The Written Nerd

Okay, this is the lazy girl's version of a Wednesday post. Below you'll find your comments and those of your fellow WN readers on reviews, in semi-abbreviated form, broken up by category: book industry, authors, and general readers (though of course there is some overlap). It's a bit long, but I thought it might be useful to see how people with different relationships to books are thinking about this issue. I'll have my thoughts on the issue on Friday. From the Book Industry: As a person who works in a bookstore, I find that a lot of customers still come in looking for a book that they read about in the Times (NPR being a close second in popularity.) Often, they don't remember the title or the author, so I try and read the Times book review so I can remember the name of the book based on their plot summary. (Noelle) Hi, I work in the bookselling industry so a lot of the books that I end up reading are just books which I've stumbled across while receiving book...

In case you don't read any blogs but mine, let me first clumsily sketch the current issues raging in the blogosphere at the moment, and in the world of book culture at large. The National Book Critics Circle has launched a campaign to preserve newspaper book review sections, beginning with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which recently fired its full-time book section editor. You can read their reasons and their strategies here on the NBCC blog, Critical Mass . Some periodicals (like the New York Times ) and many bloggers, have picked up the story and interpreted it in terms of the rise of literary blogs. Some opinions (with which I risk offending someone even by summarizing): - book reviews are suffering because blogs are cheaper and easier to produce. - blogs represent contemporary, passionate criticism, while mainstream media reviews have gotten staid, elitist, boring, or irrelevant. - professional reviewers represent an educated opinion on books, while bloggers are often a...