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Comment by timonoko | Hacker News Reader

Pirate Bay is the ultimate literary critic. "Nobody steals bad books", says Palahniuk, the most fleeced author of all times.

Finland has only one author at that level: Sofi Oksanen.

In comparison, Sweden has Hundreds and Norway has about three.

Edward Dutton, an Englishman living in Finland has had some success. But the book was about Islam, and it was leeched like crazy, probably millions. Then the book was banned from Amazon and removed from PP. Baddest of the non-bad books.

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> but the book was about Islam

Talk about burying the lead

Googling him leads to his wiki article

> Edward Croft Dutton (born 1980) is an English anthropologist and white supremacist known for authoring controversial racialist articles for fringe far-right journals such as Mankind Quarterly and OpenPsych.[1][2] Dutton is associated with the white nationalist group Patriotic Alternative.

Sharing frequency (Pirate Bay) is a measure of popularity. If popularity and critical success were the same best seller lists would be topped by literature Noble prize laureates.

It's also popularity... among bittorrent users, which is a fairly particular subset of the population.

Why should one care about critical success and Nobel prize?

This is actually a fair question. I think both of these things aren't necessarily worth caring about, though they can be indicators of quality. And that's the question--is it critical reception or popularity that proves a book's worth?

But here's a deeper question for you: is a book great if it was only popular in its era?

Most people seem to agree that the greatest books are the ones that outlive their authors, which means that popularity and even critical reception in the short-term matter very little.

I could float some ideas, but it doesn't seem to pertain to the discussion.

If you posit a thesis that critical acclaim is a better measure of whether a book is good than popularity, it makes sense to explain why.

I'll back GP's thesis.

The global median reader has poor reading comprehension skills and has read few other books. Their main concern is entertainment. Entertaining as many readers as possible in order to be popular requires writing about broad-interest subjects using surface level knowledge.

Dedicated literary critics have read many more books than average and are better at extracting meaning from what they read. They're looking for "quality," which is nebulous but distinct from entertainment value, and they're less likely to be put off by abstract concepts or complexity. Specialized critics are better; if you want a sci-fi book you ask a sci-fi reader.

As anecdotal evidence I submit the sales figures of Fifty Shades of Gray.

Just like with any other media, popular and good aren't always the same, despite there being a fairly close relationship between the two.

The reason for why critical acclaim is a better measure of whether a book is good than popularity is because critical acclaim is explicitly and directly concerned with assessing the quality of the product. As opposed to popularity, which has zero explicit relationship to the quality, it is only concerned with the raw demand numbers.

Just because mcdonalds is one of the most popular (if not the most popular) restaurants in the world, it doesn't mean that the quality of food there is better than that at a random much less popular Michelin star restaurant.

In the same vein, Transformer movie series is of a pretty terrible quality, but it is insanely more popular than something very critically acclaimed like Parasite. Just looked up numbers, and the first Transformers movie alone (from 2007) had about $700mil in worldwide sales, as opposed to about $250mil for Parasite. And mind you, Parasite wasn't some unknown indie movie that was critically acclaimed. It was one of the most popular critically acclaimed movies out there.

You misread. I didn't say that critical acclaim or popularity are measures for whether a book is good, whatever that means. I said that critical acclaim and popularity are distinct.

At a glance "Pirate Bay is the ultimate literary critic." makes sense, but it's not the whole truth. But there are bunch of things that should be also considered such as number of books available on Pirate Bay, type of books available, and then the cross section of Pirate Bay users that are interested in those books.

Could you try to explain Palahniuk to me?

I was a young kid in the 80s in Italy and somehow someone mentioned Palahniuk to me. I kept hearing this name for the next several years.

However, I never really understood what's so special about him (not to say that there isn't anything, just admitting ignorance), but also failed to find a news piece or a blog post that would clearly explain it.

Palahniuk got his fame almost solely by pirated copies of the "Fight Club". I remember first stealing it from a Russian FTP-site "Deep Repository" in 1996. Pirate Bay came years later.

Literary critics did not get the modern references like "I have constructed my life from Ikea-catalog". And they truly hated misogynist Jordan Peterson - style analysis of man's life "men are all brought up by women" and "everyman lives his days in quiet desperation".

