Battle of the book reviews

IT’S time for a truce.

When members of the National Book Critics Circle recently picketed the Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- protesting the elimination of its book review editor -- a war of words broke out between book reviewers and literary bloggers.

The quarrel, which got surprisingly nasty, spilled into newspapers, magazines and blogs, amid concerns over recent cutbacks at other big-city newspaper book reviews, including the Los Angeles Times. The boom in books-related blogging, it seemed, was a slap in the face to more seasoned literary voices as they watched their own outlets shrink.

“If you were an author, would you want your book reviewed in the Washington Post and the New York Review of Books, or on a web site written by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler or Biogafriend?” Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic, wrote in the Washington Post. “The book review section ... remains the forum where new titles are taken seriously as works of art and argument, and not merely as opportunities for shallow grandstanding and overblown ranting.”

Lit-blogger Edward Champion fired back, ridiculing the notion that only printed book reviews matter: “It’s okay for the lit blogosphere to exist as a version of your Mom’s book club -- it’s okay for us to talk books and authors and compare notes on favorites, as long as we keep our place,” snapped the San Francisco writer, who runs the Return of the Reluctant website. “Have you got that? We must not think for a minute that we contribute anything beyond serving as accessories to the real literary discussions.... We should buy books but not dare to offer well thought opinions on them.”

The accusations flew back and forth. But now there is a growing sense that enough is enough -- and that the friction between old and new book media obscures the fact that the two are in bed together now, for better or worse. Often the same people who churn out literary blogs are reviewing books for mainstream reviews. (Champion, for example, has a review appearing in this week’s Los Angeles Times Book Review.)

Many believe there’s a healthy synergy between the two. Maud Newton, who runs one of the more respected literary blogs (maudnewton.com), was puzzled by the idea that the two are somehow competing. “When bloggers disagree with or agree with an article about books in the mainstream press, it drives traffic to the newspaper,” she said. The cutbacks at newspaper book reviews are unfortunate, but hardly the fault of bloggers.

“This was truly a false dichotomy,” Mark Sarvas, who runs the L.A.-based blog the Elegant Variation, said by phone. “The two sides needn’t be in opposition, certainly not at this time. There is a vast ecosystem of information about books out there, and all of it needs our support.”

Enough books to go around

INDEED, more than at any time in the last 40 years, there is a bounty of news, features, criticism and gossip about books in newspapers, magazines and journals, blogs, radio and TV, podcasts and an ever-growing number of book clubs and festivals. It’s by all appearances a flourishing literary moment in a culture that traditionally values other forms of entertainment, and it raises the question: Why should two key elements of that mosaic, litbloggers and book reviewers, be trading shots at all?

“This may be a counterintuitive thing to say, given all the gloom and doom we keep hearing about the future of books, but I think we’re entering a very robust period for publishing,” publisher James Atlas said. “For me, the big problem is not that no one pays attention to books, but that no one pays enough to the books that I publish. There is intelligent book talk going on at so many levels. It includes much more than reviewers and bloggers.”

And Sarvas said: “There will always be bloggers who poke at newspapers and editors who resent that poking. But the best of the blogs take a deeper, more nuanced view about coverage, and the best newspapers think about how to leverage what the Internet offers. We need to bring more readers into the discussion, instead of cutting them out.”

In recent months the Los Angeles Times cut the size of its Book Review and redesigned it to share space with the Opinion section. Reviews have also been cut in San Francisco and St. Petersburg, Fla.; the Chicago Tribune is moving its review to Saturday, where it will reach fewer readers. In all of these cases, publishers cited a lack of ad revenue generated by book reviews. And it is perhaps natural to posit a cause and effect -- that as the space for traditional newspaper book reviews shrinks, the online world will grow.

“Once technology is discovered, you can’t stop it,” said Atlas. “We’re going to have e-books. We’re going to have print-on-demand business. We’re going to have a lot more discourse on the Web, and it will become more sophisticated as literary gatekeepers arrive to create some order. The key word is adaptation, which will happen whether we like it or not.”

As Callie Miller, an L.A.-based blogger who runs Counterbalance, pointed out, blogs can identify and celebrate worthy authors, especially local writers, who are ignored by print media outlets. “On any given Sunday, we see the same books reviewed in many publications, and then you see another similar block of books the next week,” Miller said. “My goal is to go beyond that.”

