Reviewing Reviewing

Rumor has it that I’m going to be on News Hour with Jim Lehrer tonight. I’ll be talking about the demise of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Eight minutes isn’t near long enough to cover a topic this broad; it’s barely enough to get started with the conversation. Yesterday was the last day for the dedicated book review, and it makes me sad to know it’s gone, but if you didn’t see it coming, you weren’t paying attention. To blame the Internet for the demise of the LATBR is to address part of the problem. Yes, book lovers are […]

Way back in the day, I was all hot diggety dog (is there a correct spelling for diggety?) about defenders of traditional media dismissing the blogosphere as nothing but a bunch of noise. Since even I can hit prey when shooting fish in a barrel, the sport of exposing holes in logic grew wearisome. I get sucked back into the fray from time to time — sheer ignorance should not go unremarked — but I let most of it pass me by. Recently I linked to an article that I retitled “On Conclusions Without Proof”. It was typical article that

At first I was amused. Now I read articles decrying the cutting of newspapers book reviews with barely-contained impatience. I am tired of the hand-wringing, the bemoaning of “loss of culture”, the sense of entitlement many of these articles present. Rather than leading the way to the solution, the writers behind these pieces show, sometimes too clearly, why they were the problem. People don’t subscribe to newspapers for book reviews. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the economics of the news business have changed dramatically over the past decade. Heck, they’ve changed dramatically over the past century. Hmm,

As we have seen over the past weeks, there has been much hand-wringing and navel-gazing on the topic of saving newspaper book review sections. To read some pundits, we need to save the world via book reviews (or, at the very least, literacy). We have been ranting about this topic for years now, and, frankly, someone’s gotta say it: just as declining circulation numbers and classified ad sales haven’t been a surprise, neither is the decline of book coverage, specifically reviews. Saving book coverage in major newspapers as it is today will not solve the problem. While it’s fun to

There has been much talk these past weeks about the decline of the newspaper book coverage. The reason, as we’ve been noting for quite some time, is that the advertising dollars simply do not support the the same kind of coverage that motion picture dollars support. You’ll also, if you take the time, notice that music coverage in most newspapers isn’t quite as robust as you’d imagine. Why would today’s reader turn to his or her local paper to discover new books? The reason, naturally, is that motion picture studios use co-op dollars to partner with local theaters, creating advertising

It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, how the New York Times Book Review — or rather its editorial staff — keeps digging holes and then tripping headfirst into them. You’d think they’d absorb the knowledge that their male-to-female reviewer ratio is woeful, maybe take some conscious steps to correct the problem, and, well, move on. You wouldn’t, not for one moment, think that anyone associated with the publication would go out into the public sphere and stick his foot in his mouth. You’d be wrong. By failing to include a broad range of readers, dedicated book review sections are hurting

Recently, Maureen Dowd went to a bookstore. This shouldn’t be news, but one suspects this was a rare event in her life. One also suspects she’ll avoid the experience in the future. What she saw terrified her: nubile pink books snuggled up against aged gray novels. Surely she thought the sweet young things would take the gravitas right out of William Shakespeare. The thought that fake fiction had made its way into our home is alarming Dowd’s faux outrage was because the sea of chicklit that threatened to drown out the classics. Yeah, it’s not like most of those are

We were somewhat intrigued by Slate’s storyon self-published authors and Amazon’s BookSurge division. The fact that BookSurge offers paid reviews as part of the service didn’t make us blink. Sure, we wonder about the authors who believe this is a valuable service, but we’ll get to that in a moment. What gave us pause was the phrasing in an email from the company to an author (see page two of the story)– while Slate’s reading of the service was that the review would be written by a New York Times bestselling author (in this case, probably the extremely extended list),

We have been following recent discussions about the decline of book coverage in major newspapers with interest. As always, we remain surprised by the lack of discussion about content when it comes to reviewing and discussing books in newspapers. Is it possible that newspapers don’t value book coverage because their readers don’t value book coverage because that coverage is perceived as being targeted toward “someone else”? Someone else, of course, is that narrow strata of readers who are clamoring for yet another expose of the real Shakespeare. Or a translation of a great Hungarian novel about oppression, strife, and disaffected

Maybe it’s that we got up too early, we don’t know, but we’re sitting here in BS Central, and thinking, “Huh?” Sure, the publishing industry moves slowly, but as we read an article on reviews at The Bookseller, we couldn’t help but wonder if we’d flipped back a year. Not that we’d complain on that score, nosiree, nothing like living through 2005 again to get a girl all excited. So, it’s all blah, blah, blah, too many reviews, readers don’t trust them, word-of-mouth, relationships, the usual, and then the kicker: Already John Murray has decided to canvass the views of