If you, like me, spent time every Sunday morning looking in our local newspaper twenty years ago at the book reviews to get ideas about what to read, you probably noticed that the newspaper’s literary supplement has been axed, or maybe the entire newspaper has been axed. For those following Civil War histories, several of the magazines dealing with the subject, like the Civil War Times, have gone out of business.
Has this shortage of reviews been taken over by bloggers? Back ten years ago during the Civil War Sesquicentennial there were over fifty web sites offering reviews of books. Now, from my counting, there are only six. There are still two journals publishing book reviews on the Civil War as part of every issue, but most people outside of academia don’t have access to them and, lets face it, the books reviewed are often two to three years old.
Last month we found out that the Associated Press (AP), America’s largest news agency, has stopped publishing all book reviews.
Ron Charles, the book review writer for the Washington Post, devoted a column to this extinction of the book review.
Charles writes:
“This was a difficult decision,” the AP’s freelance critics were told in a letter. “… Unfortunately, the audience for book reviews is relatively low and we can no longer sustain the time it takes to plan, coordinate, write and edit reviews.””
I have been writing book reviews for twenty years in the online world, and I can tell you that my book reviews get about half as many readers as my other articles.
Charles says that while the AP will continue to write about publishing, it will be about the scandals and honors of writers. It will no longer be “just reviews.”
Charles says:
“Bestseller lists, celebrity book clubs and BookTok videos with 400,000 comments: I don’t disparage any of that powerful publicity. But in this dissolving sea of mass media, we still crave the intimate experience of a special book. And a review can help a wandering reader locate that particular title that changes a mood, or a life. It can encourage a debut novelist to write again — and a publisher to take another chance.
The effect is admittedly small. “Just reviews” rarely attract the web traffic that our business models demand — and it’s impossible to overstate how much those stats are shaping (and killing) the industry. But without reliably insightful book reviews, literature risks becoming “an unweeded garden that grows to seed.” We’re left depending only on the whisper network of our own clique, exchanging the same tuna casserole back and forth.”
Typically I write about a dozen book reviews every year on both the Civil War and Reconstruction. I find that an 1,000 word blog entry on a single battle can convey a sense of the fight, but a 300 page book does so much more. To help my readers understand Reconstruction, I put in book reviews of works by authors who know a lot more about their subject than I do.
Apart from my reviews, I also recommend the reviews in Civil War Books and Authors and at Emerging Civil War, for which I write monthly.
Charles concludes; “if journalism is still, at least partially, a public service, then book reviews are one of its most eloquent contributions — one we should defend until the very last page.”
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