What the book?
May 23rd, 2007 at 01:15
I wish I had more will power – I don’t have any. If I argue with people, I’ll probably concede defeat if they nag enough – sometimes this happens even before they’ve finished constructing their first sentence, just because of my sheer apathy and unwillingness to take a stand. Even when they finally come for me, after getting the trade unionists, communists and social democrats, I’d probably go along with it anyway.
Whilst this trait is pretty bad if you want to get results, it’s worse when you consider that I’m probably just as easily taken in by marketing.
Case in point: I was wandering aimlessly around town today, before work, and ended up heading into Waterstones. It turned out that they’ve currently got a 3-for-the-price-of-2 offer on some books. Not any of the books you’d specifically go out of your way to buy, mind, just the ones they’re having trouble shifting.
And this is a situation which preys on those with little willpower. Once I saw that I could get three for two, it became like a game, and I found myself rushing around the store determined to find three books that I want to read, just so I could get them for the price of two.
I ended up coming away with four books and a wallet that was thirty pounds lighter. I don’t think this special offer was quite as special as I had expected. Not only had I bought two books and got another free, but I’d gone and bought a fourth book that wouldn’t even help me win at a special offer, on a whim.
It was at this point that I also realised that not only am I taken in by a sticker on the cover, but the covers themselves are horrible tools of marketing. Looking at my bookshelf, almost every book I own has the same front cover:
A snappy, slightly punning title, a tag line that draws you in, and an abstract cover illustration that makes the book look like something I’d want to look at – despite the insides being full of nothing but words.
For example, today I bought Tescopoly (Andrew Simms), which is presumably about how Tesco are bastards. Clever title? Check. Intriguing tagline: Check (“How one shop came out on top and why it matters”), clever cover: a parody of the Tesco logo with devil horns.
I also bought Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. Title: Check. Tagline: “Religion, Terrorism and the future of reason”, the picture being a bloodied hand print with symbols of the major religions as the fingerprints.
The other two are near identical too. As are the rest of the books in my room.
I’m pretty sure I could be sold a book advocating holocaust denial if it was called something dreadfully pun-tastic like “Hollow-caust: Why proof for the Nazi death camps is thin on the ground”. I’d like to think that on actually opening the hypothetical book I’d return it though.
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