THE New York Times has decided to beat the drum today about the dwindling column space dedicated to book reviews (something we’ve been lamenting ourselves). The issue is really money, not culture (and its much-heralded decline). Newspapers are struggling to make ends meet, and literary musings are like love-handles in the fat-trimming world of publishing.
The Times article, which quotes literary authors, book-review editors and bloggers, highlights all sorts of interesting questions about the future of books coverage:
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. In recent years, dozens of sites, including Bookslut.com, The Elegant Variation (marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/), maudnewton .com, Beatrice.com and the Syntax of Things (syntaxofthings.typepad.com), have been offering a mix of book news, debates, interviews and reviews, often on subjects not generally covered by newspaper book sections.
This rise in literary blogging is surely a good thing. “I think the more people that write about books the better”, said an enlightened Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review (a mercifully stubborn hold-out against the pull of the bottom line).
Still, a move away from print is a pity. While there are all sorts of thoughtful debates and works of criticism online, the provocative art of blogging is rather different from the more painstaking one of reviewing. (Salon.com is a rare exception.) The reader’s metabolism is different: our attention is often divided, in search of brief entertainment or an answer to a research problem. When I want to read something lengthy and consuming, it rarely comes from a lit screen.
A good literary blog, filled with insight and gossip, certainly scratches an itch. But book reviews–the good ones, anyway–often provide good excuses for newspapers to ask larger questions about what we do and why we do it. So how shall we pay for this privilege?
2 responses so far ↓
Monica Ten Eyck // May 14, 2007 at 7:16 pm
I do believe that cultural literacy is the currency of this debate. Schools in CA will soon be using Disney Comic Classics to teach reading and literacy skills. Great, if all you aspire to is Disney. But what is lost to a child who reads a comic classic of Roald Dahl or E. B. White? The sanitation and dumbing of these classics lose the pithy elements of civilization instruction. I’ll miss civilization in the next generation, it was such a lovely choice human beings made at one point, I will miss it sorely. When did we change our minds? I must have been sick that day!
Then We Came to the...sales conundrum « Moreover // May 23, 2007 at 12:44 am
[...] 23rd, 2007 · No Comments IN LIGHT of all our whinging about the declining space dedicated to books coverage in American newspapers, it is amusing to read this article about the publishing market. David Blum [...]
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