Twenty-first-century readers would be hard-pressed not to judge a book by its cover. This is because screaming from almost every book cover are adjectives like ‘unputdownable’, ‘lyrical’, ‘dazzling’, ‘taut’, ‘tender’, ‘tour de force’, ‘stunning’, ‘mesmerising’, ‘evocative’ — this list can go on and on. These descriptions constitute what is popularly known as the book blurb: a short but effusive recommendation of the book from famous authors or, for later editions, from book reviewers. But a publisher in the United States of America has had enough. Sean Manning, an executive editor at Simon & Schuster, recently raised the proverbial tempest in the publishing tea cup by declaring that he will no longer require his authors to go begging for blurbs, calling the practice of securing blurbs — usually by writing ingratiating emails to other famous authors — “incestuous and unmeritocratic”. Mr Manning has added a caveat. In case an author does receive glowing recommendations from someone, the publisher will not strike them off from the jacket.

The anxiety surrounding book blurbs reflects a deeper concern about the state of the publishing industry. The corporate publishing model now depends on publishers allocating most of their resources to a select few books they expect to be high-sellers. Only scraps remain for the ones expected to perform modestly. In this competitive — Darwinian — environment, blurbs, often provided for free, become one of the few marketing tools that authors rely on to provide promotional support. Ironically, it is those writers who are least in need of such publicity blitzkrieg — well-established names with friends in the author-publisher complex — that get the most glowing of blurbs. Debut authors have to depend on the goodwill of their publishers to not just publish their works but also secure blurbs for them. Simon & Schuster’s decision can serve to make this ‘unmeritocratic’ system even more skewed against fresh merit.

Dismantling this cosy, incestuous ecosystem requires publishers, authors and, most importantly, readers to ask some pressing questions. For instance, who should decide on a book’s merit and how? A self-help book that has no merit in the eyes of an avid reader of fiction may mean the difference between life and death for another reader: How Not to Kill Yourself by Clancy Martin is known to have stopped a person from committing suicide. The reason why authors and even publishers try desperately to get ebullient blurbs for books is that the wider reading public no longer reads just for the pleasure of it. In a survey by the Pew Research Center, a whopping 46% of respondents said that they bought books because they associated it with coming across as erudite to the world. Such readers are unlikely to pick up a book with a bland jacket devoid of blurbs from the who’s who of the literary world. Moreover, dismantling blurbs is futile when a gamut of other pats on the back remain: the book being a bestseller on Amazon or making it to The New York Times’ bestseller list or being turned into a Netflix series or winning the Booker. Book covers, for all of Simon & Schuster’s moral outrage, would continue to make and break books, with or without blurbs.