Superbloke: Publishers’ Summaries and the National Library Service

1

Publishers’ summaries are promotions for readers looking for something new. You find them on Amazon, Audible, Goodreads and most other bookseller websites. Their most notable characteristics are cliches, exaggeration and urgency—altogether, unreliability. The protagonist/hero/antihero “must” always be doing something or other, and doing it “quickly.” Even a mild comedy might be characterized with words like “stunning” and “shocking.” And surely no book is worth a blurb unless the impact is “explosive.” If the book will change you forever, even better.

I haven’t started writing the first book in the Superbloke series, but I hope to get around to it very soon. However, because publicity trumps every other consideration when it comes to selling books, I have written its publisher’s summary.

Superbloke: Adventures in the Lower Sphere

In this first and latest heart-thumping installment of this bestselling series by ever-aspiring author Adrian Spratt, Superbloke must confront the biggest threat he has yet met.

Empress Tanta summons Superbloke after evil warlady Wordah Pants kidnaps the Empress’s betrothed, Mori Bund. Tanta mounts a massive search, but she knows she cannot prevail without Superbloke’s help. Superbloke quickly flies—well, drives—to his trailer in order to transform from Kent Clerk to muscle-bulging savior. But once there, Superbloke discovers his “S” outfit no longer fits. He knows that without his uniform, he cannot transform himself into defender against evil.

He summons heart-throb Louis Street, who introduces him to the anti-obesity drug Zepbound. “What’s that,” Superbloke exclaims, “some new breed of dog?” Louis brings up videos of endoscopies demonstrating that Zepbound works by keeping the stomach filled with days-old food. Seeing stomachs bubbling with decomposing hamburger, Superbloke vomits.

But, in a shocking development, Superbloke determines that it isn’t his body type that has changed, but that someone, or something, has penetrated his secret lair, the nondescript trailer, and applied a catastrophic shrinking agent on the S suit. Who could this monster be? Will Superbloke succeed in identifying him/her/them before he becomes a victim of clothing shrinkage? Has his glorious errands-of-mercy career come to a calamitous end?

Superbloke enlists his long-time ally, private detective Ham Shovel, who quickly uncovers a mammoth conspiracy. In a stunning development, the man responsible for Superbloke’s terrible predicament proves to be none other than his childhood nemesis, Dink Wrap. Wrap can breeze through trailer walls with little more harm than a scratch and an itch. He bought up the company that mines and supplies the shrinking agent, Tiny Prancer, that now seems destined to destroy Superbloke. That fateful night, while Superbloke was playing at being mild-mannered Kent Clerk, Wrap had flowed through the S trailer and squirted Tiny Prancer on every piece of clothing he found. Superbloke hasn’t yet tried on his underwear.

Can Superbloke and Shovel find a supplier that can tailor his suit to his new shape? Or can they locate a counter-bloat agent before it’s too late? If so, can they prevent Dink Wrap from monopolizing it before they can super-X-size his S suit back to what it was? The stakes are raised and tensions quickly mount as bodies pile up.

But then, in yet another twist, Shovel appears to switch sides. The man whose loyalty Superbloke has counted on his entire good-deeding life, the man who paid the down payment on his trailer, can no longer be relied on. Surrounded by friends and foes he dares not trust, Superbloke must quickly determine if he is being betrayed or teased. If betrayed, he must quickly kill or be killed. If teased, he must quickly acquire a sense of humor.

And, with so many obstacles in his way, will Superbloke yet find a way to rescue Empress Tanta’s fiancé Mori Bund before his kidnapper, Wordah Pants, commits a deadly act of cold-blooded murder?

In this explosive, action-packed thriller, readers will be at the edge of their seats, fearful of falling on the floor but unable to stop turning pages or swiping left until the very last, heart-stopping comma. Their attitudes toward heroism, and obesity, will change forever!

