OUR local book market has been overwhelmed by a flood of cheap secondhand books from abroad, including memoirs of famous personalities. It is quite fascinating to read about American and British government officials who release their reminiscences of their time in office when they retire or after their term. The incentive to do so is enormous because their books' print run could go up to a million copies, which has made fortunes for those who write them, aside from more revenues from the lecture circuit relating to their books. In the process, they preserve and defend their legacy for posterity and for history.
There is no such incentive for Filipino government officials. That is why it is very rare for our leaders to write their own memoirs. Most officials want to tell their story through "true-to-life" movies, "MMK" or "Magpakailanman" episodes, and now, through interviews with social media influencers, mainly to win elections instead of telling it for history. There would be interviews here and there of course, archived in newspapers and videos that professional historians and biographers would have to toil to reconstruct. Worse, if memoirs are written at all or biographies commissioned, there would be only a very limited print run of about 500 to 1,000 copies with no centralized distribution to libraries around the country, making the books rare and hard to find after just a decade.
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