I hope for your sake that you haven’t been following the teapotty tempest that has attended several newspapers’ decisions to reel in their book review supplements. The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle cut back their review space, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution eliminated its book review editor, prompting a fountain of crocodile tears from embattled litterateurs.
Book reviews are a perfect example of a service that everyone wants but that no one is willing to pay for. Publishers love newspaper reviews. They tend to be fair, well written, and, when positive, ideal for plastering all over full-page advertisements. And where do those ads appear? In one paper only, The New York Times.
If every newspaper in America acted only in their economic self-interest, they would ditch their book review sections, too.
A door closes, a door opens. And lately the doors have been opening on the internet. This month, the US book superstore Barnes & Noble launched a grade-A book review section, featured on its website, bn.com. B&N boss Steve Riggio hired James Mustich, former editor of the Common Reader, to edit the section, which publishes one quality review each day.
So far, the work is very good. Mustich has published reviews by the GQ critic Tom Carson, writer/editor Daniel Menaker and John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle.
Like supermarkets, Barnes & Noble makes deals with its suppliers in return for favourable store placement. But Mustich says there is a “Chinese wall” between him and the business types: “There are no programme tentacles sticking out from the Review”. He pays $1 a word, which is better than any other publication.
B&N Review calls attention to itself because internet reviewing is still in its infancy. The well-regarded powells.com site, operated by the Portland, Oregon-based bookstore, uses reviews from newspapers and magazines like the Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic. Book blogs have earned their fan base, but the reviewing remains pretty uneven, in my unhumble opinion.
Market leader Amazon publishes some vanilla book assessments, but mainly seems wedded to its stupidity-of-crowds model, turning its mediocre, amateur reviewers loose in its notorious “Customer Reviews” section. A few years ago, a software glitch revealed that literary lions like Dave Eggers were using anonymous screen names like “a reader from St Louis” to hype their pals’ work.
War and Peace, from Ecco Press. The central press has been dancing to the tune of the Alfred A Knopf publicity department, singing the praises of the absolutely unnecessary, 1,300-page new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s epic. But that’s not the story. The real deal is Ecco Press’s new translation, fully 400 pages shorter than the doorstop the Borzoi Boys are peddling.
What’s the deal? Several different editions of W&P were published during and after Tolstoy’s lifetime, and some axed the philosophical musings that have bedevilled so many Russian Lit majors.
Borodino while-u-wait! Go Ecco!
IHT