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The Library of Congress’s talking book unit, which goes by the name National Library Service, (NLS), is “a free braille and talking book library service for people with temporary or permanent low vision, blindness, or a physical, perceptual, or reading disability that prevents them from using regular print materials.” Until the past year or so, NLS produced in-house summaries that were helpful and concise. Now they rely exclusively on publishers’ summaries. Each morning NLS issues a list of the titles they made available the day before, often numbering in the dozens, and each is accompanied by a publisher’s summary. It doesn’t take long before all the cliché-ridden blurbs run together in one mindless rush to forgettability.

I’d hoped to persuade NLS’s staff to resume their former practice of creating in-house summaries, free from promotional excess. However, even in my own mind, I’m up against a dilemma. If sighted readers are forced to endure publishers’ summaries, why should visually impaired people get preferential treatment? I want to say, must we use egalitarian reasoning to justify a lowering of standards? But if resort to publishers’ summaries saves government money, it seems there’s nothing more to say.

There are other areas where NLS is denying patrons important information that all sighted people can obtain at a glance. In the past year or so, NLS stopped providing publication dates. The rationale, to the extent I understand it from an April 10, 2023 email that NLS sent me, is that the Library of Congress has been inconsistent in treating dates as that of the copyright or the first date of publication. This flaw could easily be remedied by calling it “Copyright or original publication date,” or in other ways. To withhold the date completely was categorically the wrong solution.

Thus, if I want to read the latest book that NLS has produced on Ukraine, I have no way, based on these descriptions, to determine which Ukrainian history-related book to download. If I want to read the first in a character-connected series, I can pull up the names of every title NLS has produced in that series, but I can’t tell which was the first or, for that matter, the latest. Good luck if I want to read the series’ novels in sequence. I’d need to turn to Google, but why make this extra step necessary? Every other book supplier and reviewer, from publishers to booksellers to low-traffic opinion websites, includes copyright/first publication dates alongside titles and authors. NLS, on which thousands of disabled readers rely, is alone in withholding this data.

NLS honored me by adding my novel Caroline to their collection, and I hesitate to criticize the decisions they’ve made in the past year. Moreover, although I’ve written over and over to NLS to argue for these and other changes, the staff has nearly always responded courteously. NLS provides a valuable service to disabled people. No doubt eliminating in-house book summaries cut costs, but at what a cost! Meanwhile, I can imagine no justification, cost-savings or otherwise, for withholding copyright/original publication dates.

Actually, NLS ostensibly did agree to restore copyright/publication dates. Last summer, they promised they’d be back by the fall. The fall arrived, but when I pointed it out, they observed that it was still the fall. The winter solstice came and went, and still no copyright/publication dates. Now it’s the next spring, and copyright/publication dates remain an unfulfilled promise.

NLS typically produces hundreds of titles in one week. I’m astonished how many books they can churn out in the young adult, romance, fantasy, science fiction, mystery (my own weakness) and other popular genres, surely more than any one patron could hope to read in a lifetime. NLS is right to cater to all tastes and age levels, but the vast preponderance of titles in these genres suggests NLS’s target audience is those who read for distraction. Hence their indifference to copyright/original publication dates, never mind self-promoting, over-hyped publishers’ summaries.

For most subscribers to my website, this imbroglio might seem like a tempest in someone else’s teapot. But the fundamental problem at NLS is that its decisions reflect the state of literature today.

The literary world today resembles a line of sculptured figures who heads are turned around. Publishing is controlled by a tiny number of large, multinational, multi-layered corporations, and literary agents second-guess what they want. So we have publishers looking over their shoulder at what they perceive to be reader interest, agents looking over their shoulder to fathom what publishers believe readers want, and authors looking over their shoulder and producing what they think agents think publishers think the public want.

Commerce has always been crucial to art. Michelangelo created sculptures to satisfy his employer, the Vatican. One could make a strong argument that there’s little or no point to an artistic product that can’t find a sponsor or buyer. But I doubt the artistic world has been driven so relentlessly by second-guessing gatekeepers.

By whipping up foreseeable passions, publishers’ summaries are a symptom of this malaise. That it is so easy to satirize them is a sign of how pernicious they are.

Note: Need I admit I have no intention of writing even the first sentence of the Superbloke saga? My apologies for—let me roll out one more cliche—any inconvenience.