Five years ago, when Twitter was just another start-up and the iPad was a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye, the state of print book reviews in this country was undergoing a spectacular and noisy collapse. Newspapers that were failing financially killed off their stand-alone print book sections, or folded them into the entertainment, ideas, or culture sections. They fired staff book editors and critics and cut freelance budgets. Hundreds of newspapers shut down altogether. Many magazines stopped covering books, and the literary quarterlies, for decades the champions of poetry and literary fiction published by independent presses, faced funding challenges as well.

Writers, readers, book reviewers, and publishing professionals feared the worst. Many equated the failure of the print-newspaper business model with the death of the book review. The heated debate of those dire moments put traditional print book reviewers on the hot seat; they were excoriated as “stodgy,” “elitist,” “out of touch,” and “extinct.” The National Book Critics Circle’s Campaign to Save Book Reviewing, which was launched in April 2007 and included more than 125 blog posts written by Salman Rushdie, Richard Ford, Lee Smith, Rick Moody, George Saunders, and others concerned about the loss to the culture as book sections were being dismantled, captured the mood of the time. As novelist Richard Powers put it, “I think our crisis is instant evaluation versus expansive engagement, real time versus reflective time, commodity versus community, product versus process. Substituting a user’s rating for a reader’s rearrangement threatens to turn literature into a lawn ornament. What we need from reviewers in any medium are guides to how to live actively inside a story.” (The campaign is archived on the National Book Critics Circle’s blog Critical Mass at bookcritics.org/blog.)

Five years later, we remain a nation of passionate readers—even during a time when movies can be streamed on demand and countless distractions are built into every smartphone and tablet. Book-related discussions take up millions of characters on the Internet each week and connect readers in book groups in many communities. No matter the form—digital, electronic, print, or spoken word—a majority of the nation’s readers recognize good writing and yearn for fresh voices from authors and critics.

The best of the feisty group of literary bloggers who began pushing the boundaries of traditional book commentary a decade ago have been woven into the mainstream, and their iconoclastic styles have freshened the form. This ongoing transformation has challenged our collective creativity and pushed all manner of innovation. This period will be seen as a benchmark in book culture. But it’s not the end of the book review.

The key word for the changes afoot is proliferation. The number of books being published has ballooned from some fifty thousand books published annually in the 1970s to more than three million in 2010 and climbing, with about three quarters of those books self-published or print-on-demand versions of public-domain titles, according to R. R. Bowker’s annual publishing report. The number of readers, writers, and reviewers commenting on books also has grown exponentially.

Readers can find book news and reviews in formats ranging from a hundred forty characters to six thousand words and up, online and in print: on Facebook, Goodreads, Library-Thing, Amazon, and Twitter; on literary blogs and websites; in newspapers and magazines; via radio, television, and podcast; and in a growing number of online-only forums. The book reviewing long tail is daunting. Whom do you trust to help you decide what to read next? Despite the flood of friendly recommendations coming from Amazon and the social-networking sites, many readers still turn to familiar gatekeepers for curatorial guidance.

Here’s a snapshot of the state of book reviewing today. It is a counterargument to the naysayers, gathered from a crowd of people who are dedicated to reviews and to sharing them with a growing readership on a growing number of platforms.  

PREPUB BOOK REVIEWS
Booklist [3], Kirkus Reviews [4], Library Journal [5], and Publishers Weekly [6] (PW), all of which preview books in advance for librarians, broadcast producers, editors, and other publishing professionals, have emerged from several bumpy years leaner and more web-savvy.

“We’re stable, although we’ve certainly had to cope with the same financial difficulties as everyone else,” says Booklist associate editor Donna Seaman. Founded in 1905, Booklist, published by the nonprofit American Library Association, covers some eight thousand books a year in its print publication and Booklist Online. It also publishes an array of e-newsletters, including Booklist Online Exclusives, with online-only reviews. “We’ve developed a Review of the Day app, and a Facebook presence, and the online editor is on Twitter,” Seaman says.

Kirkus Reviews was shut down in late 2009, and revived in 2010 with a broader scope that includes self-published books. Library Journal and PW, both previously owned by Reed Elsevier, were put on the block in 2009, sold to new owners—PW to PWxyz, a newly formed company headed by onetime PW publisher George Slowik, and Library Journal to Media Source—and relaunched in 2010. 

