On the Non-Book

Non-Book is a house term we use for a title that looks like you'd want it in the store- usually on an interesting (or at least salable) topic. They're usually larger format books with color illustrations, what are sometimes called 'coffee table books'. And they are almost completely bereft of value. You can flip through one without receiving a single nugget of insight or coming across any meaningful information or striking composition.

Anyone who's sifted through as many thousands upon thousands of books as I have can almost sense a non book, they way you can spot a book club edition by the cheap paper employed for the dust jacket, or the way the spine is just slightly too squared off to be 'real'. They're things that look like good books but aren't....Pod Books, in the vernacular of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Some concrete examples would be the cookbook long on splashy color (stock) photos but extremely short on (generic) recipes, or a craft book with plenty of nifty photos of finished projects that gives short shrift to processes and techniques you'd need to achieve the pictured results.

Basically, a non-book is any book that's trying to 'pass'. It's thrift store couture trying to sneak onto the runway, ground chuck pretending its Kobe beef.

Today, doing a big buy from one of our regular guys who stops by every few months with a big white van full of boxes, we came across the penultimate non-book....more of an anti-book really...Surf Girl Oahu.

Let's go down the checklist-

Surfing: one of the most salable things we see. Normally we buy anything even tangentially related to surfing without looking at it too hard.

Women Surfing: Even more salable than regular surfing. Very few books have been published on the subject so we hardly ever see them.

Hawaii: Very salable area. Again, we'd normally buy anything presentable that came across the counter on Hawaii.

This combination is like atomic catnip to book dealers- you couldn't come up with a more desirable subject for a book if you had a planet-sized AI crunching sales figures from the entire history of bookselling for your perusal.

And yet, who knows why, bookseller's intuition maybe...the boss gave it a quick flip-through.
And his buying rhythm faltered.
He went back through the book more slowly, pausing at various points.
Again, almost page by page.
Bemused, he handed me the book.
"What do you think?"

I repeated his process almost exactly, arriving at the same destination.

"It's....it's a non book," disbelieving. "I got 20 pages before I saw a surfboard, or water. It's like someone's snapshots of their girlfriends hanging out shopping a few blocks from the beach."

The boss nodded.

"Well...now we have to buy it, don't we? We've spent too much time figuring it out, now we have to buy it."

Which made me laugh.

And, proving that when it comes to books online nobody really knows anything, even two guys with a combined 70 years of professional experience who've been selling books online for most of a decade, this veritable archetype of the Non Book that was nearly rejected for being so slight and misleading is going for $40 on Amazon.

Hah!