The business of book reviews

A few days ago a neighbour, knowing that I spend most of my time either watching cricket at home or sitting in traffic jams, sent me a journal called the Literary Review published from London. Time-pass, she said. It turned out to be exclusively devoted to book reviews.

A couple of years ago a kind friend had gifted me a subscription to the New York Review of Books (NYRB). Also, since 1977 my sister has been editing a similar journal called The Book Review right here in India. And for six months in 2002 I had won a free subscription to the London Review of Books.

Sufficient, then, I think, to make me expert enough to attempt an analysis of the world of reviews, journals devoted to them, and publishing in general, not to mention readers and their tastes. People have become members of the Planning Commission's consultative committees for less.

By the oddest of coincidences, the Literary Review, which was the first copy I had ever seen, contained an article by the editor about how long a review--or anything else for that matter--should be. "Keep it Short" was the title.

From time to time we have discussed size at this newspaper as well. The fellow who decides these things is himself a great aficionado of the NYRB, which publishes massive reviews--never less than 1,800 words, usually 4,000. However, here he insists on mere 600–700 words, which is also the length of the reviews in Economist and the Financial Times.

This, in fact, is very generous. Reviews in news magazines are of 150–200 words and the Times of India has stopped publishing reviews altogether--on the very sensible grounds that those who read reviews have no money to buy books, so why bother? In fairness, though, in the early 1990s it agreed to finance a book review journal called Biblio.

It changed its mind after the first issue but that is another matter.

Sadly, only two sorts of people read short reviews, even of 600 words--school children with short attention spans, and adults who want to show off. Such reviews are an insult both to the authors, who often deserve it and readers, who don't.

True, space in newspapers and news magazines is limited. Also, their core purpose is different. So we should be grateful that they carry any reviews at all.

But why should a journal that is devoted solely to reviews carry only short ones? Even if they aren't just 600–700 words, they hardly ever exceed 1,000–1,200 words.

The answer is not one that the book trade likes to talk about because it exposes it for the fraud it is. Basically, as a senior manager of Oxford University Press in India put it some years ago, "Who the hell cares about reviews? They don't sell books."

Publishers keep aside 100 as complimentary copies--such as six to the author, 25 for reviews, a few to Big People, and so on. These 100 come out in the printers' wash, who normally gives the publisher 10 per cent of the print-run free.

Now along comes the barmy army that wants to run book review journals. It sounds like a great and noble idea until the realisation dawns: you constantly need new books to run a book review journal. In the end, this means just one thing--you have to be nice to publishers, who, with the exception of Sage India, mostly don't care about reviews.

Being nice to publishers means having to review the books they (condescend to) send for review. There are hundreds of "publishers" in most countries and a journal can end up with 100 books every month for review. Most of these are the most awful tripe and should never have been published.

At an average of two pages per review, this means having to print a 200-page journal. Even the NYRB, the richest of them all, stops at 100-odd pages--and those are its bumper issues.

Hence the dilemma: if you don't review their books, after a while the publishers not only stop sending you books, they also put the word out that you are not "cooperative".

So to avoid the risk of not having enough books to review, most dedicated journals review as many books as they can--which means short reviews of many books, instead of long reviews of a few.

Nor do the publishers, except in the US, advertise much. In India they think a review is a substitute for an ad. In Britain, the Arts Council has to chip in with some funding. In short, there is very little support from the publishers.

The market for books, too, is tiny in comparison to the educated population. This makes book review journals even tinier, a veritable cottage industry with low fixed costs and variable costs being limited to low salaries, and paper and printing costs. If ever there was a business that survived on love and fresh air, this is it.

But granted that publishers will be greedy and book review magazines will be on shoe-string budgets, it is still worth asking why so few people want to read reviews. Given how many books there are--around 25,000 titles are published in English alone each year--and how much most of them cost, I would imagine that an extended review of the NYRB type is a perfectly good substitute for reading the book itself.

Yet, the market for journals based on English books is only around 100,000 globally, and that includes basically trade magazines like Publishers Weekly. Amazingly, India accounts for around 7 per cent of this market, with 5 per cent of it coming from Indian journals alone.

Here it is worth mentioning an experiment that Doordarshan tried back in the late 1980s, at the instance of The Book Review. It used to run a half hour programme devoted to discussing a book. I took part in one, along with the late Dharma Kumar and Surjit Bhalla. Could that experiment be revived, at least by the public broadcaster?

A third medium that is now available is the Internet. It should be possible for Indian publishers to finance a website meant just for reviews, but they won't.

Reviews have no commercial value and as a reader service, no one is interested. In any case, the Net is useful for certain sorts of things only and book reviews are perhaps not it.

Of course, it is possible that the reviews are so badly written that serious readers do not want to read them. There is also the near certainty that many reviewers write without reading the book fully.

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