Library Journal publishes six thousand to seven thousand reviews a year. “There are more books than ever, with a bigger range,” says Barbara Hoffert, whose new online column, Prepub Alert, appears every Monday morning. “And everyone wants things much faster. And with authority. How do we write as much in advance as we can, to different audiences, and still maintain critical thinking? This is not just news, but also a critical evaluation. That’s the biggest challenge we’re facing now.” Hoffert writes about books six months in advance of publication. She and seven other reviews editors sift through a thousand galleys a week. In addition to a list of upcoming big titles, she now includes more poetry, more literary fiction, and more fiction in translation. The magazine has eighteen thousand subscribers and about a hundred fifteen thousand Twitter followers.

“We call ourselves a hundred-thirty-year-old start-up,” says Craig Morgan Teicher, PW’s senior web editor and poetry editor. (He also oversees the PWxyz [7] daily news blog.) “We send the PW daily newsletter to about thirty-seven thousand people, and about a hundred thousand follow us on Twitter. Our core readership is still the trade—publishers, editors, publicists, booksellers, and authors—but the Internet has expanded that audience to include readers and book lovers, as well as people involved in industries affected by the book business. Twitter and Facebook are important ways for book coverage to push itself out to a larger audience.”

Each week PW’s eleven reviews editors consider between three hundred and six hundred books, ultimately publishing a hundred fifty reviews in print, plus twenty others online. “I try to pick books that represent the important presses in the field,” says Teicher. “Small presses are the lifeblood of poetry. And I try to consistently cover first and second books by emerging writers.” The magazine, which publishes about twelve poetry reviews a month, focuses even more on small presses now, Teicher says, because midlist books are being published by indies rather than trades, which are focusing on blockbusters. “And we focus more on work in translation than we might have before because more publishers, such as New Directions, Open Letter, and Dalkey Archive, are publishing translated books than before.”

THE LAST OF THE STAND-ALONES
Five years ago the country’s stand-alone newspaper book sections began to disappear, the remaining pages devoted to books shrank drastically, and the jobs of most staff critics and editors were eliminated. The remaining book editors are often one-person operations, reviewing as much as assigning, creating podcasts and videos, blogging and updating Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. Many of them incorporate the reader-friendly approach and informal language of the Internet, and some have hired literary bloggers or use them regularly as freelancers.

The exception, of course, is the New York Times Book Review [8]. “Being the ‘last stand-alone’ feels rather lonely,” says editor Sam Tanenhaus. “We here are all pleased, however, that other newspapers continue to review books, often copiously.” Before the newspaper instituted its paywall earlier this year, the New York Times Book Review boasted a readership of approximately one million for the print edition and one million online. “Presumably there is some considerable overlap,” adds Tanenhaus, who says that estimates of how readership has been affected by the paywall are not yet available.

“Our job remains what it has been for a hundred-plus years,” he says. “To offer informed criticism of a wide array of books, which themselves often present the most interesting and up-to-date news and assessments of the culture and embody its diverse impulses, high and low, unexpected and familiar.” At any given time, Tanenhaus says, some two hundred books have been assigned, mostly for long reviews, but also for the chronicle of four or five briefer reviews published every two or three weeks. Six “preview editors” seriously consider fifteen to twenty books a week. Tanenhaus, deputy editor Bob Harris, and senior editor Alexander Star look at fewer, though all three of them participate in every assignment discussion. 

Like other publications, the New York Times Book Review is using new journalistic forms and media. The editors regularly post online video interviews, a weekly podcast hosted by Tanenhaus, slideshows, and blog posts (earlier this year the Paper Cuts blog was folded into the ArtsBeat blog). Each Sunday’s issue is posted on Friday afternoon with a popular preview e-mail blast that reaches more than a half million readers. And there are plans to run some online-only reviews.

On the West Coast, the San Francisco Chronicle [9]holds firm with a weekly eight-page tabloid pull-out section, publishing six to eight reviews a week, along with a list of compelling first sentences from new books and a new feature in which a notable Bay Area denizen writes about her most treasured book. Contributors to the new feature have included Isabel Allende, Peter Coyote, Yiyun Li, and David Thomson. John McMurtrie, the Chronicle’s book editor, says that no matter what platform readers are using—iPads, iPods, bound books, or e-readers—he sees his job as “not just trying to foster a conversation of ideas, but also trying to encourage readers to value that contemplative time that’s needed to take in the stories they’re reading.”

The Los Angeles Times [10] book section, folded into the paper’s arts section in 2007, now has more than a hundred thousand Twitter followers and has brought on staff literary blogger Carolyn Kellogg, who founded its popular Jacket Copy blog as a freelancer.

