The Written Nerd

There's a very nice piece in Bookselling This Week about booksellers who blog , which features yours truly, among others: namely Chuck Robinson of Village Books in Washington, the staff of River City Books in Minnesota, the folks at Harry W. Schwartz in Wisconsin, Arsen Kashkashian of Boulder Bookstore in Colorado, and Megan Sullivan of Harvard Bookstore in Massachusetts. Megan I knew already, of course, and I'd heard of a couple of the others, but I'm really impressed with what store owners and staff are doing with store blogs. I think the blogging "model" Megan and I follow is a different one from what the others are doing, and I'm intrigued by the difference. The Written Nerd is less a promotional tool than a means of personal expression and connection-making -- my own personal mutual-interest-based social networking site, in a way, and an outlet for talking about the topics that are spilling out of my own head. Bookstore blogs are that too -- j...

Though I fear it has been too long in coming and will be a bit underwhelming, I'd like to try to articulate my own thoughts on the nature and evolution of book reviews: mainstream media, blogs, print, internet, etc. And it turns out living read girl' s Lady T (who ought to have a paying gig as a cultural critic) got there first. To put it in a nutshell, she writes It's like public school funding, the arts are the first ones to take the hit, while the football team gets their new uniforms. It's all about money to the corporations who run the newspaper/magazine industry,not quality vs. quantity. Essentially, we (that is, bloggers and professional book reviewers, the internet and the newspaper) are not each other's enemy. I mentioned some time ago the Wall Street Journal article which observed that publishers' allocation of advertising funds -- that is, spending money to get stacks of bestsellers front and center in chain stores, rather than on advertising in book...