Chris Webb

Jeff on the Print is Dead Blog points to Pat Holt’s great take on the decline of book review sections in newspapers.

Even if you don’t care much about the disappearance of newspaper book reviews, take a few moments to read Pat’s thoughts as she gets right to the heart of the changes the entire content market is facing. After all, book reviews are content and Pat’s point is that these providers are not keeping pace with consumers who are devouring bite-sized content at an ever increasing pace.

Our audience zips around the Internet with tremendous agility and speed, and what do we give them?

• Stodgy, dull, laborious and indulgent reviews.
• The same old 16-300 column inches that digress and meander and oh, so slowly get to the point.
• “Objectivity” mired down as we strive to get the words “nuanced,” “finely” and “wrought” into a sentence.

Not only have we gotten stuffy, dreary and plodding, but our panic is showing – we know traditional print media is in trouble and try too hard to get readers back. We’ve substituted opinion for criticism. We’ve pronounced books good or bad rather than shown readers why. We’ve fallen into the Hollywood media game of guessing what titles will hit a best seller list instead of what titles deserve audience attention.

Ms. Holt goes on to offer some great suggestions for a new approach to win back readers and suggests critics only need look to what consumers are creating for themselves.

You can grumble that customers writing on the web don’t know the difference between personal biases and literary standards, but the fact is that a scroll through a dozen customer reviews tells you all you need to know, quickly and often refreshingly, about whether the book is for you and, even (yes, you have to keep scrolling) if it might be any good.

Isn’t it time for a parallel revolution in book reviewing? Surely we can retain our high standards of erudition and criticism and have fun at the same time. I would love it if a Sunday section wiped out all but a few standard book reviews and set up, say, a dozen departments in which critics are charged with writing succinctly and excitedly about books in a well-designed, easy-to-grasp format.