Fine on the road, not in the library ... BMW. Photograph: Sascha Schuermann/AFP
Bad news - companies have started producing their own books.
I had the misfortune to get involved with a BMW publication recently that promised to deliver a groundbreaking insight into the psychology of drivers. It sounded interesting at the time, but eventually came up with the usual plodding clichés based on "observations" by a couple of academics sitting in the back of - you've guessed it - a BMW, and someone standing on a street-corner watching the traffic go by. It lacked the energy of statistics. And the human interest.
Among the more shocking of the unsubstantiated revelations was this gem: we're more likely to sing in our cars if it's sunny. Yep, I've worked on some rubbish stuff in my time, but that took the biscuit. I don't even drive.
What's worrying is that this sort of banal marketing used to be confined to a press release, or perhaps a press conference if you couldn't fit it on two pages. (Journalists are widely regarded as too lazy to cope with three.) Now, it's a book. And a heavily branded one at that.
Why go to the effort? Is it because BMW has too much money to spend? Were they talked into it by an advertising agency? Or do they feel that by turning their "findings" into a book, they've somehow acquired gravitas? Probably all three - on the back of its publication, a BMW spokesperson added: "Our engineers are now really engineers of human experience." You just don't get that sort of pompous postscript with a mere press release.
But if this particular project smacks of vanity publishing - which I've nothing particularly against - isn't it just a matter of time before such books are toned down, less branded, more insidious? Take out the posturing, and you could have an academic book, an anthropological study. A lowlife version of Kate Fox's Watching the English that works towards getting you excited by gas-guzzlers. Something cleverer.
Writers have had patrons in the past, but I fear the day when multinational corporations sponsor academics and publishers and authors to frame things from their point of view, and manage not to slap their logos all over it like a warning. Who am I kidding? That day is already here. So what can we do about it?
