It’s been a tough year so far for mainstream media book reviewers, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any easier, as major newspapers throughout the United States continue to chip away at the space allotted for reviews. But how much of a problem will that turn out to be for America’s reading culture? We’ve long considered (argued, really) the possibility that the so-called “crisis in book reviewing” is really only a crisis for a handful of staff editors and freelance writers who are occasionally helpful in steering people towards interesting new books but not, ultimately, indispensable, and we were reminded of this position by a recent letter from a published author who’s also a big reader:
“People like us, who are obsessive readers, don’t need the book reviews,” he emailed us. “We just need to know what’s coming out. Locus is the perfect magazine for me. I can scan the reviews, but what matters to me are the lists of the new books coming out and the ads. And, as a writer, the review that matters most to me is the one that takes place at the cash register.”
This letter underscores a point we ourselves have been emphasizing over the last few months: Authors and publishers aren’t so much interested in getting their books reviewed so they can find out what other people think—although obviously nobody especially likes bad reviews—but so they can get the name of the book in the paper, so readers will know the book’s come out.
That’s not to say the content of book reviews is meaningless to readers: Even at the science fiction and fantasy-centered Locus, for example, the reviews take up a lot more editorial space than the “new publications” list. Opinions do matter, when they’re trusted, and in the days when the only opinions readily available came either from the mainstream media or your immediate friends, book reviewers held more trust. As the Internet has given us access to more opinions, though, that trust has eroded. Science fiction fans online could probably name three bloggers whose critical judgment they trust more readily than that of the NY Times‘s occasional reviewer, while suspense and thriller fans might just as quickly name online peers they hold in higher esteem than the Times‘s Janet Maslin. (To prove the point, one of those bloggers, former GalleyCat editor Sarah Weinman, achieved such a critical mass of credibility within the mystery/suspense field that both the Baltimore Sun and Los Angeles Times turned to her to bolster their book coverage.)
The idea that the only reviewer that matters to writers is “the one at the cash register,” while admirable in its serene confidence, may be a bit too stark—that sale doesn’t come about without the momentum provided by word-of-mouth. But it seems reasonable, especially when we see how many websites there are out there where “ordinary people,” as opposed to professional book reviewers, dedicate themselves to talking about books, to believe that word-of-mouth won’t disappear even if every major American newspaper should completely eliminate book review coverage.