LibraryThing just announced that they’ve teamed with publishers to provide advance copies of books in exchange for reviews. After so many publications cut back or cut book reviews, it’s nice to see that some publishers are making sure their books are reviewed and that those reviews are shared. This is also part of what we may see more of as companies and mental models move from print-oriented thinking to web-thinking. Book reviews are great, but it makes more sense from a distributor point of view to include them online where they can be slurped into other systems, shared, and distributed. Since book reviews imply literacy and access to books, the audience isn’t reduced by the switch to the online model. It makes sense, and hopefully LibraryThing and its reviewers will help foster more things that make sense by sharing those reviews with library catalogs and other public-commons systems for even greater effect.
2007-09-06