Columnist and Newser founder Michael Wolff thinks that books are worse than bad these days, that they're "pernicious." He remembers a time when the book buying public ignored or condescended to so-called 'vanity books', the usually ghost-written nonsense written by celebrities' brand-management teams. These days, he laments, the public doesn't seem to find anything wrong with books that come from nothing, say nothing, and amount to little more than sales tools. He uses Sarah Palin's recent memoir and Glenn Beck's seditious cookbooks (Minutemen muffins, anyone?) as prominent examples of the trend, but Wolff's argument is larger than that. He says that because there is "a strategic mix-up between real books and fake books," the reading public is losing something of great consequence. He argues that someone should sue the book industry for creating a giant bait-and-switch scheme. Read more here. Fair warning, though, Wolff's column, ostensibly about the evil of all books, turns out sharply focused on one sort of book in particular. Because Wolff's own bait-and-switch is subtle, that point seemed to have escaped at least one commentator: Reason.com's "Hit and Run."
