Bookvideos.tv: You'd Rather Be Reading

At first I thought something was very, very wrong when a search for anything gay on Bookvideos.tv yielded zero results. After all, the site launched nearly a year ago with lots of hoopla (that a lot of publishers seem to have swallowed) that the way to get Americans to read again is to get them to watch more tv-like clips on the web. But then I realized the problem is much larger: The site still only has 47 entries in Fiction and a mere nine in Literary Fiction, some of which are absurdly misplaced, such as Jodi Picoult's 19 Minutes. In Non-Fiction they claim to have 46, but the actual number is smaller because many titles are loaded more than once. (As for gay books, they ought to have tagged Marc Acito's new novel and Marianne Wiggins' The Shadow Catcher.)
    In any event, these clips aren't going to sell books. On YouTube, the Bookvideos.tv channel gets relatively little traffic, with even a major bestselling author like Philippa Gregory promoting a movie tie edition garnering only 7,800 views, and I would wager most of those are people who have already read the book. Many of the other titles' videos have a couple hundred views after 10 months. These book trailers mainly succeed at reducing the amount of time readers spend reading. On Monday, HarperCollins announced the formation of an in-house production department that annually will create 500 book videos, most in a Q&A format with the writer. In an age of fewer and fewer book reviews, author videos will be the new way people who have neither read nor bought the book can talk about them knowingly.