One item in the book news today is something you might have seen in the Wall Street Journal, a story with a dispiritedly wayward lede:

Publishers have faced a vexing question in recent years: As newspapers’ book coverage shrinks and fewer people shop in brick-and-mortar bookstores, how might publishers open a conversation with readers online, without getting lost in the digital sea?

The story revolves around Grove Atlantic publisher Morgan Entrekin, whose decided to throw his influence and money into a new venture designed to open that reader conversation: in April he’s launching a bookish website called Literary Hub, which will feature book excerpts, book reviews, author interviews, and miscellaneous essays. It’s a website Entrekin (and presumably his financing partners) hopes will be attractive as a kind of one-stop clearinghouse for all things literary – a single stop he claims is necessitated by the simple volume of all things literary in the world today: “There’s a gigantic amount of literary content being produced each day but unless you have 10 people looking for it, you won’t find it,” he says. “We’re going to hopefully bring it to you.”

I think there are four important things to notice about this little bit of news:

First: It’s an online-only venture. One of Entrekin’s partners expresses a little trepidation about that, but of course it made me smile. I am, after all, the Managing Editor of one online-only literary venture and the US & Worldwide Editor of another, which betokens a certain amount of belief in the venue! Despite the rather large number of paper-paged printed books I get in the mail every day, I do a great deal of my daily reading on my iPad or my sturdy little Nook, and I feel certain lots of other readers do too. The fact that Entrekin and his partners could easily have opted to raise the money for a magazine and instead chose to go online-only is an encouraging step toward erasing the widespread prejudice among book-snobs for onscreen reading.

Second: It’s a foolish venture. Not only could Entrekin’s 10 busy-beavers not gather more than a fraction of the “gigantic amount of literary content being produced every day” (I myself am more capable, I assure you, than 10 or even 20 such busy beavers, and I can’t do it), but even if they could, they couldn’t then convey it all – even the Internet isn’t big enough for that. No, what Entrekin means is actually the opposite of what he’s saying: those 10 beavers will be busy deciding what parts of the tiny daily fraction of what they find they won’t censor – they’re gatekeepers, not gatherers. Nothing wrong with that, of course – it’s the function of every literary journal, in print or online. But those journals should have the humility to admit it – or the common sense not to bring it up.

Third: It’s a lazy venture. Who said book people need a “one-stop shop of bookish aggregation”? Who would want such a thing? You’re all readers – can you picture yourself ever saying, “Well, now that I’ve finally got this one place to go for all my book news, essays, and reviews, I need not go anywhere else ever again – thank God!”? The very idea caters to the worst kind of click-baiters in the depths, no matter how many hotlinks it has.

Fourth: It’s a hopeful venture. It aims to add another high-profile literary venue to a mental landscape that can never have enough of them, and that’s always a good thing. True, that opening lede seems bizarrely ignorant of an obscure little community known as Goodreads, where 25 million active, passionate readers share quirky stories, exhaustive lists, personal ratings, and thousands and thousands of reviews, and where publishers very much go in order to have online conversations with readers. But lede-writers are by nature fairly oblivious creatures – the more important point is that those reader-conversations are wonderful things, and it would be great to have more of them. I think in this rare instance I can safely speak for all my bookish colleagues at Open Letters in wishing Literary Hub a long and healthy life!