by Rebecca Vnuk
OK, I’ll admit it. I don’t really care about the death of the newspaper book review pages (insert your gasp here). Even though I’ve been involved in some form of reader’s advisory or collection development work for almost 10 years, I just don’t read newspaper book reviews. I have on occasion, glanced at the local paper’s section – but only so I can make sure we have a copy of what they’re talking about that week in anticipation for more patron requests. I’m just looking at the titles.
As a general reader, I don’t really find newspaper book reviews to be all that interesting – they don’t seem to review the things I enjoy, they seem to focus too much on “literature,” and personally, I think some of the reviews are a bit pretentious and not very informative.
As a librarian, I don’t find them to be useful for collection development because they are either behind the times or not written in a way that helps me judge an item for my collection. Frankly, I find Booklist, Kirkus, LJ, and PW to already be two too many review sources, but that’s merely because I don’t have the time to read four reviews of the same book. It would be tragic for one of those venerable publications to cease, but newspapers? Oh no, I might not get to read the 100th review of A Thousand Splendid Suns the weekend after it comes out and the 30 patrons I have on hold have already received their library copy or are on the list!
I also don’t see the majority of my patrons coming in anymore with book review sections – they are coming to the desk with tear-outs from magazines like People, O, and Redbook, or with the flyers from Borders. Or they heard about something on TV or saw online.
It’s a hot topic, to be sure. Just check out a few of these articles/blogs for pros and cons:
BookSquare
With fewer and fewer people reading the print news, and more and more subscribing to news online that they can tailor to their interests, (see Pew Research ) it’s not surprising that many newspapers are cutting their print review sections but letting their online versions flourish. I do subscribe to several RSS feeds featuring book reviews.
Perhaps the real argument here is not whether or not newspaper reviews provide us entertaining or useful information, but whether or not the loss of newspaper book reviews signals the death of reading. I think that’s a bit much to infer – but what do you think?
Rebecca Vnuk
