The further demise of the book review…

… is predicted by Robert McCrum in The Observer today.  “The book world is in full-blown transition,’ he says. ‘Blogs are rampant; Google is digitising every text going; e-readers are transforming the experience of reading. Books (and book reviewing) have been pushed to the margin. It doesn’t help that in a global recession publishing is also feeling the pinch.”

It’s an interesting question, whether blogs really are supplanting professional critical reviewing. I’m a big fan of really good serious literary blogs, which take the level of discussion about books to a place that a typical review, no matter how well done, can’t. A blog enables you to have a debate about books: what worked for you as a reader and what didn’t, and that’s a very valuable thing. It’s valuable to writers, as well as other readers. It gets people talking about ideas in a way that they probably haven’t since they studied literature at school (or maybe I was just unusual in being fortunate enough to have had seriously good quality literature teaching at school!) 

But these features of a blog aren’t the only thing that’s valuable, and even the best of blogs serves a different function from a good review by a professional critic in the literary press. Sure, we’ve railed against the bad reviews and reviewers in the past – the ones that don’t live up to the responsibilities of a professional reviewer – who, after all, is being paid to do a job properly, fairly and accurately.  But they are in the minority and there are bad book blogs too.  It seems to me that both are needed. The rise of the literary blog is a fine thing, but it would be a great pity indeed if it were at the expense of the professional critical review.

There are other issues that McCrum takes up:  ”At Houghton Mifflin Harper, in a damaging outburst of candour, a company spokesperson revealed that, with rare exceptions, editors were being encouraged not to acquire new books. Günter Grass and Philip Roth, both with this publisher, can be expected to write at will. But for any new writer, or worse, a novelist in mid-career, these are the times that try men’s souls,” he says. More evidence that the typical agent’s cry these days - ”I can’t sell literary fiction any more” - is based on a very real problem.

McCrum also talks about the rise of the bestseller at the expense of the ’smaller’ book – a good literary novel or literary memoir. Again, something we’ve spoken of often in this blog in the past. He ends on a high note, predicting that the current economic downturn might ”purge the trade of vacuous bestsellers and bring the British reading public back to better books.” But it’s difficult to see how. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, it’s the independent presses that are increasingly publishing the majority of risk-taking, quality literary books these days. We are the ones that those first-time novelists and mid-career literary ‘mid-list’ authors turn to when the big guys cut even more of them out. But the downturn affects us too. In a business that is already heavily discounted, and where people are, even in a time of relative economic ease, increasingly price-sensitive and prone to bargain-hunting, where typical book-buying behaviour is to purchase only from the ‘3 for 2′ tables, is it really likely that people are going to pay an extra couple of pounds on an undiscounted cover price to buy the kind of literature that is only available from small presses, who can only afford to operate on a full-price, high-quality, small volume model?

There’s certainly no evidence of it yet. But who knows how things may shift. It’s going to be interesting finding out!

Sharon