Apocalypse Delayed (Again)

Andrew links to a tale of woe from - yes, you guessed correctly - our friends in the literary world. Never knowingly under-fretted, the latest crisis in American letters concerns the War on Reviewers.

According to Art Winslow of the National book Critics Circle:

"In the new book burning we don't burn books, we burn discussion of them instead. I am referring to the ongoing collapse of book review sections at American newspapers, which has accelerated in recent months, an intellectual brownout in progress that is beginning to look like a rolling blackout instead." 

Something must be done! So there is, of course, a campaign: here. It is all very worthy and well-intentioned and frankly I'd be quite happy to see more space devoted to books than is currently the case. But it's far from clear that there is really much of a problem here at all. Some newspapers may be cutting back on the amount of coverage they give to literary matters but that doesn't mean readers are suffering. Indeed the opposite seems more likely to be true.

OK, so there are now only 5 "stand alone" books sections published by American newspapers and OK, rather strangely, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (circulation circa 375,000) has decided it can no longer sustain a Literary Editor (an odd decision, though one should never be surprised by any decision made by any newspaper management)

But so what? (It's not clear to me, incidentally, why a "stand alone" book section is necessarily better than one that includes other copy. Indeed, if you wanted to pull new readers in to a books section the last thing you'd want would be to make it easy for them to throw it away unread, no? And if the stand-alone section is so sacred then British newspapers don't have proper books pages...)

Anyway, I digress. The truth is that there's more book reviewing available to the average reader now than at any point in decades. Arts & Letters Daily links directly to the books pages of no fewer than 37 publications from across the English-speaking world and this doesn't even include the books pages of publications such as The New Republic. In other words, the reader in Atlanta or Cheyenne or Kansas City now has greater access to the literary world - with all its diversity and disputes - than his or her parents' generation could ever have hoped for.

Nor is this the only heartening sign. The remarkable success of book clubs, to say nothing of the proliferation of entertaining literary sites online, as well as the ever-increasing number of literary festivals crammed into the calendar each year all combine to suggest that rumours of the book's death continue to be exaggerated.

We know this is true. After all, there has been no decline in the number of books published, nor, according to Census Bureau figures, has the value of books' bought slipped in recent years. Yes, things change and yes it may be harder for small or independent book stores to thrive these days. Good. Most of them were no good anyway. Viva Waterstones or Borders or the other Big Evil Chain Stores. As someone brought up in the countryside in the pre-internet age I envy today's teenagers whose access to books is vastly greater than was the case for my generation.

The internet has also been a blessing for second-hand bookstores and browsers too: how sweet it is to be able to launch a global search for a long-looked for book or edition.

And if ever a commodity was designed for The Long Tail approach to business, it's books.

So, really, people, the loss of pagination at a few provincial newspapers, while disappointing, is scarcely a sign of a return to the dark ages.

I suspect that what's really being mourned here is the fact that books - bar Harry bleedin' Potter - have lost any claim they might once have had to cultural supremacy in America. People don't talk about Dave Eggers or Philip Roth around the water-cooler (can you blame them?). But this is true of other art forms too: in a country of 300m people even movies and TV struggle to capture the nation's collective imagination (in as much as that cn be said to exist. We're a long way from Who Shot JR?

We all live in niches now. There may be a downside to that, but it doesn't mean that it's the end of the world. On the contrary, there's vast amounts of space out there, just waiting to be settled by bright and enterprising people. Many of those people will want to bring their books with them.

Comments

[Tim Worstall]

That fewer book reviews are being commissioned and published does at least explain why I'm not geting asked to do book reviews any more.

Or peraps it was just that the few I did were crap.

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Or mis-spelled. Perhaps.

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