“write-only books”

A GOOD BOGOST POST FROM LAST YEAR that I didn’t notice at the time.

There is a remarkable amount of academic junkware on the market. Publish a couple of books and you will find yourself inundated with Who’s Who invitations, most of them requiring a hefty fee. (In the most aggressive case, one of them actually called me, in Egypt, from New Jersey. Only after 20 minutes of apparently sincere interview did they tell me the volume would be mine for only a couple hundred dollars. Normally I am never rude to workers of any sort, because jobs of that sort really suck, but in that case I’m afraid I was a bit rude.)

A Cairo colleague and I also both received the hilarious offer of a “Great Thinker of the 21st Century” medallion. I think I saved that ad somewhere. It would have been several hundred dollars to buy the medallion, which come to think of it is cheaper than academic regalia from Josten’s. And one of those medallions would look good on Zizek, don’t you think?

As for write-only books, they’re a sign of the end times– of the decadence of the once-great medium of the academic book. Publication will look completely different ten years from now.