6 May

Newspapers Eliminating Book Reviews

Posted by Isaak Kwok in Blogging, Books, Web.

It was reported on Wednesday’s New York Times that newspapers in the States are slowly eliminating book reviews sections. But the article does say that more and more book reviews are appearing on blogs such as Bookslut.com, The Elegant Variation, and MPOW’s High Browse Online. You can also read about what the book review industry has to say.

Well, MPOW also experience some cutback on the number of book reviews that we need to submit to the national newspapers. I guess we will need to re-look at where else we can put our book reviews. Possibly on blogs as well as other new media avenues.

(via LISNews)

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2 Responses to this post.

  1. <? comment_author() ?>'s Gravatar

    Posted by Coll B. Lue on 06.05.07 at 3:14 pm

    My comment in response to the article in the Washington CityPaper post on Saving the Book Reviews section in Newspapers:

    Coll B. Lue Says: Apr. 30, 2007, at 2:35 pm

    I’ve read a few weblog posts on bookcriticscircle which reflect writers who appear ‘hungry’ to get their points across; the website on the whole provides for interesting reviews.

    Book Reviewing is a precious tool which not only provides book critics with a valuable means of letting readers make informed choices of listing good reading materials, in their busy schedule of things but it provides readers with a brief but well informed view of new publications, which, if made redundant, could detract from a newspaper’s literary content.

    According to Washington CityPaper, cutting back the review section can only mean one thing: Negativitism.

    I don’t have anything brilliant to add to the conversation, except to argue that by gutting review sections, daily newspapers undermine their mission twice over: cutting back doesn’t just hurt arts coverage, it lessens the papers’ ability to catch up on reportage that found its way into book form because their news budgets got slashed. And I hope that “marketing heads of book publishers” gets added to the mix of people the NBCC taps for comment. (Quote in The Washington CityPaper )

    Making changes so as to save money is just ironic - the short term consequences are rewarding but the long term ones might just be a setback in the readership statistics.

    Bookscriticscircle have been quoted as saying,

    NBCC president John Freeman promises to use the group’s blog, Critical Mass, to “feature posts by concerned writers, interviews with book editors in the trenches, links to op-eds by critics, novelists and other NBCC board members, Q&As with newspaper editors and owners.”

    This cutback on a crucial aspect of literary publications is a setback not quite set in ink but still a harsh reality.

    Book reviewers, however, have to weald their critical tool with an eye for seeing the best in a novel, if the writing deserves to be recognised for its outstanding content, as implied in my comment on Elegvar’s post, Wednesday 2nd May 07:

    Yet some book reviewers aren’t aware - or maybe they conceal it under the general umbrella of ‘literary criticism’ - of having somewhat stirred an author into reacting negatively and even frostily to reviews which appear ‘bland’ or even ‘not favourable’ towards their well-earned efforts, just by a few words splashed with adjectival phrases which show off the reviewers’ flair more so than the objective of giving readers’ a true synopsis of a book which would otherwise receive rave reviews by others. Posted by: Coll B. Lue May 02, 2007 at 02:14 PM (in response to Elegvar’s post, Wednesday Marginalia )

  2. <? comment_author() ?>'s Gravatar

    Posted by Isaak Kwok on 06.05.07 at 3:14 pm

    Thanks for your comment and thoughts. And I just added you to my RSS reader.

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