The book that hates itself

Welcome to a new genre: the book that is embarrassed it's a book. That hates the fact it's made of dull, dowdy old print and paper and is full of stinky old writing, that wishes more than anything it was a sleek, sexy tumblr blog or Twitter stream.

Daniel Pink’s Drive is one of 2010’s most high-profile non-fiction books. It has a timely thesis: that people are primarily motivated to work hard and achieve great things not by money, but by their own passion for what they do. It’s a good point, worth making. But I found Drive infuriating. This had nothing to do with its argument, or with Pink’s writing, which is fluent and lucid. Actually, it’s Drive that has the problem with itself, not me.

The author takes 146 pages to make his case. The remaining 80 or so pages, named “The Toolkit,” consist of what you might call meta-content or, in plain language, padding. Much of this padding seems to exist on the assumption that the reader won’t have time to read the first part–you know, the actual book. "Drive: The Recap" (yes, I quote) offers three different summaries of the preceding 146 pages: a short summary, a shorter one, and–you must have seen this coming–a tweet. Drive condensed, crushed and squeezed into 140 characters, and rid of its tiresome bookness.



The "Toolkit"–presumably named to make it sound less like part of a book and more like something you'd put up shelves with, because books are airy-fairy collections of words and essentially a waste of valuable time, which is money–consists mainly of lists, of which the “Recaps” form one. What else is there? Nine Strategies for this, Nine more Strategies for that, Fifteen Essential Books on a similar theme (though presumably nobody’s expecting you to actually read them), plus Twenty Conversation Starters To Keep You Thinking And Talking (which implies that without Drive’s help, you'd basically be a vegetable).

But it’s those summaries that really appall. It’s not just that Drive thinks some readers won’t read it. It suggests that no self-respecting modern reader should be expected to. Drive says: if you haven’t read me, that’s cool. I’m down with that. You’re busy. To which you just want to shout: SHOW SOME BLOODY PRIDE IN BEING A BOOK! Tell people: this is worth you stopping whatever you’re being busy about and reading. Tell them you contain multitudes. Stand up and be a book about it, for God’s sake.

If books are going to survive it’s because they are powerful enough to pull readers out of the bitstream for a few hours and remind them of the rewards of concentration, imagination, and sustained attention. Books that cringe before social media have given up the game before taking the field. And if books don’t value themselves, then you can be sure that people won’t.

Am I out of touch with the reading zeitgeist? Perhaps I am, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. Here’s how Pink (I keep saying Pink, but presumably Toolkits can be outsourced, or bought from B&Q) introduces his “Recap” section:

“This book has covered a lot of ground. You might not be able to instantly recall everything in it. So here you'll find three different summaries of Drive.”

F Scott Fitzgerald warned that when you begin writing about an individual, you all-too-easily end up with a type. Start with a type and you’ll probably end up with a stereotype. I think that's what Pink and his publisher and others like them have done with their reader. They’ve started by thinking about people who are digitally connected and have less time to read books than they used to, and ended up addressing them like kids with learning difficulties.

Drive’s self-abasement at the altar of social media is typical of publishing’s terror at what it sees going on around it. It’s wrong not just because it’s abject and self-defeating but because it’s misguided even on its own terms. The last thing you should do is tell people what to tweet about you (and as it happens, Pink’s Twitter summary is incomprehensible.)

It’s not just books, of course. All the old media are practicing the social media cringe–what shall we call it? the Twitter cringe? The twinge?–with varying degrees of inelegance. The Guardian ran a graph across two pages displaying “positive” and “negative” tweets during Gordon Brown’s appearance before Chilcot. Monocle looks like a website and clearly has no faith in its writers’ ability to hold anyone’s attention. I wince every time David Dimbleby is forced to say the word “tweet” on Question Time in order to make the completely unnecessary gesture of telling people how to tweet about his programme.

Old media, stand up for yourselves! You have nothing to lose but your padding.

Ian Leslie's Twitter name is @mrianleslie.