Read ‘em and Weep
Following hot on the heels of my post yesterday, where I wondered how historians (and journalists) can get support for their best work and find an audience in today’s climate, today we receive news that the Washington Post‘s Book World will cease to exist as a separate print section.
So not that anyone’s counting, but: independent bookstores all over the country have closed. Libraries are slashing budgets. Academic presses have been hurting for quite some time, and now corporate publishing isn’t looking so hot, either. Amazon’s Kindle may or may not herald the death of printed books. The flourishing internet used-book market means that most people need never buy a book in the first place. And even if you do manage to get a publisher to sell your book, how will anyone know about it if mainstream book review sections are also being closed off?
Here’s Douglas Brinkley, in the linked article:
Douglas Brinkley, the historian, suggested that the book industry and book reviews deserved some kind of public bailout. “I think that just like public television — I think book review sections almost need to get subsidized to keep the intellectual life in America alive,” Mr. Brinkley said. “So if we can do that for radio, and we could do it for television, why can’t we do it for the book industry, which is terribly suffering right now?”
I’m not sure government subsidy for books and book reviews is necessarily the right answer (and besides, the government’s got its own problems right now). But things certainly do look grim, don’t they?
Unfortunately, outside the DC area, one didn’t really notice Book World’s existence even when it existed. At some point, I think about the time the book superstores started opening with their walls of New York Times best-sellers, the NYT took a virtual monopoly in terms of newspaper book reviewing that could actually generate a broad readership for the work of history (and I suspect for other genres as well.)
Comment by Jeff Pasley — January 29, 2009 @ 10:34 am
Actually, I’ll take issue with the previous comment–some people knew of Book World’s existence outside of DC…but they were typically folks who read/love books (i.e., the choir you are preaching to). A comment I read last week on the possibility of Book World’s disappearance featured a comment from a Washington Post editor, who didn’t deny that BW would disappear, but suggested that books would continue to get reviewed/discussed elsewhere in the paper. Given budget constraints in the print media, I rather doubt they’ll devote the same amount of space.
Publications like BW face have always had to cope with a marketplace of other print competitors: NYReview of Books, NYT Book Review on Sunday, Choice, and others. For a long time, they have been a kind of 3rd banana in print. Now, they must confront the (instantaneous) delivery of this kind of content via the internet: reviews of books at Amazon, weRead, LibraryThing, or the blog/discussion list of choice (H-Net anyone?). I’m not sure that reviewing is likely to disappear, so much as migrate to the medium we’re using for this conversation.
Comment by Sally Hadden — January 29, 2009 @ 11:40 am
Yes, Ben, you raised the fundamental issue– the structure of the book market. We are seeing simultaneously the expansion of the on-line and off-line big box stores (Amazon, etc.) and growing consumption of books– with bestsellers getting more exposure and reading than ever, but at the same time the small bookstores and such wonderful publications as Book World (which I read out here on the west coast) are finding it hard to find support. It’s as if the market has become so segmented, and the economic forces behind bestsellers now dominate the intellectual community that once played a larger role determining which books gained a reputation. It’s no different than cereal now, except that cereal is usually fortified.
Comment by Johann Neem — January 29, 2009 @ 9:23 pm
His followers, drawn primarily from the peasant class, went on to establish the Jōdo Shinshū school of Buddhism. The other major Pure Land school to arise in Japan was the Ji school founded by Ippen (1239–89). He also inherited Hōnen’s teachings, but he advocated simple repetition of Amitābha’s name whether undergirded by faith or not. All of these schools made Pure Land one of the dominant forms of Buddhism in Japan.
Comment by dini videolar — August 20, 2011 @ 7:52 pm