Requiem for a Book Review

The title of this post might be overstated. The Los Angeles Times book review isn’t deep sixed, it’s just shrinking by a huge margin. But in three days, on July 27, the LA Times will issue its final standalone book review section. The loss of a standalone section is a huge blow to Los Angeles’ rising literary cachet, and, as Steve Wasserman and other former book editors point in their letter of protest, a grave blow to the prestige of the Times.

Mark Sarvas makes an impassioned plea to pump up the online coverage. No, more than that. He suggests: “Rather than calving the book pages yet again, and grafting the limp remains onto Calendar’s derriere, let’s fold the print Book Review entirely. Stop it cold. Spare it further indignities. And take the budget of that hard copy review – including all physical costs (printing, a share of distribution) – and use those funds (with perhaps a bump if you’re really committed) to create a web-only Book Review.” I completely agree with him that the future of book reviewing is online, and that book reviewing sections should devote more funds to online activities (video, podcasts, more reviews — with hyperlinks).

But unfortunately, in the current model of newspaper governance, it seems that authority comes from print and online receives a trickle down. In other words, the print/online relationship is not even symbiotic, but parasitic — print as host and online as parasite. The amount of funds devoted to online coverage of a topic is almost always inferior to the print funds. This is changing, of course, but in the way that newspapers currently organize their funds, they are still primarily a print medium, most likely because the financial conduits still run with the physical page. So I wish the powers that be at the Times would be as visionary as Mark, dreaming up new modes of book coverage, but as it stands, I think if someone axed all book reviewing, some other part of the paper (celebrity coverage?) would snatch up the funds and we’d be left with a huge vacuum of coverage. Of course, we’re getting a vacuum anyway.

Also, by axing a print section and going all online, we’re losing a demographic, an older demographic that still reads in print. All my book reviewing sources come from online — if anything, to the younger set, book reviews on the printed page feel a bit antiquated, a throwback like black and white television and Cold War bomb drills. But a significant proportion of readers — as attested to by any independent bookstore worker who hears where people read about books — still stick with tradition and read print. I don’t want any readers disenfranchised, whatever medium they prefer. So given the loss of cultural prestige that comes from cutting the print review, as well as the demographic loss, and the necessity of a print section becomes all too clear.

Scott Esposito brings up the effect of this collapse on other literary outlets, specifically his own publication, The Quarterly Conversation. It’s natural that the rapid demise of book coverage in newspapers will force readers to shift elsewhere for news (of course, some readers won’t make that shift, and just pay less attention to books, continuing the downward cultural spiral of literature, but that’s neither here nor there). Scott ends up mentioning that he’s recently started paying contributors of TQC, which is wonderful, because this all ends up at money. Of course, I remember talking to Judith Freeman when she was writing a book review for the Los Angeles Times, and she said the money in book reviewing is so poor (even for a major outlet) in comparison to the time spent (reading all the author’s previous works) that it never makes financial sense to review books. It’s more about prestige and intelligent interaction with the literary world. Well, that’s what we’re left with. And may other literary institutions pick up the slack where the LA Times has left a gaping hole.