Do we know what we want to read?

I’m going to think out loud here and it will probably be disjointed and wholly anecdotal so please bear with me.  I welcome your thoughts.

In recent weeks I’ve been giving some thought to tagging as a way of discovering new books to read and how publishers might be able to use this to do I don’t know what.  Running parallel to this is a growing fondness for LibraryThing.  It just told me I would definitely love Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. I don’t know what that says about me and I’ve never heard of him, but I did go through a phase of reading anything about the SAS and watching Vietnam War films.  I only have three read books in my LibraryThing so far so how ever it figured that out is genius.

My point is that I don’t really know what kind of books I will like until I start reading them which is a bit of a pain.  I am not averse to genre fiction (although there is a certain subject I once tried out of curiosity that I will straight out avoid for my own sanity) and I will try and read anything for one reason or another, but I guess like everyone I want something great to read every time.

Possible?

Reviews are useful. Lists are not. I get very anxious if I haven’t read a single book on a given list (I am very thankful for this post on MOBYLIVES today. Thank you.).

Now there are enough books no? So what is my problem? And where is this post going?

There is, I’ve read somewhere (there’s no chance of a link, sorry) an eternal question whether publishers should define the taste of readers or publish what readers want.  Phew.

I get why celebrities are published and I get why Katie Price is popular. Not because she grew up in Ruislip where I also grew up, ; ) but because she’s writes in a genre I’ve just condescendingly dubbed ‘Babes n Bruvs’. And fair enough.  When I was sixteen I absolutely loved Killing Floor by Lee Child.  Last month, when I was twenty seven, I decided to see what Jack Reacher was up to in Bad Luck and Trouble……and boy -o- boy.

This is the subjective side of publishing.  I was going to ask if somehow publishers could understand their demographics by analysing folksonomies of books, but would this do any good? Could you stick these tags into the meta data of your ebook? What would that do if anything?  Anyway tastes of readers will change. I am happy for publishers to give me books they think are good.

Is tagging a good tool for publishers?

Image by satanslaundromat/flickr

Filed under: Social Media, research , Katie Price, LibraryThing, Tagging