The Death and Life of the Book Review

The Nation has an in depth look at the state of book reviewing, what with newspapers going out of business, e-book sales on the rise and that thing called the internet becoming pretty popular.

From the piece...

Wading through the year-end newspaper and magazine digests of politics and culture usually makes for dreary reading, and last year was no exception. Some writers struggled to wring a drop of good news from the decade. Others strode to the bar and leveled indictments. Either way it was a bad patch, an impossible task. Glossing ten years of history in snippets of 300 or 500 words, the writers performed an exercise bound to turn any observation about a low, dishonest decade into the perfect expression of it.

Seeking some solace I picked up a book, and in a matter of minutes I read the following passage:

Now that anyone is free to print whatever they wish, they often disregard that which is best and instead write, merely for the sake of entertainment, what would best be forgotten, or, better still be erased from all books.

The sense of impoverishment before an overabundance of information; of helplessness before the need to spot relevant material in a slurry of ephemera; of vertigo provoked by the realization that "the present" is becoming overwhelmingly, annoyingly accessible—many of us, I'd wager, have had these reactions after reading those year-end digests or spending just a modicum of time online. Now anyone is free to print whatever they wish. This could be someone kvetching about blogs, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube or Twitter, and in not 500 words or 300 but nine. Except it wasn't. The jeremiad was the handiwork of Niccolò Perotti, a learned Italian classicist, writing to his friend Francesco Guarnerio in 1471, less than twenty years after the invention of the printing press.

This anecdote does not suggest that past is prologue but rather underscores the importance of thinking historically, of taking a long view when trying to understand changes in deeply engrained patterns in literary culture.