Couple of random links that I think dovetail interestingly, beginning with the announcement of the closure of the Washington Post‘s Book World section.
As it happens, Book World never garnered much advertising from publishers, who generally spend very little on newspaper ads. Publishers now focus their marketing dollars on cooperative agreements with chain bookstores, which guarantee that certain books will receive prominent display at the front of stores.
Reading that segued into this post on The Written Nerd, citing an LA Times report on the current state of independent bookstores. And connected to all of that is this Conversational Reading post on book websites, which explores the question of how to properly create a website for a writer or book. (Hint: Mark Sarvas and Neil Gaiman are those praised in the piece.)
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As for where I stand on the closure of the section itself — my thoughts on this right now are pretty close to those of Edward Champion. The Washington Post isn’t ending its coverage of books (though I wish they weren’t cutting the overall number of books reviewed in a year); nor do they seem to be looking to change the quality or nature of those reviews. And given that I don’t live in Washington, my method of accessing those reviews isn’t exactly changing. One thought that endures from one of Champion’s updates:
…one advantage that a print-based newspaper has over a blog is the manner in which a reader can discover an article adjacent to another, much like the way in which you discover an unexpected book next to another in a library or a bookstore. Given this exploratory reading tendency, does it even make sense for any newspaper today to maintain a stand-alone books section?