 1202269 Join Date: Mar 2008 Device: Kindle	I bet the readers of Charles Dickens would be quite amused to find out he's "classic"

02-15-2012, 09:49 AM	#175
Steven Lyle Jordan Grand Sorcerer Posts: 8,478 Karma: 5171130 Join Date: Jan 2006 Device: none	As nice as it is that downmarket genre fiction (and I prefer to think of it as simply "popular fiction"--"downmarket" sounds so elitist), it would be as nice if the "popular" segment was as enthusiastic about new authors and new ideas. It seems it takes a lot to penetrate the barrier held by well-known authors and themes, and only a very few at a time manage to become noticed by the public; though, once that point is penetrated, the floodgates are open.

02-15-2012, 01:46 PM	#180
QuantumIguana Philosopher Posts: 2,034 Karma: 18736532 Join Date: Jan 2012 Device: Kindle Paperwhite 2 gen, Kindle Fire 1st Gen, Kindle Touch	Downmarket refers to a cheaper product. Since genre books are not cheaper than other books, the term doesn't apply. My car is downmarket, but it meets my needs quite well, I don't need a larger car and I like the gas mileage. I am not driving something inferior, merely something cheaper. I've read some of these so-called "upmarket" books myself. I'm not saying they are inferior either. My preferred genre is science fiction, and there is at least as much exploration of ideas in the "upmarket" books.

Advert

Advert