The book-person's view of the world

Over at 2 Blowhards, Michael Blowhard describes what he sees as "the difference between the movie-person's view of the world and the book-person's view of the world":

[F]or the sake of this discussion, I don't mean book fans. I mean people who spend a hunk of their professional lives in the books world -- as agents, retailers, critics, editors, writers, designers, etc.

[...]

Practically speaking, many people who join the books world do so because they're scholarly and quiet sorts. You won't find many movie professionals who spend a lot of time regretting that they left academia, or who went into the moviebiz hoping to find a quiet refuge from the stresses of business, ambition, competition, chores, and sex. But you'll find a lot of such people in the book world.

Also, the simple fact is that, for many people, books equal school -- while movies represent weekends, vacation, time off, romance and sex. And so life in the books world is for many books pros a way of trying to continue living life as though in school. [...]

As a consequence, the books world has a quiet-study-and-thought-at-war-with-everyday-distractions feeling. IMHO, many of the characteristics, and many of the endlessly recycled arguments and discussions that preoccupy bookworld people -- standards at war with money; the way striving for the good becomes a matter of holding the world at bay; a dreamy leftism -- can be explained from this simple fact: many books people are bugged by life outside of school. They wish life were like school. They were happy in school, and they did well there. Money, business, leaky roofs -- it all interferes with how they want to live, buried in their books. They feel put-upon by life [...]

I can't deny that the man has a point.