We could suffer more book awards

I came across a video from Jared Henderson on an online sentiment that new books are not as good as the old ones. He touches on a few ideas on why he thinks this idea is going around. One of his points was discussing the sheer volume of books. Even if the increasing ISBN volume per year is misleading, it is still a large amount of words to read and we have a discovery problem. Last month, Rebecca Makkai talked about how a lot of book prizes work. Which largely boils down to very human processes and real limitations of time, money, and technicalities. There’s a lot of gotchas for various scenarios where good books would get excluded. It seems books have a hard time getting into the correct prize consideration. Books are being submitted to prizes for contractual or they’re being entered into the pool just to see what happens regardless of relevance. And while mostly irrelevant to this topic, this video from Man Carrying Thing in response to someone complaining about the recommended…