Against Better Judgment

Abstract

plan their profit models. In an October 2022 essay for Public Books, “Where is All the Book Data?”, Melanie Walsh discovered that the company BookScan collates and distributes data to major publishers but the collated data in question is explicitly banned from being used for scholarly projects. This is part of the impetus for projects like Laura McGrath and Dan Sinykin’s Post45 Data Collective, an open-access repository for literary and cultural data to gain insights from a variety of sources, including library circulation numbers and how publishing house decisions effect the distribution of work by authors based on race and ethnicity. Both corporate and open-access approaches nonetheless face daunting barriers to providing clear causality on how, for example, an academic text might escape the backwaters of research collections and enter into the awareness of a mainstream readership. In response to Lincoln Michel’s Counter Craft blog post “No, Most Books Don’t Sell Only a Dozen Copies: A little post on why publishing statistics are so confusing,” BookScan’s lead industry analyst, Kristen McLean, thoughtfully weighed in on why so many statistics appearing in the public record from events like the DOJ’s antitrust case against the $2.2 billion Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster merger can nonetheless end up offering little to no clarity on actual people reading the actual words of a book. Beyond how someone chooses their tranche of sales data, even BookScan’s numbers don’t include “direct sales from publishers...sales by authors at events, or through websites, eBook sales, or any reading through platforms like Substack, Wattpad, Webtoons, Kindle Direct, or library lending platforms like OverDrive or Hoopla” (Michel). The result is that the economics of book sales are both difficult to access or parse and even harder to link to the kind of effective conceptual impact that Leckie pursues by initiating divergent forms of writing. It appears that those of us committed to the work of cultural critique and interpretation must make decisions about what constitutes our own reading public without any clarity of how that imagined community necessarily coincides with the industry reality of publics that read. Is the primary purpose of writing scholarly monographs and articles to be read by a niche group of likewise informed scholars who then reciprocate with their own contributions to disciplinary ways of knowing? Leckie expresses a deep dissatisfaction with these cloistered networks of knowledge formation, and, in doing so, has written a book that would not easily circulate within the logic of field citation. Lists of self-help tips to avoid ending up a modern-day Casaubon are not generally cited as evidence in academic arguments, but perhaps the possibility that such a venture may act as a communal rallying cry for climate action is worth the sacrifice of losing that mode of citational immortality. Whether Leckie’s work will mobilize academic readers or even appeal to a broader readership is unclear. She ventures this provocatively poetic interruption in an urgent attempt to find out.