Free Range Librarian has an excellent post on the National Book Critics’ Circle’s Campaign to Save Book Reviews. And here’s Kate Brady, president of the AWP, on “The Value of Book Reviewers.”
To allude to mysterious market forces as a reason for not publishing book reviews sidesteps the fact that market forces most often result from human choice. We all need to promote books, and we need to promote reading not as a peripheral, arcane hobby of the privileged but as a functional and essential part of contemporary life. When a book reviewer brings a book out of lonely obscurity into public space, s/he makes a miracle possible.