The Washington Post [11], which lost its stand-alone Book World in early 2009, gained a critic of rock-star proportions last August when staff book-review editor and weekly reviewer Ron Charles created his “totally hip book reviews” video series on the newspaper’s website.

The Wall Street Journal [12] took the contrarian path last fall and launched Books, a print book section sandwiched into its Weekend’s Review section. “We’re solely focused on print readership,” says the paper’s book editor, Robert Messenger. The book review reaches two million readers—a little more than half of them are subscribers to the print edition. “We post our content online in a similar format, but our core concern is subscribers. That was behind the decision to re-create the Saturday paper. People liked the Saturday paper. The readers like book reviews.”

The Wall Street Journal publishes daily reviews, special Friday reviews, and a minimum of six pages on Saturday, with a mix of lengthy reviews (nine hundred to two thousand words) and roundups of shorter reviews. “This is a reader-oriented model, like book reviews have been for a hundred fifty years,” Messenger says. “A book comes, I commission a review, [and there is] a lot of back-and-forth. Many reviewers are grateful for revision, for editing. We review books in a literary manner. It’s an old-fashioned approach: hard reading, hard writing, hard editing, fact-checking, proofreading.”

TRUSTED NAMES, TWEAKED
Trust is a rare commodity, and many readers maintain an allegiance to familiar gatekeepers, most of which have added online book coverage in recent years. The American Book Review [13]; the American Scholar [14] (with weekly online columns by William Deresiewicz and William Zinsser); the Believer [15]; Bookforum [16]; Entertainment Weekly [17]; National Public Radio [18] (NPR); the New York Review of Books [19]; O, The Oprah Magazine [20]; Rain Taxi [21]; and a slew of others continue to serve readers who remain faithful to their brands.

More than a million readers each month visit NPR’s online book section, which dates back to 2004 and began running online-only reviews in 2008. The site’s focus has been on literary fiction and newsy nonfiction, with small presses covered consistently. “We have a multiplatform, multimedia strategy that encompasses on-air, online, and mobile, audio, and print,” says Joe Matazzoni, senior supervising producer of arts and entertainment for NPR.org. “In digital we’re able to tap radio coverage—especially our strength in author interviews—and complement it with reviews. We collaborate and plan very closely with our radio colleagues.”

NPR’s recently updated site runs three online-only book reviews each week (and summer and end-of-year recommendations), plus All Things Considered and Fresh Air reviews. That amounts to eighty to a hundred book-related stories per month—coverage of a thousand to twelve hundred titles per year. The media organization’s hosts and show producers scan for upcoming books. “Lynn Neary is a dedicated books-and-publishing reporter, but she also does blog posts and writes web stories,” says Matazzoni. “Ellen Silva, a senior producer for All Things Considered, works closely with us on books content. Plus we can tap people like Maureen Corrigan, Alan Cheuse, and Nancy Pearl. In terms of dedicated staff, we have one online books editor who works with a part-time freelance editor and…a lot of other folks on the staff. We also have a circle of six to ten freelance reviewers.”

After nearly a century as a print publication, the Christian Science Monitor shifted to an online-only format in early 2009. “Once upon a time, the Monitor’s book section was reaching a relatively small and fairly well defined group of print readers,” says books editor Marjorie Kehe. “Today it still reaches many of those same print readers. But in addition it’s speaking to millions of new readers a year online.”

The Christian Science Monitor’ [22]s weekly mix of book coverage includes five or six reviews a week (the fiction reviews tend to be roundups), at least five blogs a week, a Reader Recommendation almost every day, and other features such as lists (five best books about baseball, six books to help you understand Libya) and quizzes (“Can you match the poet to the poem?” during National Poetry Month). “Quick, catchy features like these bring in a surprising number of readers,” Kehe says.

O, The Oprah Magazine covers a couple of dozen books each month, including at least four to six reviews per issue. The April 2011 issue devoted twenty pages to a special poetry section. “Books and reading are central to the magazine’s mission, as they are to Oprah,” says book editor Sara Nelson. The print edition of the magazine has sixteen million readers. Oprah.com draws five million unique visitors a month. All the reviews are posted online, and the iPad edition includes excerpts of the reviewed books and added content such as interviews and videos.

