AP to end its weekly book reviews | Hacker News Reader

AP to end its weekly book reviews

dankennedy.net

83 pointsthm30 comments

Aren't most book reviews effectively marketing for the book?

Are the book publishers not willing to fund the AP reviews, or the AP doesn't want to be in that business?

Also, I have read some NY book reviews that seem to double as marketing for the guest reviewer's own book or brand. If we go full MBA on this, all these parties could be paying to play. Is some journalistic ethics wall between business and editorial leaving money on the table?

In most cases yes, but the Associated Press makes its money mostly through members fees that scale based on circulation size and in return the members get to syndicate AP content so the incentives are better aligned towards editorial integrity. The AP has strict guidelines against allowing outside organizations to influence their reporting (FWIW).

Publishers and PR firms can send advanced copies but they can’t pay for one of AP’s independent critics for a submarine article.

So by extension, the members don't desire syndicated free reviews from AP but would rather sell those reviews? That would mean this article from AP is saying is that there is low demand for editorially integrous book reviews and not book reviews in general.

The major news orgs like NYT, WaPo, etc usually have their own critics and they syndicate their content to smaller papers so they’re usually competing with the AP. The smaller papers don't have their own critics at all but most syndicate from the bigger papers and the ones that specialize more in non-factual content like Tribune Content Agency and Creators Syndicate.

I think this is just AP cutting the red headed step child because they don’t produce much other opinion content, instead focusing on analysis and factual reporting, so everyone goes to another source that has more depth in their book reviews.

Book publishers directly funding the reviews is a conflict of interest.

Part of the problem with the ongoing death of professional criticism is that you could reasonably expect a professional critic and their employer to both have some sort of ethical code regarding how the job should be performed. That simply isn't the case with random amateur critics on the internet.

Sort of like bond issuers paying for credit credit rating. Oh, wait...

> Are the book publishers not willing to fund the AP reviews

I'm pretty sure that would be illegal.

Yes, what you say might effectively be true in some cases, but they have to be sneakier/more indirect than that. Straight up paying people for reviews probably crosses the line into illegal advertising.

Not to sound too pollyannaesque but if you want some good news then (1) Mat Kaplan and The Planetary Society have just started publishing their monthly book reviews on the main stream; and (2) Armando Iannucci (The Day Today, Brasseye, The Thick of It, Veep) and Helen Lewis have also just started doing mini reviews too on their Strong Message Here podcast.

https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/book-club-andy-wei...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0ls28zb

It’s not much, but it’s always nice to follow edges in the taste-graph from nodes I trust to nodes that are new to me.

It's a bit annoying having to listen to book reviews. Do you know of any good written resources?

It's surprising to me that AP customer newspapers don't want book reviews to pad out their Sunday papers. Bookstores are opening more than closing in the US, and people love library apps like Libby, so you'd think they'd want reviews too. But I guess it's possible people are getting as many book recommendations as they can use from social media and TikTok and aren't interested in more detailed reviews.

It doesn't surprise me that people aren't seeking out book reviews on the AP website or app—I don't think AP is particularly associated with reviews, maybe deliberately because they've historically been read in local papers that don't emphasize the AP sourcing, so people wanting reviews from a national source probably go to NYT, WaPo, WSJ, the New Yorker, etc. first.

The book market is yuge and filled with many niches. There used to be more broad market offerings but the market isn't as interested lately. So it's really impossible to cover without writing 100+ reviews a week. And the AP (and their customers) can't afford that many.

There's soooo much fragmentation.

My top two sources for finding new books are NPR's annual book list (which is structured around discovery) and friends' recommendations. Especially going to a bookstore with a few friends, browsing, and physically pointing out books to each other. "Hey, have you read this series I liked?" kinda stuff

My read is that no customers will leave since they are much more interested in news coverage -- and this helps the AP focus more on news.

This is a tangent, but I wonder if they feel that they are just creating LLM training data and that few readers (even of Sunday papers) will actually read their reviews.

Is it just me or have all mainstream news agencies suffered a significant loss in quality in recent years? It all seems lazy, opinionated, more like social media and less like old school journalism, less trustworthy... and now they're cutting book reviews?! Maybe I'm just getting older.

Journalism was always bad, it just seemed better in the past because people had less to compare it to, less ability to check things out themselves, etc. As for "Old School Journalism", was that the sort that helped George Bush start the Iraq War? Or the sort that started the Spanish-American War? If there was ever a golden age of journalists when people spat straight facts without interjecting their bias, I genuinely have no clue when it was.

You can find an archive of thousands of PBS News Hour episodes online, I've watched dozens of episodes from the 80s and 90s. This show has a tone and air of respectability, a thoughtful show for high brow people who like to consider the facts. But that's really just the surface aesthetic. Besides modern news shows being flagrantly tacky, the meat of what they do is the same; repeat some basic 'facts' about the story, many of which will be proven wrong in later years, then have some people selected through mysterious processes come on to talk about how the viewer should feel. In retrospect very little of it was ever accurate and stories which seemed important then aren't in retrospect.

Well, not to be too obvious, but people do not pay for news anymore, they expect news to be free on Google or social media. Hence firing of journalists, loss of quality everywhere. Less money, less quality.

You're right. It's the collapse of web advertising, I think. News websites can't make money from ads adjacent to articles, so now the article is the ad.

Coming soon to AP: Fresh book reviews every week sponsored by and made possibly by OpenAI.

I honestly don't know how to feel about changes like this, but I feel like they are important. Whether they are good or bad? I'm not sure.

