Kirkus Is Dead, Long Live Relentless Positivism
Kirkus Reviews, the publication that booksellers, librarians, and mainstream reviewers used to determine what's worth selling, buying, and reviewing again, is dead. In its obituary for the esteemed publication, the New York Observer points out that it wasn't so esteemed at the time of its closing. In fact, some in the publishing industry downright loathed Kirkus for its codgerish tone and predilection for bad reviews.
But other people were really unhappy to see the mag go under. Who they are and why they care, after the jump.
If you guessed other book reviewers, congratulations! You win absolutely nothing, because this was the obvious answer.
Here's Chip McGrath, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, in that Observer article:
"I think people relied on it a lot....It was an early warning system. ... At the very time that we're inundated with stuff, that's the moment when you also need some gatekeepers, tastemakers, guides. Not that any of these are foolproof, but without them, it's just sort of chaos. How do you get your head around it at all?"
Seeing as the people reading the New York Times Book Review probably weren't also reading trade pubs like Kirkus (or Editor & Publisher, which also closed), who was? People like McGrath. With Kirkus, critics reviewing books for a general audience knew what was worth reading (and thus reviewing in long purply prose), and what wasn't. The last bit of value that Kirkus held, then, was as a source of information and income for other professional book reviewers.
Let's meditate on the lunacy of this for a minute: Imagine that there was a magazine that reviewed telephones in 300 words, and its sole job was to tell other magazines that reviewed telephones which telephones were worth reviewing in 800 words.
The problem, as others in the Observer article point out, is that the Web is peopled with shit-talkers, and most of them do for free what Kirkus charged money for (bad reviews). That's not to say it wasn't helpful to have people like Mark Athitakis and Jonathan Taylor doing a cursory–and professional–sorting of the wheat and the chaff (the two have written about their respective experiences reviewing for Kirkus here and here), but that, as the closing of Kirkus demonstrates, nobody is willing to pay for the "service" of negative reviews if it's going to hurt their ability to sell books.
The publication did serve some good for readers. Even though online booksellers like Amazon have such a wide reach that there's probably a customer for every book, even the terrible ones, Kirkus was a check against the site's near-unregulated comment policy. There is simply no way to know why someone gives a book a low rating on Amazon; sometimes the customer reviews are thoughtful, sometimes they're trash, but there's no getting around the fact that ulterior motivations can wildly alter a product's rating, and there's no way to discern what those motives are. (Caveat: Those same motives sometimes appear in edited publications like WaPo's Book World, but when they do, there's often a clarification.)
What might the future hold?
Music sites that are winning online are winning because the people who run them are writing–for the most part–about music that they like and that their readers like (and yes, some of them are getting bashed by the dinos for their niche stations, but whatever the fuck ever). Brooklyn Vegan isn't obligated to review Some Orchestra's umpteenth Stravinsky arrangement, Arts Desk isn't obligated to review Toby Keith's new album. We can, and sometimes do, review stuff we don't like, but it's not the same type of gate-keeping that Kirkus did for books. In other words, no one is not reviewing an album because we said it wasn't worth the effort. In fact, I'd argue no one in the music-writing world gets paid for that service.
And let's face it: Unless there are high hopes for a book and it somehow fails, (or, in the case of Dan Brown, is so wildly popular that not to review it is to appear out of touch with what the country is reading), most outlets only review stuff that their reviewers like. Without the dinos patrolling the gates, we're going to see more of Eliot van Buskirk's "reviewer as DJ" principle at work, which means more positive reviews of fewer books, fewer negative reviews of anything.
2:57 pm
The audience for Kirkus wasn't just book-review outlets; lots of librarians relied on it as well. Or so I'm told. I'd be curious to hear from librarians who feel that Kirkus helped them make effective buying decisions, or that Amazon "shit-talkers" will now help them make those decisions now that Kirkus is gone.
One point of clarification: I linked to Jonathan Taylor's piece in my blog post yesterday, but it's not a reaction piece to Kirkus' closing; it ran in 1999.
3:01 pm
Mark: I don't think the Amazon shit-talkers (let's hope this term catches on!) will be helpful for choosing books. But the Observer article suggests that so many of Kirkus' reviews were negative that it wasn't all the helpful either.
I, too, am curious about the libraries. Might the ALA have something to say?
3:09 pm
One reason ASTs (to give "Amazon shit-talker" the authority of an acronym) aren't a sufficient replacement is because they don't get pre-publication access to books, though that doesn't stop many ASTs from writing reviews months before books are published. I neglected to mention Kirkus' other big audience---booksellers, who have a limited amount of real-estate in their brick-and-mortar stores and may also have appreciated Kirkus' guidance. Maybe; Kirkus didn't have a letters column, and I don't know if it would've been filled with gushing thank-you letters from booksellers and librarians if it did. Regardless, if Kirkus wasn't really helping those people do their jobs, ASTs won't either.
3:16 pm
I assume we're talking indie booksellers, no? Or did Borders and B&N, with their seemingly infinite amount of shelf space, also rely on Kirkus? Because if it was just the indies, well, it seems their fates are sealed with or without Kirkus.
Regardless, I think I may have failed to get across my contempt for ASTs. Many of them suck. A great many of them are morally despicable. And there's absolutely no check on their criticisms. But they're not going away, and I think they sometimes perform a worthwhile service, and it would be interesting to see if there's a way to make the service more useful to people who buy books for themselves, and more fair (or less detrimental) to authors.
5:57 pm
Kirkus didn't deserve its "gatekeeper" status any more than the ASTs. (Thanks for that, on behalf of the literary lexicon!) Reviewers were paid lowball money, remained comfortably anonymous, and were assigned books regardless of their knowledge of or interest in the genre. Assuming reviewers actually read the books. I've witnessed the trashing of books where the reviewers inadvertently revealed they had *at best* done a perfunctory skim. Where's the value in that?
Perhaps back in the day, Kirkus had integrity and value. That went out with the manual typewriter. May they rest in peace. I'm not the only one who's sick of snark, and it's not what the publishing industry needs right now. We need to build up instead of tear down. Big Mama's Rule of Book Blogging: "If you can't say something nice...you're just an asshole."
5:59 pm
PS ~ Please join me in lobbying Amazon for one simple rule that would vastly improve the AST dynamic: No one should be allowed to review a book without proof of purchase or library loan.
6:02 pm
Does anyone know when the last issue of Kirkus will be published, or is it officially defunct as of the announcement? Thanks.
8:40 pm
Big Mama's Rule of Book Blogging is a pointless, unhelpful rule to which no sensible person would adhere.
4:16 pm
Mark, silence is more deadly to a book than snark. If you really want to hurl yourself between the hapless reader and his/her purchase of a book you personally dislike, saying nothing is not only the high road, it's the more lethal poison.
Peace be with you. Literally.