Have you heard? Mark Zuckerberg wants to start a book club. As one of his New Year’s Resolutions for 2015, the 30-year-old CEO of Facebook will commit to reading one new book every two weeks. He has already set up a Facebook page “The Year of the Book” and invited Facebook’s 864 million members to join in the fun by leaving comments relevant to the book at hand. As of this writing, the page has some 241,000 likes.
So far at least – and in marked contrast to Facebook users – the reaction to this announcement within the cultural commentariat has been largely negative. Criticisms seem to come mostly in the form of: The nerve of that young upstart! Who does he think he is…Oprah? The argument here is that Mark Zuckerberg cannot pretend – nor should he pretend – to be a tastemaker like Oprah Winfrey, who re-ignited reading within her (largely) middle-aged female audience by closely aligning her book club selections with the highly personal, emotionally resonant material covered on her talk show. As Gawker’s Anna Wiener puts it: “Oprah’s best product has always been Oprah. Zuckerberg’s best product is Facebook.”
Sure and point well taken.
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