There is an urgent news to purge the book review industry of motivated reviews. Most book reviews are being done on the request of author/publisher. It is a cancer that is spreading. Friends review books of friends and I would not be surprised to be told that spouses review each other's books! Such dishonesty has prevented us from becoming an intellectual giants that we can. the book review editors patronise their coterie as reviewers who in turn do favorable reviews of his/her friends' books. It is so disgusting. A simple survey of academic journals will prove this suspicion.
and this has gone on in India basically because we don't buy books after reading reviews. Much like film critics whose panning a film has never harmed the box office prospects of the films, in the academic world we purchase books by visiting book fairs, book distributors and the book sellers who visit colleges and universities. book reviews are read for amusement not for making up mind to buy them. As it is many book reviews are done years after the book had hit the market and hence such reviews are important only for academic interest. This is why journals and reviewers get away with murders.
But with the speed of online publishing all that can change. And today's academic freedom and transparency demands that too. So we would expect all our reviewers to declare that that they do not know the authors of the book under scrutiny and that they will not let their biases influence the reviews. We owe it to the nation and owe to to ourselves. Till then the book reviews will be treated with disdain they deserve
Please register and send message to me with books in mind and then we shall decide what to do.
mean while the first book review meeting is slated next week of a classic and then you will get to read the post about it too.
Till then happy reading!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment