That Rending Sound You Hear Is My Heart

Posted 19 September, 2007 in Book Reviewing |

Here’s one to get all those “crisis in book reviewing” folks’ hearts racing.

New York Business.com is reporting that as of September 23, the New York Times Book Review will be augmenting its bestseller lists, separating mass market and trade paperback titles and including twenty titles each, up from the current list that amalgamates the two formats and only includes fifteen titles. Advice, How-to, and Miscellaneous bestseller lists will also increase in size, from five titles apiece to ten.

This doesn’t mean that the Book Review is getting bigger, however: the extra page for the steroid-enhanced bestseller lists will mean one less page of editorial content.

Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus explains that separating the mass market list from the trade paperback list will better serve his readership: “Now you have a list [the trade paper list] that corresponds closely to what we review and what we gauge our readers are interested in.” This is because the putatively higher-quality literary fiction and non-fiction that dominates the trade paperback format often gets bumped from the amalgamated list by mass market titles that sell in high volume through big box stores or through non-traditional bookselling outlets such as Wal-Mart.

Fair enough, but, if its true that the NYTBR readership focuses predominantly on literary fiction and trade paperback books anyway, why have a mass market list at all? Who is your audience expected to be?

Furthermore, the loss of one page of editorial content in favour of bigger bestseller lists that are presumed to attract more advertising dollars seems a bit suspect, since New York Business also reports that ad revenue for the Book Review was up by ten percent last year, and is on track to increase another ten percent this year.

The NYTBR is the only quality, stand-alone book review in an American newspaper, since the Los Angeles Times folded its books section into the body of its paper earlier this year; to see it diminished like this is somewhat disheartening, particularly when the stated rationale for the move doesn’t exactly compute.

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