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.

There’s a Charles Bukowski poem that takes place at a reading during which someone asks him, “What do you think of Norman Mailer?” To which Bukowski succinctly replies, “I don’t think of Norman Mailer.” Well, seeing as how Mailer died today, I’m thinking of him quite a bit.

As a young reader, not much into my teens, I discovered Norman Mailer (almost because of his reputation more than his books). My friends and I collected and talked about his work, and I still remember getting into fights with my English teachers over him; they hated him, which only made me love him more. And even though there are many of his books I’ve still never gotten around to — for instance, I still haven’t read The Naked and The Dead — instead, it was more the force of his personality that attracted me. As a kid in high school who never got good grades and didn’t like sports, I was attracted to Mailer in a rebellious sort of way, kind of like how the Beats took up Kerouac as their idol and role-model.

And when I finally got around to actually reading Mailer, I loved almost everything I read. Even his almost inscrutable books, from Why Are We in Vietnam? to Ancient Evenings, made me admire him because he had the drive and power and vision to write books that no one else would risk (or think of) writing.

Plus, my favorites of Mailer’s never seemed to be anyone else’s favorites, such as The Deer Park, a book which cost him a publisher and almost his sanity, and Advertisements for Myself which, in its conversational asides, contains the best advice to writers that I’ve ever read outside of perhaps New Grub Street.

Later I read Mailer’s masterworks such as The Executioner’s Song and The Armies of the Night, and when I did I sat dumbfounded at the man’s total control over words (and his less than total control over his ego), not to mention the fact that any biography of Mailer (including Peter Manso’s oral biography, which cost him his friendship with Mailer) was better than most people’s fiction.

Yes, Mailer was often a jerk and a blowhard and overall a general loudmouth, but he was also an American original and someone who played a large part in who I am today. Not only that (indeed, what he has meant to me personally is dwarfed by what he has to meant to literature in general), but I think the battles Mailer fought are finally being won thanks to the Internet and the egalitarianism of a Web 2.0 world where consumers have more choice than ever. Today, the “wisdom of crowds” can often drown out the cranky, singular critic who no longer controls fates with the slash of a pen they way they did back in Mailer’s day. For instance, here’s a passage from one of the interstitial essays in Advertisements for Myself, where Mailer casts a cold eye on the literary landscape of his time:

The day was gone when people held on to your novels no matter what others might say. Instead one’s good young readers waited now for the verdict of professional young men, academics who wolfed down a modern literature with an anxiety to find your classification, your identity, your similarity, your common theme, your corporate literary earnings, each reference to yourself as individual as a carloading of homogenized words. The articles which would be written about you and a dozen others would be done by minds which were expert on the aggregate and so had senses too lumpy for the particular. There was a limit to how much appraisal could be made of a work before the critic exposed his lack of the critical faculty, and so it was naturally wiser for the mind of the expert to masticate the themes of ten writers rather than approach the difficulties of any one.

But today, with more and more mainstream publications cutting back on review space, and more and more readers and consumers trading their opinions via social networking sites and blogs, the power of the critic is beginning to slowly whither away. What’s replacing it is the power of the individual (which goes a long way toward restoring the power of the writer). And I kind of think that Mailer would have wanted it that way.

As has been previously reported here and here (with Galleycat’s Ron Hogan intelligently explaining that spam is hardly the answer), it looks like the San Diego Union Tribune is going to cut back/streamline its book review section. To exactly what extent the section will be reduced or redefined has not yet been announced, but San Diego literary agent Sandy Dijkstra isn’t letting the lack of details slow her down. Instead of waiting to hear about the Union Tribune’s plans for its book review, Dijkstra has already started forwarding around an e-mail asking people to take, uh, action:

Some of you may recall that some years ago, we faced a similar crisis of losing our Book Review. At that time, we circulated a “chain letter with a civic purpose”, describing the San Diego reading community via stats and then, presenting a threat: IF the Book Review were not restored, we, the readers, writers, booksellers and publishers of San Diego, would evoke the spirit of Fahrenheit 451 and descend upon the offices of the San Diego Union-Tribune, bearing a coffin filled with the books of the many authors whose works would no longer be reviewed. We would then stage a READ-IN until we got news that our needs would be addressed. This threat, together with a deluge of chain letters hitting Mrs. Copley, forced the paper to restore the Review.

