Et Tu, YouTube

YouTube strength lies in its capacity to deliver experience that is immediate, genuine, and robust. If a piece is tentative, it doesn't belong on video, and is unlikely to be a YouTube fave. Library Dominoes did little for me; I just pitied the poor soul tasked with post-production clean-up.

It's not surprising that YouTube best bets tend to be transgressive. They aim, and succeed, at turning something on its ear. Topic and degree of trangressivity are subject to personal taste; let that be caveat and disclaimer for what follows.

A cursory search for literacy-related videos yielded a couple of gems:

• Read a Book - Get Crunk About Reading, by Dawiyd Moor, featuring music by Bomani D'Mite Armah

• Comedy Skit - Men on Books, submitted by Digital Overdrive

For an assortment of reasons, I won't link or embed, but each video is worth viewing for its library service implications. Each video promotes reading, albeit in an edgy, highly stylized manner.

Read a Book incorporates rapper D'Mite's raucous refrain along with profanity and racial epithet, all set to an unrelenting hip hop beat. The pace is purposeful; the message richly layered. The raw exhortation to literacy plays against a display of classic African American literature and historic African American leaders. The mix engages movement and provokes thought.

The Men on Books comedy skit features fictional gay book critics, from the television show In Living Color, who talk up (and down) popular and classic titles from their own highly vamped and often scatological perspective. The video's a tart example of the truism: same book, different reads.