Magazines with influential culture sections, including the Atlantic [23], the New Yorker [24], Harper’s, [25] the Nation [26], and the New Republic [27], continue to publish book reviews, and most have added online-only content. The New Republic’s Ruth Franklin reviews several books a month, and its online the Book [28] offers several reviews a week (Adam Kirsch is a regular) plus classic reviews from its enviable critical archive, podcasts, and noteworthy videos, including ones of Allen Ginsberg singing Hare Krishna to William F. Buckley Jr. and John Updike discussing the Rabbit books.

The New Yorker supplements its reviews with the Book Bench [29] blog, which was launched in May 2008. The blog is named after the wooden bench in the center of the magazine’s editorial offices, which overflows with books and galleys. “We like to think of the book bench as a state of mind, too: a place for considering literary matters great and small—and for occasionally baring our teeth,” staffer Ligaya Mishan wrote in the initial post.

ONLINE-ONLY REVIEWS
Hundreds of online-only book-related websites—Barnes & Noble Review [30], Bookslut [31], the Complete Review [32], the Millions [33], the Morning News [34], the Quarterly Conversation [35], and the Rumpus [36], to name a handful—are increasing reader traffic as well as the number of books being covered. A much-watched newcomer to the mix, launched in April, is the nonprofit Los Angeles Review of Books [37], edited by Tom Lutz, with a focus on long-form reviews with a West Coast perspective from contributors including Jane Smiley, Greil Marcus, and David Shields. “The Los Angeles Review of Books was born as we watched the Sunday book-review sections of paper after paper die at the same time that the number of new titles continued to explode,” says Lutz. “We are building a site designed to offer numerous linking opportunities on each page, trying to resist what we see as the main scourge of current web knowledge: The web constructs a word-search interface, which is very good at helping people find the things they know they want to know, but less good at the serendipitous learning that happens in open-stack libraries or superbly curated bookstores. Much of the value we hope to add will be the way we link throughout the site and to pieces elsewhere. We want readers to enjoy a continuous process of discovery as they navigate.”

Salon [38] and Slate [39], founded in 1995 and 1996, respectively, are the old-timers of online book coverage. Slate reviews half a dozen books a month. Salon senior editor and cofounder Laura Miller writes weekly book reviews, 75 percent of which are of nonfiction works. “On one side, this is a sad decline from the heyday when Salon had a book section that ran a review every day plus features and news,” Miller says. “On the other, we still have a staff writer dedicated pretty much exclusively to writing about books (me), which is more than a lot of newspapers can say these days.”

The Millions, which publishes three or four reviews each week, started out in 2003 as a personal writing project for editor C. Max Magee and has evolved into a book-oriented website with a staff of a dozen writers and dozens of guest writers. “We reach more than a million people a year,” Magee says. “We’ve been lucky to get links from our fellow online magazines in the culture space, like the Daily Beast. We’ll cover anything that piques our interest, from the very mainstream to the very obscure.”

Another online-only staple is Inside Higher Ed [40](IHE), launched as a daily in January 2005 and now attracting more than seven hundred thousand distinct visitors each month, most of them in academe. “Although everyone involved in IHE at the start had extensive newspaper experience—or perhaps because they had that experience and could read the writing on the wall—it has always been online, and it has always been free,” says Scott McLemee. As intellectual-affairs columnist, McLemee focuses largely, but not exclusively, on university-press titles. “I still think of it in the same terms as I did before ever going online,” he said. “It’s a matter of thinking out loud about books—assessing them, but also mulling over their contexts and implications, my own long-term preoccupations, or whatever else seems to apply.”

Blake Butler, editor of HTML Giant [41], the literature blog launched in 2008, ticks off the advantages of the online-only approach: “low cost, wide readership, easy access, integration of diverse media, timely response, messy fun, weird troll trouble, party city.” HTML Giant runs four to ten reviews a month, with an emphasis on small press books, and Butler’s approach to books is informal: “I like a big wild mess where there is more focus on talking about things as if we’re talking to our friends than sitting in an office getting paid to talk about books,” he says. “We try to be a little more real and a little more rowdy, in the name of unserious seriousness, where the stakes are as high as you let them be and the door is open.”

Tina Brown’s the Daily Beast [42] introduced a book section, Book Beast [43], in February 2009, which was a finalist for a 2011 Digital National Magazine Award. Lucas Wittmann, the Daily Beast’s books editor, says he covers (by review, interview, author essay, and/or video) ten to fifteen titles a week. “I love what the small presses are publishing and always pay attention,” he says. The recent merger of Newsweek and the Daily Beast added a print publication and an expanded web audience to the Book Beast portfolio.