Book Reviews
By Jerry D. Simmons | May 9th, 2007 | No Comments » (Click to add yours!)
There was an article in this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review written by Motoko Rich and originally published on May 2nd, titled Are Book Reviews Out of Print? The article heading states that “All across the country, newspapers are cutting book sections or running more reprints of reviews from wire services or larger papers.”
The author notes that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently eliminated the position of Book Editor, the Los Angeles Times merged their once stand alone book review into a new section reducing their page count from 12 to 10, and the San Francisco Chronicle’s book review was cut from 6 to 4 pages. “Author’s and critics claim this is one more nail in the coffin of literary culture.”
The problem with that statement is that from a purely commercial standpoint, the literary culture has been eroding for years, barely registering a blip on the page of book sales for a long time. Publishing today is about movie stars, high profile court cases, political high drama, the kind of things that stand out on the nightly news and in the tabloids. Literary culture? I don’t think so!
Newspapers are suffering as they try to hold onto readers while more and more people are tuning to blogs for information about books. The old guard book reviews are seen as nothing more than an forum where the big publishers can advertise their books. Thus blogs have replaced the stodgy old line newspapers for readers attention and information about books.
Another thing the article points out is that this “Inevitable transition toward a new and more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books,” is a good thing. I agree, and also know it is time for blogs to write more about Independently Published books. If that seems like a tough hill to climb, then we just create our own blogs about Independent Books. Why waste time joining them when we can create our own book reviews, do you think readers really care which blogs write about books?
This blog is unedited, please disregard mistakes in spelling and grammar.
Leave a Reply
