Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

The Los Angeles Times recently announced that they will cease publication of the standalone Sunday book review section. As further fallout from this decision, a number of editors will lose their jobs. This is of course bad news, but I also think it needs to be kept in perspective. For instance, on the website LA Observed, four former editors of the LA Times book review have an essay that discusses the situation (LA Observed calls the essay a “protest” but I always envision a protest as involving marching and signs, or at the very least a pickup truck, generator, and one of those creepy inflatable union rats). “The dismantling of the Sunday Book Review section and the migration of a few surviving reviews to the Sunday Calendar section,” write the four editors, “represents a historic retreat from the large ambitions which accompanied the birth of the section.” While I’m sure that there will be plenty of Angeleno bibliophiles who will miss the book review section, I’m not sure its disappearance constitutes a “historic retreat.” George Washington and his army’s various escapes from the British in 1776, now that was retreat. This is just a business decision based on the undeniable facts of readership, circulation, etc.

In the essay, the editors also frame the decision to kill the book review section, but keep the popular Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, as hypocritical:

…since its founding in 1996, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books has attracted upwards of 140,000 people to the UCLA campus from all walks of life throughout Southern California. Four hundred writers from all over America typically participate. The written word is celebrated. It is the most significant civic event undertaken by the Los Angeles Times to deepen literacy and to strengthen the bond between its news coverage and its far-flung community of readers. But without the Book Review itself, the book festival will be a hollow joke.

I think that saying that the festival will be either hollow or a joke without the book review is itself kind of a joke. If anything, I see much more worth in the festival than the book review section. At the festival, people can meet writers, and interact with other readers and booklovers within their community. This seems to me much more vital and real than reading what someone like Walter Kirn thinks of someone like Michael Chabon. If anything, the loss of the book review now makes the festival more important, not less. Or rather, it makes the festival much more practical. Because book reviews are too often about critics, and festivals are all about people. After all, I’d take Woodstock over Rolling Stone any day.