Blog P.I.

The number of books about the political blogosphere climbs ever upward, and today I see that yet another is on the way, from Democratic Virginia blogger-consultants Lowell Feld and Nate Wilcox. The book won’t be out until the middle of 2008, but Feld announced it in a post on Raising Kaine last night. It’s called “Netroots Rising: How a Citizen Army of Bloggers and Online Activists Is Changing American Politics,” and it’s already listed on Amazon:

Wait. I think I need to do an exaggerated double-take, for comic effect:

Forty bucks? What is this, a college-level textbook? A coffee table book? Merely oversized? Is it 800 pages? I buy enough books that my Amazon Prime account pays for itself, and I can’t remember the last time I shelled out this much for a book that wasn’t out-of-print.

For comparison, here are the Amazon listings for other recent (though indeed they are all recent) books about politics and the Internet:

These aren’t all new, and they’re not all hardcover. But you’ll see that the two released this fall — the tomes by Graff and Bai — are indeed hardback, and with Amazon discounts they cost less than half of “Netroots Rising.”

It is certainly the kind of book I would be inclined to buy. I bought most of the books listed above, mostly from Amazon, and mostly when they were brand new. But at forty bucks, I may just have to apply for a library card.