The Life and Death of the Book Review | Hacker News Reader

The Life and Death of the Book Review

libertiesjournal.com

30 pointslermontov7 comments

I subscribe to the paper version of the Times Literary Supplement and used to also subscribe to the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. All pretty decent publications, and I only canceled the latter two to save a little money.

All three are essentially just short book reviews written by experts on the topic, for example, a book on the history of Constantinople written by a Greek history professor. The books reviewed are definitely more “serious” and sometimes a little niche, so you usually won’t see the stuff on Amazon top charts.

In any case I highly recommend it, if only as a way to discover some new books and learn about different topics:

https://www.the-tls.com/ https://www.nybooks.com/ https://www.lrb.co.uk/

Scanning this 998-word essay, I'm wondering if OP accepted a dare to write at length about the current state of book reviewing without ever mentioning Goodreads. His essay proves that it can be done, but -- wow! -- what an omission.

Yes, the caliber of reader reviews on Goodreads is all over the map. But it is huge, passionate forum for active readers of all stripes. Spend a little time with lists, filters, reading circles, etc. -- and you can semi-reliably get both reviews and recommendations that are well worth the time invested. Most major publishing houses know this, accept it, and have even come to appreciate it.

As a hardcover author in 2017, I found that my publisher's marketing/publicity team was very comfortable with Goodreads' prominence and felt that its review-by-review quirks balanced out over time in a way that ultimately was quite good for promoting wider readership of interesting books.

It's not obvious from the webpage, but if you are a subscriber or enter your email address you can read the whole essay, which is 4849 words long. And though it does not mention Goodreads explicitly, it does mention "Amazon reviews" as a category (close enough, with Goodreads reviews sometimes? showing up on Amazon) quite a bit at the beginning, for example:

> user reviews exert ever more influence compared to serious criticism […] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics

Goodreads is now an amazon marketing website filled with astroturf and review bombing.

In a 16th century French literature course, I read Montaigne in the original—I realized then how much I rely on paragraphs to read prose...

I don't quite see why the author shuns them.

It's a bug in the website's preview mode — if you look at the full essay, it has (if I've counted correctly) 25 paragraphs. There are also three paragraphs that start with "BC" for some reason, which seem to be bigger breaks.

There should be 7 paragraphs in the preview shown, with paragraph breaks after ‘reigns.”’, ‘on Amazon.’, ‘Well, yes.’ and so on.

TFA is perhaps another consequence of the cost of information/data distribution going to zero.

It seems that when given the option, folks don't choose traditional media for curated books-to-read lists or literary criticism.

Just like they are tending toward social media for news and streaming companies for tv and movies.

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