In NewsBites on Wednesday, one of the stories was about a petition to address gender labeling in books for children. The argument is that publishers should not assume that boys want one type of book and girls, another.
But of course, identifying the target market is a long-standing tradition in the publishing biz. The idea is to facilitate sales by helping consumers narrow the field to books which appeal to their particular areas of interest. As data collection and analysis have become more sophisticated, the numbers of genres and sub-genres have multiplied. Continue reading “Genre Equality”
On February 2, 
Back in the day, there was a TV show called Bewitched. The main character was a typical suburban housewife who happened to be a witch. The woman who lived across the street had a habit of spying on her neighbors, and when she saw something especially odd going on at the Stevenses’ house, she’d screech her husband’s name to get him to come to the window: “ABNER!!!”