The Book Review is Not Dead!

The proof? The London Review of Books are celebrating their 30th anniversary.

From the story in The Huffington Post...

For all the dark mutterings of the intelligentsia about the decline of serious literary journalism in the digital age, it seems the long form review essay is doing just fine. It's a genre that would have been entirely familiar to 19th century readers, but it did well in the 20th century and it looks like doing even better in the 21st. At the London Review of Books (about to celebrate 30 years as a fully independent publication, with a series of events in New York) we've found print circulation has risen steadily during the last decade and we have more readers now than any literary magazine in the UK has ever had. The digital landscape opening up before us can, in our most optimistic moods, look like a promised land, though there will certainly be some tricky areas to negotiate as we move into it.

The digital revolution is radically changing the conditions under which books and ideas reach readers. The explosive growth of the Internet has produced a bewildering multiplication of voices speaking about books. Everyone now has a platform from which to give a view, and in this cacophony we more than ever need to know where to go for opinions that we can trust and writing which will expand the vocabulary of our own critical conversations. In this situation, magazines like the London Review of Books have large and exciting opportunities.

It has become a cliché of the web that 'content is king.' To the extent that this is true, the leading book review magazines start with a big advantage over most other purveyors of literary opinion on the net: they have the writers and the editors to produce new work of the highest caliber and they have rich back archives of material that is as interesting today as it was when it was first written.