BookFinder.com Journal

BookFinder.com searches the inventories of a wide variety of European book sites, including fnac, the large French book retailer. I was looking at the fnac site today, when I noticed that they were running a site-wide promotion featuring an upraised fist in their site header. It turned out be an ad for a 40th anniversary microsite featuring books and CDs associated with May 1968, a series of left-wing student protests that helped bring down the De Gaulle government.

And what a promotion. They’re pushing books, flogging CDs, running a blog, and organizing an “I Sing 1968” contest, where participants can win a trip Prague by submitting a YouTube video of themselves singing a song from 1968.

I know very little about France and its postwar history, and how May 1968 is remembered forty years on. What I do know that in the US, mass market retailers tend to shy away from politics, and that we have very conflicted views of 1960s/1970s political movements.

I just can’t contemplate Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com doing a sitewide promo on the Kent State shootings and strike; the events seem to remain too divisive, too unresolved, for there to be a reasonable safe national consensus. Could a mainstream American ecommerce retailer safely do a site-wide promotion centered around the history of the Summer of Love? Yes. Roe v. Wade? No. Woodstock? Yes. Stonewall? No. The March on Washington? Yes (but no flippancy allowed).

So what’s going on here? Have the French come to a national consensus on May 1968? Is fnac being brave, or foolhardy? Is the promotion in good taste? This curious American wants your opinions.

[Now reading: Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk]