No one is as smart as everyone

By Adam | March 19, 2013 | 0

I had a great post planned for today. It was full of bang and zip. It had all kinds of cool thoughts in it. And, it made absolutely no sense. As I said in a previous post, sometimes you need to fail to succeed. While I was pondering the mess that my post had become, one of my favorite tweeps posted this:

This led me to thinking, which is one of the awesome things about anything Ame tweets. After the smoke cleared, I realized that I have recently been looking at books differently. I hear the collective moan of the audience, but really, it’s true. I’ll give you an example.

When I buy a book solely for myself, for the sake of argument let’s call it an adult book, unless I am familiar with the series or author, I usually do some research. I’ll check the reviews at Amazon or Goodreads. I’ll ask about it at my local book store. I might find something based off a blog I read. I may select a book because people in my reading group recommended it, or it was on someone’s challenge list. What I don’t do, is buy it because it has a cool cover. Let’s not be too hasty though, a cool cover might influence my decision to look up a book’s reviews. It just isn’t the primary reason I buy a book for myself.

When I bought books for my kids, I didn’t do any of that. I would turn them loose in the kiddie section and wait until they had a small stack. Then we’d cull that down, to one or two, to take home. What influenced their decisions? It certainly wasn’t content or reviews. It was the covers. And, the books they brought home from school? How did you pick that out buddy? “It has a shark on it.” or “Dragons, dad. Come on.”

What changed? One reason was finding some great children’s book people on twitter. This led to finding some great blogs. Places like mrschureads.blogspot.com and sharpread.wordpress.com led me to other cool places like librariansquest.blogspot.com, 100scopenotes.com, and www.thelibraryfanatic.com. And, these led me to more. I’d list them all, but that’s not the point. All of a sudden, I was thinking differently about children’s literature. I was joining twitter reading groups discover the best distributors of Rheem HVAC. I was considering books to get my children instead of just grabbing something they thought looked cool. And, they were getting excited about reading. Which, if you get right down to it, is kind of the point, right?

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