In a sense, information is massively cheap now. You could get dozens of reviews on goodreads or any other site for a book. No, those reviews are likely not vetted, or written by credentialed individuals, but they are a solid heuristic. The decline of the professional art critic is lamentable, but it also doesn't really seem like it should be a job in the first place.

I write a blog about golf, and I've examined the aesthetic underpinnings of golf course design pretty seriously: theory of reviews, axioms of frameworks and their affects on reviews, and the epistemological concerns we should have with what reviewers actually say. In the end, I think the "named critic's opinion" is far and away the best way to do aesthetic reviews, as long as there are a significant number of named critics. I think this is applicable to every art form.

Social media has made this possible, but very few websites have actually make the matching of causal critic to a larger audience. For critical reviews to be useful, connecting large swaths of people to the nerds with correlating opinions in that art form would be a huge value add... while it's definitely doable with machine learning, nobody seems to want to recommend critics, they only recommend content. It's a bummer.

If the decline of professional "named critics who are nerds in their favorite genres" continues, if there is no rise of casual named critics, I do think we lose something real from a functional perspective in these areas. I only hope someone can create a platform that efficiently connects interested parties in finding a casual critic who shares their aesthetic tastes.

-----

My writing on aesthetic theory of reviews (about golf course architecture):

* A look at a functional perspective of aesthetic reviews, Howard Moskowitz, and collaborative filtering: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/golf-course-rankings-a...

* A look at review framework axioms: https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/p/from-doak-to-digest-go...

* I'll be publishing my essay on epistemological concerns this week.

As far as book reviews, professional is professional. I have never, ever read anything on Goodreads that compares at all to something in the London Review of Books for example. They just aren't even in the same category. People who read and review books for a living simply are better at it. They have more context than casuals, they are better writers, they have the education to fully understand a work and place it in context etc. Professionals.

As insular and snobbish as publishing may be, publishers developed taste over hundreds of years. Goodreads, by contrast, is is social media.

I like LRB a lot but it's usually less book review and more 'commentary of the whole field, written by someone who knows it well, and then a paragraph or two in three pages about the contents of this new book on the topic'

There isn’t really enough here that illustrates your aesthetic theory to allow me to respond well.

If you are suggesting that some critics have “better opinions” then I’d basically reject that conception outright. Here I would reference Howard Moscowitz’s theory and practical engineering of tastes to suit different audiences.

If you’re suggesting a trained reviewer can better connect and convey the artist benefit of a work to those who would appreciate those aspects, then I completely agree, but it’s just that we are talking about one specific audience being served that is not easily served, not audiences in general.

If you’re talking about the pleasantness and prose of the written reviews themselves, we end up in a meta-discussion of the aesthetics of review writing.

> The decline of the professional art critic is lamentable, but it also doesn't really seem like it should be a job in the first place.

What makes the professional role of "art critic" special that it should not be a job? Compare it with other professional roles: lawyer, software engineer, accountant, architect. They all involve understanding historical context and producing a professional opinion.

Essentially, the argument is that the critic merely serves as an effectively plain data series of opinion, for which consumers try to find one with low variance with their opinion, but that ultimately there's no accounting for taste.

When aesthetic theories try to argue that there is a "correct opinion," one that would justify a kind of professionalism and training, then there are myriad philosophical problems that fall out the other side. This is effectively the basis for Howard Moskowitz's success in data-first food/flavor design.

It's certainly true that critic education can help map those opinions onto audience opinions (getting references, understanding the historical background, etc), but those frames aren't necessary for enjoyment if the audience following your critiques doesn't also have that information. Many will, which will increase the correlation of opinion.

Book critic does not belong with architect and accountant, jfc. Come on. Get real.

Why does there have to be a critic? What's wrong with a recommendation feed of content you may like?

The current feeds are all based on surface level signals/labels. That's why "opinions from someone you trust" e.g. social media, user reviews and message boards are still a thing, and that's the role a critic essentially served.

0. Critics aren't necessarily negative.

1. Seemingly no one has ever made a recommendation feed that's actually as interesting and insightful as human experts.

2. You probably don't want a feed of content you "like" as a fan in some hobby. You want a lot of content that's interesting, which can be a very different thing entirely.

3. Critics can highlight aspects and context you missed, or help you vocalize and understand your own reactions to a work.

4. Other people have different opinions. To really participate in a community you need to be exposed to those opinions and engage with them.

A lot of intellectually rich works like Paradise Lost and Kant are best read alongside the commentary and reactions to their work. You're missing out if you're not reading the reactions to "the ones who walk away from Omelas" for example.

I mean the theory behind it is that they are effectively the same thing, it's just that the critic will have more explanatory power. The whole point is that you don't know what you don't know.

Most of this is based in movie reviews, since that is where I think critical reviews shine the most. Even if there is an algo that has perfect, zero variance with the consumer, there is still a genre/style/mood distinction that you will change from night to night. The algo is effectively a black box in terms of these extremely subtle mood variations, but a critic with zero opinion variance will -- ideally -- have a blurb about why the film is good, which should correspond to the ideal viewing setting and mood that the film ought to be consumed in.

Interactive chat sessions about your literary interests with a good LLM will produce much better book suggestions than reading book reviews in newspapers. It's not even close, because unless your interests are as simple as "whatever book publishers want to sell this week", the newspaper book reviewer just happening to cover a book up your alley is about as common as a planetary alignment.

I asked ChatGPT for 20th century space operas with literary merit or lasting recognition. It suggested Nova by Samuel Delany. Great book. How many newspaper book reviews would I have to read before I got suggestions for books in that category? I'd probably die waiting.

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