Trust in booklovers, not reviewers

By Michael Cairns, former President, Bowker

Michael Cairns, our newest contributor, is former president of Bowker and managing partner of Information Media Partners, a strategy firm. Check out his PersonNonData blog. Welcome, Michael! – D.R.

Should readers really miss the book review sections that newspapers are dropping? It was a hot topic last year, with speculation on the future of reading and books generally.

Now we see the demise of several more sections, including the one at the LA. Times, which published its final stand-alone edition on July 27. Should we lament this trend? As I see it, the arguments in favor of the sections remain sentimental. They suggest a Utopian book-centric world where every reader weighs the careful words of the reviewer before making a particular purchase.

Lissa Warren’s dropped jaw

In a Huffington Post blog item, a publicist-editor named Lissa Warren lamented the demise of the Times’ section. She called out those who believe, as I do, that blog reviewers are filling the void left by "official" reviewers.

"…What does make my jaw drop," she wrote, is "the seemingly widely-held notion that these book sections are being adequately replaced by blogs. To be sure, there are some excellent book blogs out there: Mark Sarvas’s The Elegant Variation. The National Book Critics Circle’s Critical Mass. MediaBistro’s Galley Cat. Jessa Crispin’s Bookslut. The Boston Globe’s Off the Shelf. And, of course, the New York Times’ Paper Cuts. They’re all bookmarked on my computer. I read them often for news on new titles (and older ones I missed) and Q&As with authors. Many of them are also good for stories on publishing trends, which as a book publicist and editor I appreciate a great deal. But, for the most part, these blogs don’t actually review books."

Trust networks vs. traditional book reviews

In my view there is a macro point that makes her argument largely irrelevant; that is, we are beginning to see the development of trust networks. As consumers of information we are starting to build our own networks of people and entities we rely on to support everything from our political philosophy to our choice in vacation spot.

Reading falls squarely into that paradigm, and it no longer matters whether a book review is produced to the standard of the L.A. Times or the N.Y. Times book section (and many blog reviews do).

What helps: Impact on purchase decisions—and reviewer-reader connections

What matters is the impact the review has on a purchase decision. Those interested in reading are finding bloggers whom they "trust" (even of the blogspot variety, a comment which baffles me). And these reviews do indeed "adequately" fill the void created by the demise of some of the larger newspaper reviews sections.

Interestingly, some of the arguments presented by Warren as to why these blogs are not of a standard are precisely the items that lend reality, personality and connection to the readers of these reviews.

"I’d also advise that book reviewing bloggers jettison the use of personal pronouns (yes, I’ve used a slew of them here; you can nail me in the comments)," she writes. "And for goodness sake, I wish they’d stop telling me what their father and their girlfriend—or their father’s girlfriend—thought of the book. Also, I don’t need to know how they came to possess the book—how they borrowed it from the library, or bought it at B&N, or snagged a galley at The Strand, or got the publisher to send them a copy even though they average four hits a day. The banal back-story is of little interest."

It is my own personal view that the back story is of little interest; however, that might only be because I haven’t found a (blog) reviewer that I identify with. The point is, many consumers reading these blog reviews do find the back story interesting and the great thing is they can move on to someone else if it becomes too tedious.

Speaking of "self-indulgence"

Warren also speaks of "self-indulgence" and surely nothing could be more self-indulgent than reading a Salman Rushdie review of a Martin Amis title in the N.Y. Times book review section. (If you would.)

Trust networks will define how many people (maybe all of us) communicate—that’s what MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. are starting to show us. The blog network is a fundamental part of that and the continued development of trust networks has implications for all consumer interaction including recommending and buying books. The word "recommend" is better than review. The word "review" in conventional terms and as used by Warren is used pejoratively when referring to blog reviews. This is wrong, because a book review doesn’t have to conform to a standard; this is a convention that has been constructed by old school journalists.

Of back-fence recs and Facebook

What is relevant is what the opinion/review/recommendation means to the consumer. Someone yelling over the back fence to their neighbor that they really liked The Corrections is a "review." And that’s synonymous with replying to the Facebook "what are you doing" by typing, "I’m reading The Corrections and I really hate it".

Lastly, who was reading the reviews in all these newspaper reviews sections anyway? Most people in the US who read (and that’s not many) only read one book a year. That book is likely to be something like The Da Vinci Code, a diet book, Dr. Phil or an Ophrah pick so what’s the return? It is (was) a mystery. Not so on the web. These evolving trust networks concentrated around people who love books, talk about books and opine about books provide publishers with a window on the community they never had. Stop with the whining, and recognize that as a publisher you have a tremendous opportunity to understand your consumer in ways you never could before. Rather than lamenting the demise of the newspaper, publishers should be rejoicing in front of the window to a vibrant community of book lovers and opinion makers.

Might be all we have—so pay attention

To answer Lissa Warren’s question: Blogs may not save Books but they may be all we have so pay attention.

Related: Michael on the importance of focus in branding. "Publishers are best placed to build author-centric and subject/theme-oriented websites–not sites oriented around a ‘brand’ that isn’t relevant, but those that focus attention on segments of the business that remain relevant to consumers"