A Commonplace Book

Boing Boing, fine purveyors of Wonderful Things, recently ran a few paragraphs from Dan Shahin at Hijinx Comics in a post which can be found here. The main thrust of the post/press release was that Dan also operates an online comics retailer, ComicBookShelf.com, which has dedicated 10% of all future sales to charity. Half will go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and half to the Hero Initiative. That 10% has also been doubled for the entirety of October. (Supporting the Hero Initiative sounds like a great idea to me, although that might simply be due to my having finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay not more than two weeks ago.)

And while the site’s charitable donations are laudable, it was the last paragraph of Dan’s note that really caught my eye:

We carry a wide array of books and our open source bookstore recommendation algorithms let you rate books and get recommendations. Kind of like Netflix does, but for graphic novels.

This is, in a word, awesome.

For movies, books, and other entertainment I usually like the idea of putting your faith in one or two cultural critics who haven’t let you down very much. I’m currently leeching ideas from the superb staff at The AV Club, and if it weren’t for a ringing endorsement from one of their staff writers, I never would have sat down for Friday Night Lights, which ended up as one of my favorite TV shows of the past season.

Despite this, I also like the social-networking or algorithm-based suggestion system. I can think of at least one or two movies which liked and had watched based solely on a Netflix recommendation, so the idea of a comic book recommendation system based on amalgamating other users’ opinions could be awesome. The only catch? There have to be other users.

I’m not sure how long Comicbookshelf.com has had their system up and running, but even most of the more popular comics, or rather the ones I immediately ran to look at, had 2-3 votes at the most. Obviously the market size for comic books is smaller than that of major motion pictures, but I’m hoping that more people will begin to go through the site on an occasional basis and mark up how they feel about each comic book. I’ve been burned once or twice before on comic books that I heard would be good, that looked good, but didn’t end up being good. $14.99 gone like that.

So while I can’t drive any legitimate traffic towards ComicBookShelf.com myself, I can at least add an extra drop in the Google algorithm bucket and include as many key words as possible in this post to drive some comic book fans in that general direction.

Contrary to what you might expect given his outspoken distrust of all things written word, Stephen Colbert has published a book, “I Am America (And So Can You)”. There’s an accompanying audio-book version with the same title, and word has it they’re not exact replicas of each other. No doubt someone at the publishing house is hoping to sell both versions to a few of the more die-hard members of the Colbert Nation.

To compare it to its cousin in source material, the literary companion to The Daily Show, “America (The Book)”, was fairly spectacular but was also somewhat divorced from the show itself. The authors took the tone of the show and applied it to American history as well as American politics, ending up as a sort of cross between The Daily Show and The Onion. Colbert’s book, meanwhile, stays closer to home, and I think that might have been a poor decision.

I’ve been more than well aware of how much the live aspect to The Colbert Report amplifies what I like about it, but listening to Colbert’s humor without the crowd and with careful editing really takes something away from the humor. Without going too deeply into the increasingly frustrating divide between The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (and I also hope without sounding too harsh), I think its fair to say that Stewart has regressed into poor imitations of Bush and Cheney for punchlines while Colbert has been pushing into new territory and experimenting as a comedian.

Watching Colbert flub a joke because the on-screen “Alpha Dog Of The Week” graphic barks too early is just as funny as watching him land a joke with perfect comedic timing. Similarly, there’s something amazing, even watching from home, the way he can get the crowd involved. I’m even fairly certain that the flub is planned, but I don’t really care as long as I can get lost in Colbert’s fantastically bizarre universe of wrist injuries, Tek Jansen novels, and killer bears.

By staying close to the format of the show and the character but channeling it into book format, I think Colbert and his staff of writers might have missed the opportunity to push in a different direction, something they do so well on their TV show. Its good for what it is, but the restrictions of the format have left it far short of even the more mediocre bits on the show.

A preview clip from his book can be found here.

And now, your moment of zen:

The Barnes & Noble on the ground floor of my office building is great for browsing on those odd days I don’t work through lunch, and I’ve been bothered more and more by the number of books titled “Insert Title Here: A Novel” which appear around the store. (I concede this is a sign of a fairly unchallenging life.)

I considered the possibility that it was just me, that I had fixated on the idea of “Insert Title Here: A Novel.” Maybe I was suffering from a cognitive bias that made those books stand out even though they weren’t actually any more prevalent.

Fortunately, Ironic Sans has come to the rescue and convinced me that I am not just seeing things. Not only that, but they’ve done so with a very pretty picture. I can only imagine how long it took to save, crop, and link those pictures to their respective Amazon links.

Its always nice to have someone else back you up independently, and even better when they do it with well-styled html.