conuly

And I'm not going to detail the boringness of it, but we disagreed at one point on the meaning of the word "blurb". She said she'd been told by a publisher that it was specifically the part of the cover or jacket that says things like "Best book I ever read!", and that the part that tells you what the book is about is simply the summary.

I said that as most everybody uses blurb inclusively to mean all of it, it's unlikely the publisher is going to be able to push that definition much longer, but that I'd look it up and post if she was right or if I was. (The odds of her seeing this are slim, of course, but a promise is a promise!)

And here is what Merriam-Webster says: A blurb (they say) is a short publicity notice (as on a book jacket).

Which seems to me as though it could go either way, because of course they only put summaries on books in order to get people to buy books, right? (I know *I* don't buy books with no nifty summary/blurb attached!) But on the other hand, you could just as easily say that only the parts actively publicizing the book count, and those would be the people going "ten thumbs up" or whatever.

So now we know. Sorta.

Wikipedia agrees with me, by the way, and says that the blurb can include a short summary of the book. But that's just Wikipedia. What do they know?