Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Okay, I promise that this will be the last post about the incredibly shrinking book review section, but I thought that The New York Times, on Wednesday, had a nice non-hysterical overview of the current situation. In an article entitled, “Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?,” reporter Motoko Rich sums up the current scene in a sane way, and then nicely summarizes both the dilemma and the opportunity: “To some authors and critics, these moves amount to yet one more nail in the coffin of literary culture. But some publishers and literary bloggers — not surprisingly — see it as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books.” Rich talked with a good selection of important bloggers, as well as publishing executives (who, somewhat surprisingly, thought that literary blogs were a good thing).

However, a writer who comes off very poorly in the piece is the novelist Richard Ford, who denigrates book blogs without ever having read one. He even goes so far as to state that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution should print reviews “as a public service.” This is I think the height of vanity. Garbage collection and paved roads are a public service; what Jay McInerney thinks of Ben Kunkel is not. Even within the world the words, this isn’t the loss that Ford and others make it out to be. I mean, to think that the world of literature will be worse off for not having a dreamy full-page photograph of Michael Chabon in the LA Times is lunacy; what we need is Michael Chabon writing intelligent and entertaining novels, we don’t need him to be a pin-up. Meanwhile, the NBCC is relentlessly staging their campaign to save book reviews as if this were a push for civil rights or an anti-war rally. They’re now staging “read-ins” and protests and circulating petitions that have the signature of people like Norman Mailer; next month I think they’re going to march on Washington and try to levitate the Library of Congress.

Unfortunately, I think all of these efforts are going to backfire, and only show how out of touch the literary establishment is in terms of knowing who readers are (let alone knowing what they want). So instead of reaching out to readers, the recent reaction of the literary establishment has the condescending whiff of “let them eat cake” combined with “father knows best,” while the critics themselves circle their wagons in order to protect the status quo. But readers are too busy, discovering books in dozens of ways besides a book review, to notice.

NY Times: Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?