The Life and Death of the Book Review
20 points
2 days ago
| 2 comments
| libertiesjournal.com
| HN
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bonsai_spool
3 hours ago
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In a 16th century French literature course, I read Montaigne in the original—I realized then how much I rely on paragraphs to read prose...

I don't quite see why the author shuns them.

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svat
2 hours ago
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It's a bug in the website's preview mode — if you look at the full essay, it has (if I've counted correctly) 25 paragraphs. There are also three paragraphs that start with "BC" for some reason, which seem to be bigger breaks.

There should be 7 paragraphs in the preview shown, with paragraph breaks after ‘reigns.”’, ‘on Amazon.’, ‘Well, yes.’ and so on.

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GCA10
2 hours ago
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Scanning this 998-word essay, I'm wondering if OP accepted a dare to write at length about the current state of book reviewing without ever mentioning Goodreads. His essay proves that it can be done, but -- wow! -- what an omission.

Yes, the caliber of reader reviews on Goodreads is all over the map. But it is huge, passionate forum for active readers of all stripes. Spend a little time with lists, filters, reading circles, etc. -- and you can semi-reliably get both reviews and recommendations that are well worth the time invested. Most major publishing houses know this, accept it, and have even come to appreciate it.

As a hardcover author in 2017, I found that my publisher's marketing/publicity team was very comfortable with Goodreads' prominence and felt that its review-by-review quirks balanced out over time in a way that ultimately was quite good for promoting wider readership of interesting books.

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svat
2 hours ago
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It's not obvious from the webpage, but if you are a subscriber or enter your email address you can read the whole essay, which is 4849 words long. And though it does not mention Goodreads explicitly, it does mention "Amazon reviews" as a category (close enough, with Goodreads reviews sometimes? showing up on Amazon) quite a bit at the beginning, for example:

> user reviews exert ever more influence compared to serious criticism […] The rise of Amazon reviews has reinforced a larger pattern of populist impulses challenging older cultural norms. The book clubs and reading circles that do so much to fuel book sales today generally pay little attention to professional critics

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