Swedish magazine interview
I was interviewed about BookFinder.com in the June issue of Diego, a Swedish career and lifestyle magazine.
We just got a copy, and tried translating the article from Swedish back into English (the language sounds a bit hokey, as my responses are translated from English to Swedish, and back to English):
BookFinder.com is the world’s largest gathering place for bookophiles. It works as a search engine for more than 100 million new, used, cheap, expensive, ordinary and peculiar book titles and lists all hits in price order. The site is connected to over 100,000 booksellers all over the world. A few years ago, BookFinder.com was only a small school project, begun by technophile and book nerd Anirvan Chatterjee and his friend Charlie Hsu.
“Some of last years most sought after titles were Madonna’s photo book Sex, Taylor Caldwell’s novel about the evangelic Luke, Dear and Glories Physician, R P Hunnicutt’s Sherman: A History of the American Medium Tank and June Hemmons Hiatt’s The Principles of Knitting, which has become somewhat of a cult book among knitters”, says Anirvan Chatterjee from his office near the University in California, Berkeley. Oh, that is an interesting blend. “Yes, our readers are interested in sex, religion, violence, and knitting…Try to interpret that if you can!” He himself reads over 100 books a year. Salman Rushdie and Samuel Delany belongs to the favorites.
“Books make it possible to step into someone else’s head and experience someone else’s experiences, to me, the best books are those that reason with the readers and make them think in new ways. But it is difficult to divide books into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Everyone is entitled to his or her own taste. Right now I’m mostly looking forward to reading Philip Roth’s new novel Everyman. I discovered him in high school when a teacher lent me Portnoy’s Complaint. Since then I have slowly but surely worked my way through many of his novels, which often deals with culture and masculinity. If there is any American who deserves the Nobel Prize, it is he”.
But you know what. It is said that the paperless society is on its way to take over - so is there really a future for someone like you? “The talk about the paper copy dying out has been going on for decades, but still nothing has happened. The e-book system has so far been a big failure. There are very few people who want to exchange their paper copies to digital versions. I would certainly not want to pay very much for a book that I neither can lend to someone else or read again after ten years when the technique is exchanged and the soft copy already has passed its prime—best to be used before date”. But it does not mean that the electronic text does not have a future, to the contrary. The digital revolution is definitely here and it is possible that the role of the traditional book in our culture will change.