The final demise was sad but by no means unexpected.
News arrived this month that the Washington Post's prestigious book section, Book World, will no longer appear as a separate supplement of the paper. Instead, book reviews will now be split between Outlook, the opinion and commentary section, and Style & Arts, along with feature articles and interviews.
There will be fewer of them too. Is this the end of the line for the book review?
The Post is only the latest in a series of newspapers to scale back their book reviews or eliminate them altogether. Specialist publications like the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books continue to appear. But when mainstream newspapers are under pressure from falling sales, lower advertising revenue and tough economic times, the standalone book review section is one of the first places they look to make cuts.
Book reviews as we know them first appeared at the beginning of the 19th century in response to a crippling sense of information overload. In the previous century, publications like The Gentleman's Magazine had listed every new book published, with brief notes describing what the book was about. But by the beginning of the 19th century, there were just too many books for anyone to pay attention to them all.
Magazines like the Edinburgh Review (founded 1802) and the Quarterly Review (1809) began to publish longer, more evaluative reviews of a few carefully selected books. They were written by a new breed of professional critics, whose job was not only to tell readers what the books were about, but also whether they were any good. They quoted at great length, which meant that reading the review (then as now) could be a substitute for reading the whole book, rather than an enticement to read it.
These reviews helped to create a shared literary culture – a sense that well-informed people could agree about which were the most important books of the day. But they did that by excluding the vast majority of the books actually published. They sifted through the deluge of new publications in order to channel a selection of them to readers, complete with notes about why they were important and whether they were any good.
Since the 19th century, our sense of information overload has become increasingly intense. More books are published now than at any other time in history – the Library of Congress in Washington catalogues 7,000 new books every single day. And we have access to millions of web pages at the click of a mouse, including several million complete books on Google Books. Thanks to new technology, we're drowning in information, even as we're starved of knowledge.
The sense of information overload web surfers are now experiencing reprises that felt by readers of books at the end of the 18th century. But the outcome will be different. As books sections like Book World close their doors, blogs about books are starting up all over the web. From BookBlog.net to bookslut.com to reviews on Amazon, the book review is alive and well online. Although it won't print Book World as a separate section, the Washington Post has decided to keep it as a special area of the paper's website.
But unlike their 19th-century counterparts, these new book reviews will not create a shared, literate community. The long tail of modern marketing means that online book reviews can target a tiny specific interest group. If you want to start a blog entirely devoted to reviewing books on fly fishing, go right ahead – there's nothing to stop you. You'll probably get thousands of hits, as fly-fishing enthusiasts from all over the world log on to read your posts.
Just don't expect to make any kind of impact on the culture at large. Slowly but surely, we're moving towards a situation where every book is reviewed, but no general audience for the reviews exists. Come to think of it, a situation where every book is reviewed by its author and no general audience exists for the review or the book.
The changes that the book review as a genre is undergoing are symptoms of a larger change in the way that information circulates in our culture. The information overload that made book reviews seem necessary in the first place is now becoming complete “information atomization” (a phrase I plan to trademark). The overlap that you can assume between the knowledge of any two people seems to be getting smaller every day. Therefore, there's no shared sense of which books are worth reviewing for a general audience.
So, far from being an endangered species, book reviews are thriving in their new habitat on the Internet. What is endangered is the shared sense of a literary public culture that book reviews helped to create in the first place.
Tom Mole is an assistant professor in the Department of English at McGill University.
