The Erogenous 12-Step Diet for Reducing Book Glut

NEW YORK — With bulging bookstore inventories triggering computer overload and breakdown, the new health menace of “browser fatigue” felling an average of 10 customers a day in the larger chains, and an alarming 62% increase reported in personal bankruptcies among book buyers in the last fiscal quarter, the American publishing industry has reacted at last.

“Let’s face it,” admitted an industry spokesperson. “The repetition and overlap and sheer redundancy of book titles today is cultural cellulite--and it’s high time for literary liposuction!”

The downsizing of the American book-title behemoth has already begun--and right where the effects will be the most dramatic. The more than 50,000 current individual titles on astrology, diet, Hollywood, pet care, cults and financial management--the perennial villains of book glut--are being amalgamated into one volume: “New Astrological Sex Gossip of the Top 50 Hollywood Diet Cult Doctors That Can Make Your Pet an Overnight Stock Market Millionaire, Tax-Free.”

“No more hopeless plodding up and down miles and miles of shelves,” burbles the industry spokesperson. “Instead of half a million copies of 50,000 different titles, publishers will now print 50,000 copies of one title. How about freedom of choice, freedom of expression, freedom of the press? Like we told the ACLU, hey, how about the freedom in giving the poor overworked presses a rest?”

Other mainstay book categories face a similar winnowing process. Editors are now scrambling, for instance, to reduce the overflow of inspirational, self-help and uplift volumes to a manageable single book titled “Your Hidden Inner 12-Step Reawakening Journey of Selfhood: Alone At Last No More.”

The thriving sexuality category will be condensed into “Loving Therapy Partners and the Common-Sense Approach to the Fulfillment Trap--the Last Taboo?”

The pseudonymous “Stephen Clancy Grisham” is due to generate a single horror technolegal thriller, tentatively titled “The Haunted Meltdown Tort.” Infinite variations on the classic power-and-sex dynastic saga will be boiled down to “Angel Slut: Naked Days, Hollywood Nights.”

When the grueling process is complete, experts predict that bookstores will offer a total of only 16 titles at any one time.

How to handle what publishing insiders call “backlog”--all works published prior to 1997, including everything from the works of Shakespeare to the novels of Dostoevsky ad infinitum--is proving a thorny issue. That there are too many such books for a downsized world is obvious; yet, so far, with early efforts having produced such curiously unsatisfying titles as “The Decline and Fall of David Copperfield in the Wasteland For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “Madame Bovary to the Vanity Fair Lighthouse of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom--A Stillness at Appomattox,” there clearly remains much work to be done.

But that overtaxed book lovers will one day be the beneficiaries is certain. As certain as that “Angela’s Midnight in the Dilbert Garden of Good and Ashes, a Perfect Storm Into Thin Air Saved Civilization” will be the first best-seller.