This is all incredibly silly, and will likely hurt the book review more than help. Because to portray books that don’t get reviewed as “dead” is not only lame (and wrong) in terms of a book’s worth, but it’s also terribly disrespectful to things which actually are actually, sadly dead. Dijkstra’s campaign, along with the pitchfork-wielding efforts of others (key words in above are “threat” and “force”), has really nothing to do with the true nature of books or the discovery of reading. Instead, what Dijkstra is really mourning is a literary status quo that she seems desperate to not let slip away.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, book and film critic Richard Schickel has an opinion piece entitled “Not everybody’s a critic” in which he excoriates bloggers and declares that an atmosphere in which everyone can contribute to the literary conversation is a “wasteland.” Fun, right? Wait, it get’s worse…

To start with, Schickel comes out swinging: “The most grating words I’ve read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation’s leading newspapers.” Mind you, we’re at war, people are dying, the Middle East is once again lighting up like a Roman candle, but what really gets Schickel’s goat is the fact that the world may no longer be able to know what Michiko Kakutani thinks of D.B.C. Pierre.

After this apocalyptic opening, Schickel doesn’t waste any time — or many words — in getting straight to his point: “Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object).”

I would now be making fun of Schickel if he weren’t already so profoundly making fun of himself. His words are truly the worst kind of snobbery, and his logic is so twisted the inside of his mind must look like spin art (done in black ink). He’s so concerned with who is bestowing the judgment that he doesn’t care about the judgment itself; he only cares from whose lips the words are issued. To him, all bloggers are just hoi polloi with HPs.

Schickel also writes: “The review’s highest business is to initiate intelligent dialogue about the work in question, beginning a discussion that, in some cases, will persist down the years, even down the centuries.”

Again, I would be ridiculing Schickel for being a pretentious snob if he weren’t so intent on saving me the trouble by heaping ridicule upon himself. Not since Milli Vanilli declared that they were “more talented than any Bob Dylan” has an artist or critic so overstated their own importance.

Even the title of his essay, “Not everybody’s a critic,” is totally wrong. These days, in a flattened Web 2.0 world, where the notions of so many things — television, music, communication, and now publishing — have been shattered, more people than ever have a voice. But Schickel just wishes everyone would keep it down; can’t they see he’s speaking?

LA Times: Not everybody’s a critic

David Blum, writing in The New York Sun, had an essay earlier this week entitled “How Not To Write a Best Seller.” The essay takes a look at Joshua Ferris’s recent debut novel, “Then We Came to The End,” which received rave reviews earlier in the year (including a front page review in The New York Times Book Review, which is just about as good as it gets). But the book — while the publisher has shipped 50,000 copies, going back to press four times — never became a sensation and never really caught on, and this makes Blum curious: “Why does the reading public not know Mr. Ferris’s life story the way it so often becomes familiar with young literary lions? Why have comparatively few people heard of his novel, read it, or embraced it as the discovery of the season, if not the year?”

In terms of reviews, since Ferris’s book did just about as good as a novel, first or otherwise, could hope to achieve, Blum then ties the book’s only respectable reception to “the industry’s recent hand-wringing over the elimination of book-review sections in newspapers.” Because if book reviews are so important, and without them no one will know what to read (as recent supporters of book reviews have stated), how come they don’t work? Why didn’t Ferris’s book sell even more? Why isn’t it a spectacular success? In the words of Blum, “Something doesn’t compute.” What doesn’t compute is that reviews, in and of themselves, don’t automatically make a book a smash. Instead, reviews are only one part of an equation that adds up to success. And, as we may be discovering, reviews may be a smaller part of the equation than we previously thought.

