Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

After it seemed that Motoko Rich’s article in The New York Times last week would be the last word on l’affaire book reviews, this past Sunday The Los Angeles Times weighed in with an article by Josh Getlin entitled “Battle of the book reviews.” The article focuses mainly on what’s seen to be the contentious relationship between the critics who are losing their jobs and the literary bloggers who seem to be taking the place of critics by exposing books through online means.

“The quarrel, which got surprisingly nasty, spilled into newspapers, magazines and blogs,” writes Getlin, “amid concerns over recent cutbacks at other big-city newspaper book reviews, including The Los Angeles Times. The boom in books-related blogging, it seemed, was a slap in the face to more seasoned literary voices as they watched their own outlets shrink.”

The article quotes the usual big literary blogs and bloggers: Maud Newton, The Elegant Variation, and Laura Miller, book critic for online magazine Salon. Finally, though, Getlin announces that all of these warring factions may be ready to get along: “there is a growing sense that enough is enough — and that the friction between old and new book media obscures the fact that the two are in bed together now, for better or worse.”

I think this neatly sums up the current situation — that blogs and the mainstream media currently co-exist — but it doesn’t deal with the future, where a newly flattened world continuously plugged into online debate and constant Internet exposure will not only make print criticism irrelevant, but it will begin to drive it out of business. After all, the current discussion was spurred because this has already started to happen. So it’s not that the truce won’t be short-lived, but that the battle — one more of attrition than carnage; these are, after all, writers — will soon be over.

Los Angeles Times: “Battle of the book reviews”