Why Book Reviews?

As I’m wrapping up another book review to submit to a publisher, I’m left wondering: why do we still do this? Consider that traditional academic book reviews:

  1. are not valued in promotion and tenure
  2. are limited in volume by the constraints of traditional publishing, and so many books do not get reviewed (I won a book award for my first book, but I’ve still yet to see it reviewed in a journal)
  3. have a limited potential readership (as an example, I don’t have access to the journal that I am submitting this latest review to!)
  4. assume authoritative expert opinion, but really just reflect one reader’s partial opinion, and leave no room for a broader conversation (except in rare cases)

In all kinds of ways, then, the practice of academic book review is profoundly limited. So why do we bother? What might be the implications if we all decided to boycott the practice, and instead encouraged a culture of blogging our thoughts on new books?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Comments

  1. Dan Cohen says:
    1/30/2009 at 4:24 pm

    Agreed. Completely. Having a blog makes one realize that the book review system was always broken, reducing the potential review pool to a single (often slightly unwilling) person in each disciplinary population. Much better to have as many reviews as possible. This is definitely a case where more via the web is better than the unnecessary restrictions of print (especially since blog reviews are open access too).

  2. Ed Summers says:
    2/2/2009 at 11:05 am

    Good point Bruce. Some tech publishers (O’Reilly, APress, etc) have nice user group programs where review copies are sent to a group for review. The publisher likes to get notified when a review has a URL. This encourages people to put up reviews on the web instead of into trade mags.

    In an ideal world you could imagine publishers implementing tracback in their web catalogs so that they could automatically collect reviews from trackback enabled blogs. Kinda like what arXiv does.

  3. Bruce D'Arcus says:
    2/14/2009 at 1:19 pm

    @Ed: those tech publishers are way ahead of the academic publishers on a number of counts, including things like open access. I’m seriously thinking of trying to push in this sort of direction (open publication of and commenting on drafts, CC license, etc.) for my next book, but I don’t expect it to be easy.

    @Dan: exactly; academia is really about the conversation, and that conservation is so stilted by the limitations of traditional publishing.

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