Jan Olof Bengtsson

Blogs, websites, and the internet in general must not replace books, but promote them.

One thing I used to do on Facebook – and still do, although, for the reasons I explain on the Facebook page here in the blog, no longer to the same extent – was to post book recommendations in the form of links, mostly to Amazon, with thumbnail images of the book covers. They seemed to be appreciated, valuable comments were made, and they sometimes triggered important discussions. (I also used a book app, VisualBookshelf, which I filled with hundreds of titles.)

When I started this blog, I complained that WordPress did not allow such links to be published with the images. I did post a few book posts without the image links, but it did not look very good and I stopped. But now I have started again, adding the information provided by the publisher about the respective titles and authors. Since the books thus recommended can be regarded as integral parts of my arguments, I want to draw my readers’ attention to or remind them of them and keep the basic information about them readily available. In fact, this is necessary, essential. Facebook’s thumbnail images were eminently suited to my purposes. Without book posts, this blog has been impoverished in comparison.

I now figure book posts, expanded to include the publishers’ information and not just a link as in my few early ones (which I will revise), are worthwhile even without the images. The posts will include the books I posted on Facebook and VisualBookshelf, both new and older ones, although almost exclusively such that are still in print or easily available, for instance at bookfinder.com. The titles of the respective posts will include the author’s name and the main title of the book. In the text, the subtitle, publication details, and (when available) presentation will be given, and a link to Amazon, some other seller, or the publisher.

One of my purposes is simply advertisement, to help the authors, publishers, and sellers sell more of the respective books, to thus help them make more money and become better known and respected, so that it will become easier for them to write, publish, and sell more books of the same kind and make still more money, etc.

In the case of books which I have reason to recommend – either because I have read them myself or because I know enough about them for other reasons – I find it perfectly meaningful to post such posts with only the mentioned basic information provided by the publisher, including blurbs, instead of just listing the titles as I did on the old References page. It seems to me sufficient for enhancing the presentation of the themes, analyses and positions in all of my posts in other categories, in which I can naturally link to them.

I have added a new subcategory for them under Uncategorized: Books. It replaces the References page which I used as a substitute for book posts. The new subcategory may, in time, become more extensive than the page. But it should still be regarded in the same way as the References page: it has in some respects the same function in relation to the blog as a whole as the references section in a book has to the book, although the blog is certainly not a single book but contains separate though related texts and series of texts, comparable to my traditionally published articles and books. The main difference is that it will contain only such titles that are of general relevance to the themes of the blog, not works to which I refer for limited, special purposes in posts of a more scholarly character. The latter titles appear only in the respective posts.

On the Contents page, I plan to present the posts in the new category with the same subdivisions as on the old References page, i.e. the respective other categories, and not in the order of publication. If readers find this inconsistent with the rest of the Contents page, I will list them in the order of publication on that page and restore the References page, adding each new title there too, or perhaps not list them at all on the Contents page but simply refer there to this new References page. Those who remember the old References page will see that all of the titles that were there will, in time, appear on the new one too.

For those who read the posts with my own writing, the relevance of these book posts will be obvious. Such readers will also be able to understand that I do not agree with everything in the recommended books, and often even what precisely it is that I do not agree with. But at a later stage, I could of course in some cases add short comments of my own, or the posts could be developed into reviews or review articles.

The book posts will of course be prominent and take up much space on the first page, but they will be strictly confined to this new subcategory. Those who are not interested can easily ignore them and find the other posts.

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Edit: I now use small images of the books.