In an effort to bring the continued plight of book reviewing as well as the changes occurring in book retailing to the attention of the wider general public, I took up the subject of the announced closing of Kirkus Reviews in my most recent “From Under My Hat” editorial column.

More bad news from the world of professional book reviewing: Publisher’s Weekly is reporting that Nielsen Business Media has announced that it will close the highly influential book review publication Kirkus Reviews as well as Editor & Publisher magazine. In publication since 1933, Kirkus Reviews publishes roughly 5,000 book reviews annually covering a wide variety of genres. Its closing will undoubtedly cause a significant decrease in the availability of professional, well-written book reviews. Editor & Publisher, the “bible of the newspaper industry” has been in print even longer; tracing its origins as far back as 1884.

Being a book reviewer is difficult enough these days… what with more and more of the print media reducing or even entirely eliminating the amount of space they dedicate to news and reviews of recently published books, more and more of the information available to the public regarding the subject is now to be found online. However while bloggers and other new media publishers are working to try and fill the void left by the move away from print publication of book reviews, compensation for such work is far less that existed in years past. Many reviewers, including myself, are not paid at all for the hundreds of hours of work we annually put into our respective book reviewing websites. As a result, most of us produce other types of writing or, in many cases, have entire other income-generating occupations. We do it simply because we love reading books and writing reviews for the benefit of the larger reading public; however whether we are paid for our work or not, most of us, especially in the blogging community, do what we do out of a profound love for our subject. Read the rest of this entry »