Eat The Press

Review This! Or, Actually, Don't, Allow Us

Rachel Sklar |  Posted Friday May 11, 2007 at 04:07 PM

Here's something weird — really weird. Consider this statement: "[R]eader interest in books seems to be growing. Industry figures show increases in adult book buying over the last two years, with public library usage also on the rise." Is this statement from:

(a) Mokoto Rich's recent article in the New York Times about how book reviews are being slashed in newspapers across the country; or

(b) the recent New York Times press release addressed to managing editors, wire editors, feature, culture and online editors at publications across the country offering NYT premium book review content at a bargain?

Funnily enough, it was from the latter — which uses the Rich article as an example of how reader "appetite for book news and reviews" might be easily satisfied by the glorioius books pages of the Times. Fine, great, good — except that "reader appetite" gets nary a mention in Rich's piece on the Great Book Reveiw Slashfest sweeping the nation. Instead, Rich focuses on how this might be a sign of progress and — gee whiz! — here come the lit bloggers to fill in the gaps!

The weirdness isn't that Rich writes about lit bloggers — though that's about the most predictable way to address this story (see "an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books" and replace "literary" with "political" and "books" with "politics" and then go on to sub in words like "media" "movies" "music" and "restaurant reviewing" to recognize the meme). What's weird is that Rich's entire story is about the pros and cons of lit blogging and whether or not it's better or worse than newspaper reviewing, but fails to address any of the issues raised by slashing book reviews. There are no industry statistics, no data on what percentage of books-pages readers get their information online, no breakdown of comparative numbers between book reviews in print and online, no information about adult book buying and library use — which was obviously pretty available. (And, irritatingly, the "This Is Not Chick Lit" example fails to acknowledge that (a) the book was covered by tons of major papers (USA Today, Village Voice), (b) most of the authors featured, like Egan and Sittenfeld, saw their stars rise via old-fashioned print exposure, not online chatter, and (c) an entire other book, the responsive "This Is Chick Lit," fed the online chatter and made the story bigger than what an average book might garner.) But more to the point, it's sort of odd that, in a story about slashing coverage of an entire industry, the only thing examined would be the tired (so tired!) blogger vs. MSM debate. And it's even odder that the NYT would then use that article to push its own content in that selfsame area. It just sorta seems a little close to home.

By the way, the piece was hooked on the elimination of the book editor position from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which has galvanized the lit and lit-crit community; the National Book Critics Circle has started a petition with approximately 6,000 signatories including Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie, Yann Martel, Jonathan Safran Foer, Fay Weldon, Gary Shteyngart, and Anthony Swofford; earlier this week Rushdie went on The Colbert Report to plead the case ("No one in this country bitches more about literary critics than writers — we've discovered we can't do without them") (fun fact: "William Faulkner would have disappeared were it not for the critic Malcolm Cowley") (see Rushdie's full appearance after the jump) (now we're just seeing how many parentheticals we can get away with) (okay, we're done now).

Upshot: The NYT's story was weak, it's weird that they're pimping their content using it as a hook, Salman Rushdie will blurb you for certain "considerations."

Are Book Reviewers Out Of Print? [NYT]

Related:
NBCC Campaign To Save Book Reviews [NBCC]
Last Exit To BookLand [Salon]