{"id":181,"date":"2007-05-09T20:49:07","date_gmt":"2007-05-10T04:49:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/09\/how-many-book-reviews-do-we-need\/"},"modified":"2007-05-25T07:21:38","modified_gmt":"2007-05-25T15:21:38","slug":"how-many-book-reviews-do-we-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/publishing\/how-many-book-reviews-do-we-need\/","title":{"rendered":"How many book reviews do we need?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.marginalrevolution.com\/\" title=\"marginal revolution\" target=\"_blank\">Marginal Revolution<\/a> has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2007\/05\/whats_the_optim.html\" title=\"book reviews\" target=\"_blank\">an interesting discussion of the role of newspaper book reviews<\/a>. Several people say they just want &#8220;the bottom line &#8212; buy it, read it, skip it, or burn it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Why would you want that? Why would you want to abdicate your own judgment to someone else&#8217;s? (&#8220;Oh, the book reviewer said I should read this one, guess I&#8217;d better buy it. But that one I&#8217;m supposed to skip, even though it sounds interesting.&#8221;)<\/p>\n<p>All I care about is getting some idea what the book is like. I&#8217;ve known a lot of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/reviewing.htm\">reviewers<\/a>, and there are very few whose opinions I have a compelling need to know.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>\nKathleen Parker: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.orlandosentinel.com\/news\/opinion\/columnists\/orl-parker2507apr25,0,3784142.column\" title=\"kathleen parker\" target=\"_blank\">America&#8217;s Death March to Illiteracy<\/a><em><br \/>\nNew York Times:<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2007\/05\/02\/books\/02revi.html?ex=1335758400&#038;en=a201fb6091d183f9&#038;ei=5090&#038;partner=rssuserland&#038;emc=rss\" title=\"new york times\" target=\"_blank\">Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marginal Revolution has an interesting discussion of the role of newspaper book reviews. Several people say they just want &#8220;the bottom line &#8212; buy it, read it, skip&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[14,42],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}