Still, the numbers are telling: The literary blogs are reaching a small audience. While larger newspapers have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, the Elegant Variation, for example, has an estimated 5,000 to 7,500 hits a day, while Champion’s Return of the Reluctant is averaging 40,000 visits a day.

And although many newspaper reviews are shrinking, Dennis Loy Johnson -- an independent publisher who started Moby Lives, one of the pioneering literary blogs -- believes they continue to offer more solid content than most online efforts. “It’s a dirty word in 2007, but blogs have not raised the level of intellectual discussion,” he said. “Book blogging is for the most part book gossip and fresh commentary, or opinion. It’s vital, but it’s not true literary criticism.”

David Rosenthal, executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, said he preferred having books reviewed in traditional media. “But I won’t knock the blogs,” he said, adding that “they contribute to a long-standing oral tradition, keeping a national discussion alive.”

But not all online criticism struggles for attention. At Salon.com, book critic Laura Miller writes reviews that often leap to the top of the online magazine’s hit list. Her piece last month on “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was the eighth-most-viewed story on the site, which pulls in about 4 million viewers a week, she said.

“In a weird way, we’re part of the establishment now,” Miller said, describing Salon’s growth since its creation in 1995. “And it sounds harsh, but you get what you pay for. We hired good writers. I used to write for peanuts, and you can’t make a living doing that. So it may be that the friction between bloggers and reviewers is just another version of this age-old resentment that aspiring journalists have always felt toward more established journalists.”

The conversation

PERHAPS the pervading sense of scarce resources is compounded by a publishing industry that produces more books than even the most robust cultural conversation could possibly include. Last year there were 120,000 new titles released, far more than American consumers could be expected to navigate. Only a relative handful get media attention. Yet even as they lament this situation, some book mavens resist the idea that serious attention to books is under siege from the Internet.

“We keep hearing there was a golden age of books 30 years ago, when Gore Vidal would appear on Johnny Carson and they’d talk about books for half an hour,” said Ron Hogan, who runs Beatrice, a literary blog, and Galleycat.com, a website for book industry news. “But look at what we have available to us today. We’re going to have Cormac McCarthy appearing on Oprah Winfrey. We have an entire cable channel [C-SPAN II] that provides 48 hours of weekend coverage of nonfiction books. We have authors appearing on Comedy Central shows like ‘The Daily Show’ and ‘The Colbert Report.’ You have thousands of people attending book festivals across the nation. There’s a huge amount of book-related information out there.”

Not all of it comes from book reviews or blogs. As the National Book Critics Circle members picketed outside the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, John Freeman, the group’s president, recalled that some of those who came by to show support were members and organizers of book clubs, whose numbers are estimated at 5 million, according to industry experts.

“There’s been a large growth in the numbers of these clubs,” said Barbara Drummond Mead, who along with her husband, Charles, runs Readers Group Choices, an organization that dispenses advice about book selections and publishing news to book club members across the nation. “The numbers took off when Oprah Winfrey began focusing on authors in 1999. And now we’ve done studies showing that the average member of a book club buys up to 40 books a year.”

Next month, Mead will be hosting a panel at the BookExpo America convention in New York, updating booksellers on trends in the book club world. Several days later she will be heading to San Jose, where a newer convention -- Book Group Expo -- will be holding its second annual meeting, with more than 1,000 members of book clubs and some 50 authors.

Meanwhile, members of the book world are beginning to tone down the rhetoric. In the aftermath of their testy online exchange, Dirda and Champion have begun communicating, looking for a middle ground.

“I think cutting newspaper book coverage is an abject and unfortunate development,” said Champion in an e-mail to The Times. “I also think it’s egregious for either of the two sides to wag schoolmarmish fingers at each other. The litblogs could use more editorial care; the newspapers could use more passion and spontaneity. But here’s the good news: the twain can meet.”

“It’s great that people should voice their opinions about the books they love or hate,” Dirda wrote in an e-mail, sounding more conciliatory but still noting that he prefers traditional book reviews. Blogging “encourages a vital literary culture, just as book clubs and other discussion groups do. But we still need the common ground of book review sections.... Perhaps there is a modus vivendi that will allow both kinds of literary discussion and opinion to flourish. I hope so.”

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josh.getlin@latimes.com