By which I mean not the reviewing of books but the kind of newspaper section called a book review, as in the New York Times Book Review or the Washington Post Book World, which may be closing down. I am not sure how much to be worried about this. For much of their history newspapers have not reviewed books at all — going back to the eighteenth century and through almost all of the nineteenth, book reviewing was largely the province of other kinds of periodicals — and few newspapers have ever had whole sections devoted to book reviews. Are we about to see considerably fewer book reviews altogether? Or are we just faced with a kind of dispersal of book reviewing into more and more varied locations? UPDATE: See Alex Massie's post on this subject from 2007.
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Friday, January 23, 2009
the end of book reviews?
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Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what's fun?
Alan Jacobs
Alan Jacobs is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities in the Honors Program of Baylor University and the author, most recently, of How to Think and The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography. His homepage is here.

Sites of Interest
How to Read Well in an Age of Distraction
Watch video of Alan Jacobs discussing his book in a Washington, D.C. lecture in June 2011.

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