Thanks!

As the article points out, popularity is requires talent and promotion. Sofi Oksanen is both talented and works so hard in promoting his work.

Sweden has so big lead in the tradition and skill in marketing that it's not even funny. There is this romantic idea that if you do good art, it will be recognized organically. But people want to read what others read. Good writer must be popular to sell books.

> Sofi Oksanen is both talented and works so hard in promoting his work.

Her.

Context: the Finnish language has no gendered pronouns so confusing he/she in English is a common mistake.

Yes. I have to make a mental pause before saying or writing he/she in English. It feels weird to have to think about gender so explicitly when talking and writing.

I don't see any evidence that you can promote genders equality meaningfully by changing the language, but I believe there is some truth to the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (the theory that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality).

They/them works if you don't want to think about it. A very few people take offence because they assume you're taking a political stance; a few more are unaware singular they has a many centuries of history in English and may correct you.

It may seem odd to some in English in contexts where the gender is well established and/or obvious, but they'll get over it.

>They/them works if you don't want to think about it.

Except that's it's typically used a plural. Referring to one person as multiple is weird, awkward and clunky. Or, you're making a multi-personality joke. I thought we were at the point where poking fun at mental illness was a no-no? That's micro-aggression behavior there on your part. So sure, if you don't think about, it works. Just like saying apple instead would work if you don't think about it.

Yes, languages differ. Why anyone still uses accent marks is weird too. Oh well. A few people forcing their own ideals on the masses isn't right either. Two wrongs don't make a right.

>Why anyone still uses accent marks is weird too.

I consider it a lot weirder that letters are pronounced differently depending on which word they are used in.

Yet the world keeps spinning just fine since it was adopted as the main language of the world. French has its own insanities and it was the lingua franca beforehand. Looks more like the more weird a language is, the more likely it will be internationally adopted. Every language has its quirks. The mere concept that a handful of people should have the dictative right to alter any of them in their own image, with force adoption by all, is far more insane than the quirks themselves. If you learn the history of the standardization of spelling, most of the fuckups we groan about to this day you can find roots in some authoritative asshole going, "You know, English needs to be a lot more like XYZ language." You see this is many words where they try to formalize English spelling using Greek and Latin spelling principles or word origins. Even if the English word was never derived from Greek or Latin, but it made it look better. Off top of my head when I read about this long ago, the word island. It's like isla or isula for Latin that relates to the concept of an island. So someone thought that English speakers saying, "iland", should add an s in there. The whole English spelling issue is a far more deep rooted and complex problem than your hand-wavy comment gives it credit for. In truth, folks with your attitude are what led us to the current mess because, "they knew better than all those low lives".

As I pointed out, singular they/them has been well established in English for centuries (it dates to the 1300s)

Trying to cater for people who get worked up over singular they/them is not worth the effort.

And how do you feel about the use of "he" as a generic pronoun in reference to an individual of undetermined gender? That has also been well established in English for centuries.

I think "they" is better because it also works even when referring to a specific person whose gender may be known, such as the Finnish author mentioned earlier. Minimal cognitive processing.

I have no objections to it personally, but in the context I proposed they/them, where the point was to not have to think about it, it is not applicable as you then need to consider the distinction between an unspecified person and a named person of unknown gender, where 'he' is not generally applicable, and often comes across as rude and presumptuous if you get it wrong.

The NYTimes bestseller list is sort of an indicator what you shouldn't bother reading. Extrapolate as appropriate.

> “Nobody steals bad books”

The popularity of something has nothing to do with its quality.

More than that, if you’re indeed going by the MC Donalds way of measuring things, you’re bound to be much more interested in:

> “Today Finland’s literary exports have tripled in size...”

Than how many people steal your books. Popularity that you can not turn into profit is completely useless in any professional sort of way.

“Quality” in this context simply means popularity - among literary critics. There’s no objective standard of measurement for literature.

Popular books aren’t better or worse than “good” books, they’re a different product. Could Michael Crichton have won the Nobel prize? Or could the Nobel prizewinner for literature write - and sell - a massive hit like Jurassic Park?

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