The Vanishing Book Review?

May 2008

If there is a single most popular request that we receive from Choice subscribers, it can probably be summed up in a single word—“more.”  “More” as in more reviews of more titles in more subject areas and in more formats.

It’s a simple enough request, and a gratifying one at that.  After all, it implies unmet demand for Choice’s raison d’être, those concise, critical, 200-word, expert assessments of new books and electronic resources that are Choice’s specialty.  And it’s led over the years to any number of interesting discussions of whether it might be possible for Choice, already one of the four largest review sources in this country, to review too many titles.  Perhaps, as has been suggested by one staff member, our goal should be to review nothing less than 100 percent of all new books and electronic resources, preferably before they are written.

The goal is daunting, but we are doing our best.  Thanks to the efforts of the dedicated Choice editorial, production, and publishing team, the number of new reviews published in Choice has slowly increased from roughly 6,700 to this past year’s slightly more than 7,200 new reviews.  To put it another way, in 2007 Choice published more than 600 reviews per month, 138 reviews per week (no vacation weeks or breaks allowed), or just under thirty-five reviews per workday (of which there are 220 in a normal year).

No matter how you slice it, this translates into a lot of traffic at 100 Riverview Center.  Moreover, it’s only the tip of the iceberg, since Choice reviews just 25 percent of the titles submitted by publishers.  Thus for every review published in Choice, there are three additional titles that were received, cataloged, and in due course examined by one or more Choice editors, but not selected for review.  Sometimes, what you don’t see is a big part of what you get.  And so it is with Choice, where one of the more important, but also more easily overlooked, aspects of our mission is to deselect, thus concentrating our efforts on those titles most likely to be of greatest interest and relevance to our audience.

All this is all very interesting, you say, but how many people really care?  Good question, and the evidence might suggest the answer is, “fewer and fewer.”  For some years now, even as the number of new books appearing in print has steadily increased, the number of book reviews has declined.  Book coverage in the major newspapers is rapidly approaching extinction, most major dailies having either eliminated or severely reduced their book review sections.  Not even The New York Times Book Review, which contains 20-25 percent fewer pages today than in the mid-1980s, has been immune.  In addition, two of the four largest review sources in the United States, Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, were recently put on the market, necessarily creating uncertainty about their future.

Still, Choice and our sister publication in Chicago, Booklist, persevere.  Today, nearly forty-five years and some 250,000 reviews since its founding, Choice continues to focus on the task at hand, reviewing more titles.—IER