Recent visits to a book store

Whenever I go to JM road, i like to visit the pirated book sellers sitting on the footpath. These sellers are always unbelievably updated as in they always seem to have most popular and recent books.

So from my recent visits, one of my observations is that they seem to have unusually large number of books on self help. Well this category of books include books in "how to..." series for example, "How to win people", "How to improve your body language" etc. Also we have subtle books like "Monk who sold his ferrari" or "Tuesdays with Morrie" or more obvious ones like "Yes, You can !" or "You can win" or more abstract books like "Who moved my cheese" etc (listing many names just to drive home the point)

Other observation is that most of these books are best sellers which is a puzzle in itself - how can we have many best-sellers in a given period. And if at all a book is NOT a best-seller it is always by an author (or even a publisher who hardly has anything to do with the actual book) of a best-selling book. So basically all the books are best-sellers.

Most interesting thing I found in recent books are the sesationalism of the book title. It seems that everybody wants book titles which either create sensation or controversy. I read a very interesting passage in "Rich dad poor dad" where a friend of the author wanted to publish a book named "Fundamentals of education" which was the aim of the content of the book. No publisher wanted to publish the book. The same guy renamed his title without altering the content and named it "STOP SENDING YOUR CHILD TO SCHOOL...If you want him to learn" and the book became (any guesses ?) ...."BEST-SELLER"

There is a very interesting observation in the same book about the term "Best-seller". The term is very simple and self-explanatory. It doesn't say "Best-written" it says "Best-seller" there is a very obvious difference !!! It's just a advertising point, it doesn't mean anything about how the book is.

So when I think about it, the only conclusion that i can draw is, like any other field, literature has also become a "business" where authors (most of them) want to "supply" the "demand". They want to market their product (book) aggressively just like any other product in the market.