Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Bestselling mystery author Michael Connelly had an opinion piece in last Sunday’s LA Times entitled “The folly of downsizing book reviews,” which is yet another essay dealing with the recent closure and reduction of some book review sections (including the one at the LA Times). While not as apocalyptic as the Winslow piece I blogged about earlier in the week, Connelly uses similarly dire language, stating that “newspapers that cut back on book coverage may be cutting their own throats.” For Connelly, this is personal since he feels that it was positive reviews of his first book that saved (and gave him) his career. He then asks what would happen to a similar book in today’s culture where book review sections are rapidly disappearing. However, Connelly happens to answer his own question with his opening sentence: “Fifteen years ago, my first book was published in near obscurity.”

Well, within the past fifteen years the Internet was invented, which itself has since given birth to dozens of new ideas and ways to communicate. The fact that, in the last fifteen years, we have been witness to the rise of blogs, user-generated content, Youtube, Myspace, iPods and MP3s, shows that the world has changed an awful lot since the publication of Connelly’s first book. And so while book reviews saved his first novel a decade-and-a-half ago, the power to promote and form opinion has since shifted, moving away from print-based book reviews towards something much more egalitarian and open-ended. Because of the Internet, dozens of new ways to champion books now exist. For instance, a positive mention of the blog Boingboing today probably has the same power (if not more) to shape influence and spread the word about a book than a book review did back in the days of Connelly’s first novel. And in addition to Boingboing there are dozens of literary blogs, not to mention the various social networking websites devoted to books, all of which — cumulatively — have a much broader reach than book review sections ever did.

LA Times: The folly of downsizing book reviews