NY Sun: How Not To Write a Best Seller

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”

David Kipen, in response to all of the recent discussion about the disappearance of book reviews from American newspapers, has a pretty silly essay on Salon entitled “Last exit to book land.” In the piece, Kipen (an ex-book critic, and thus hardly an impartial observer) somehow manages to come up with a theory that says if we save book reviews we can also restore “reading to the heart of American life.” However, before all the sturm und drang, Kipen first sets the stage: “[Newspaper] circulation is down. Newsroom paranoia, never exactly dormant even in the best of times, is up. And editors are cutting book reviews like they’re going out of style — which, if we’re not careful, they just might be.” Kipen then pulls back his focus, and tries to tie all of this into the declining numbers of readers overall: “Still, as important as the crisis in American book reviewing is, the underlying crisis in reading is practically sawing the country in half. Forget red states and blue states. The implications of a republic where half reads and the other doesn’t — not can’t, just doesn’t — are simply horrifying.”

Finally, Kipen sinks to the totally ridiculous, equating the absence of newspapers with the absence of readers: “But imagine a country where readers aren’t even a minority, but an aberration. Picture a country where newspapers gut book coverage and everything else that made them worth saving in the first place…” What Kipen either doesn’t realize, or refuses to acknowledge, is that this is still very much a country of readers. However, it’s just becoming less and less a country of newspaper readers. Because, really, what does Kipen think happens when users visit a website? They’re reading. After all, blogs are usually just words, most websites have more text than they do graphics, while the website that has changed pretty much everyone’s life is Google (a site where people use text to find what they’re looking for, which is usually more text). In addition to all of this there are numerous Internet-only magazines (such as Slate and Salon, where Kipen’s essay ironically appears) that people go to in order to, you know, read. So Kipen’s conclusion that, because book reviews are disappearing, we’re going to turn into an illiterate society where we communicate via grunts or semaphore, and can’t tie two sentences together, is insane.

Salon: Last exit to book land

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?

Former publishing executive and book review editor Pat Holt has a great essay this week as part of her “Holt Uncensored” e-mail newsletter. Entitled “Book Critics: Are we driving readers away?,” Holt looks at the recent phenomenon not only of shrinking book review sections in American papers but, almost more significantly, the large number of mainly self-serving essays and think-pieces (not to mention petitions) that have recently appeared in order to rally support for book reviewers and book review sections. Instead of blindly jumping on the “We have to save book reviews!” bandwagon, Holt takes an intelligent and thoughtful look at the situation, stating that “maybe it’s time for those of us who have worked as critics for a living to evaluate what’s happened to our profession — and why we may be driving readers away. In the last 25 years, just about everything about the print experience has changed — except the way critics review books.”

Instead of the usual facile arguments that the proponents of books and book reviews usually trot out in the “print is dead” debate, Holt argues that the status quo isn’t worth saving. Her whole point is that the world has changed; we have become more and more adept at finding information and content online, and now the literary world has to also change. “Our audience zips around the Internet with tremendous agility and speed, and what do we give them?” asks Holt. “Stodgy, dull, laborious and indulgent reviews.” Holt also realizes that the reduction of book reviews is only the tip of the iceberg, and that the loss of interest in book reviews is an early signal that a loss of interest in books themselves could be around the corner. But even that hasn’t been enough to create change. “Not only have we gotten stuffy, dreary and plodding, but our panic is showing — we know traditional print media is in trouble and try too hard to get readers back,” writes Holt. “We’ve substituted opinion for criticism. We’ve pronounced books good or bad rather than shown readers why.”

So even the book reviews that remain are no longer doing what book reviews used to do so well: connecting readers with books. Instead, readers have gone elsewhere, and are now connecting with reading material online. Without the aid of major newspapers or literary critics, consumers are finding new reading material from either recommendation websites or software on commerce sites, social networking sites, or even just by keeping in touch with people online who share with them ideas for books (now that e-mail has the ability to connect everyone on Earth, “word of mouth” has turned into “world of mouth”). So while the NBCC crowd is interested solely in protecting its turf (and their jobs), Holt’s essay is the first one I’ve seen asking for the industry as a whole to take a long hard look at itself.

Holt Uncensored: Book Critics: Are we driving readers away?

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