L. McMaken
11-30-11
Cincinnati, OH
Literary video’s are being hotly pushed by Fiction Circus to garner a place on YouTube. The goal is to launch a channel just for literature – a “new space for authors and readers.” Currently, any author that posts a book video on Youtube must find a channel for it. They only channel close to appropriate for books is listed under entertainment. That channel is actually more music videos’ and movie trailers and books tend to get lost  in there.
An alternative is to create a  personal author channel, but that is limited to those who are familiar with the author and know to search under a specific author’s name. And either of these options leaves no place for readers to comment, view or download a book video.
Fiction Circus is working to create a “literature channel” exclusively for books. In a statement they said: “You will note that while Google has made serious, extremely well-organized attempts to purchase and control all out-of-print literature and create a massive online digital library, they have not bothered to create a ‘literature’ category for YouTube, revealing once again that they would be terrible shepherds for the human inheritance of written knowledge. Perhaps it can be argued that literature is ‘entertainment’. But aligning literature with ‘entertainment’ is disingenuous. Literature is never merely ‘entertainment’.
We will update you if they succeed in creating a “Literary Channel.”
