The Salon writer adopts a superior attitude and a willingness to generalize like wild across several populations of readers. But then she probably had a deadline and reached for something to say to fill those column inches – digital pixels – the white space?

But I think in general, most of these people are out of touch with book awards and how books are selected for them or what authority/meaning any of them have, and so the NBA is just as irrelevant to them as any other award. It’s a question of ignorance or apathy on the part of the readers’ more than esoteric-ness of the awards. But I question how much the two are related. If we make the NBA less esoteric, will that make readers pay any more attention to it? If we award the NBA to books that would have done well with these readers anyway, will they take notice and come to see it as a seal of approval and seek to read other winning books? But if we start doing that, there’s a chance we’ll only award books that would have been read anyway, and that raises the question of whether the NBA is bringing attention to “significant” books at all, depending on how one defines that loaded term.