R.I.P.
In fact, most books on any subject written by – or about – a celebrity fit here, the idea being that consumers will buy the name whatever the product might be (A Michael Jordan lunchbox, a Michael Jordan autobiography…it’s all the same.). The name itself sells the product – or the celebrity, him- or herself directly sells the product (as in, for example, the egregious advice books written and then shilled on the radio by anti-feminist zealot and call-in show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger).
There are also a growing number of books that owe their existence to an aggressively entrepreneurial strain of literary agent known as the Book Packager. This is a person who, rather than waiting for worthwhile, publishable proposals to come his or her way like the other hard-working, god-fearing literary agents do, instead becomes a book “producer” by glomming onto hot topics, snagging an expert to attach his or her name to the project, corralling an out-of-work writer to write the text and selling the “package” to a publisher. Recent packaged projects include The Elvis Treasures (Yes! There are many.) and Doga (I regret to inform you that this is a book about yoga for dogs).
Functional books and anti-books do little to support what the author of The Book is Dead calls “Book Culture,” the great and ongoing human conversation about what matters that takes place between the covers of books and among the people who read them. But nowadays these conversations are taking place in other media, often online, and the book has become (he argues) increasingly irrelevant to how we learn about the world and experience our culture.