If Librarians Ruled the World

If librarians took over the world, you would not have to worry about any silly irradication of ethnic groups or suppression of ideas. (We are in the idea business, after all.) No, if librarians had aspirations to world domination, it would only be about one thing: books:

1) No more tiny books, no more huge books. Uniformity of size, people! Do you know what a pain it is to shelve all these oddly sized books in conjunction with the Dewey?

2) Sorry, J.D. Robb, but if you don't start numbering your Inanity in Death series, you will be facing a firing squad. And that goes too for any author who plans on writing a series that goes on forever. Recognizable sequences, or death.

3) Sorry about your luck, L.J. Smith, but you won't be allowed to republish books you wrote ten years ago under a different publisher with a new copyright date. You can republish all you want, but that original copyright date from that original imprint stands. You don't reissue a birth certificate when someone gets married and changes their last name, do you!? No. You're not fooling anyone.

4) Oh, and authors, if you're planning on genre-hopping, you'd better have a healthy imagination for pseudonyms. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it is to hand a blue-haired old lady the newest book from an author who has heretofore been family-rated and down-to-earth only to have her return it reporting that it contained vampires and *gasp* nudity!? New genre=new pseudonym.

5) James Patterson, you unmitigated fraud, if you want to help out unknown authors whose books you feel deserve to be published, set up your own publishing imprint. Slapping your name on the front of the book along with the real author is just fraud. Plus, after reading Sunday's At Tiffany's, we question your taste anyway.

This is life under the Librarian Reich!