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FIVE years ago, when Twitter was just another start-up and the iPad was a gleam in Steve Jobs's eye, the state of print book reviews in this country was undergoing a spectacular and noisy collapse. Newspapers that were failing financially killed off their stand-alone print book sections, or folded them into the entertainment, ideas, or culture sections. They fired staffbook editors and critics and cut freelance budgets. Hundreds of newspapers shut down altogether. Many magazines stopped covering books, and the literary quarterlies, for decades the champions of poetry and literary fiction published by independent presses, faced funding challenges as well.
Writers, readers, book reviewers, and publishing professionals feared the worst. Many equated the failure of the print-newspaper business model with the death of the book review. The heated debate of those dire moments put traditional print book reviewers on the hot seat; they were excoriated as "stodgy," "elitist," "out of touch," and "extinct." The National Book Critics Circle's Campaign to Save Book Reviewing, which was launched in April 2007 and included more than 125 blog posts written by Salman Rushdie, Richard Ford, Lee Smith, Rick Moody, George Saunders, and others concerned about the loss to the culture as book sections were being dismantled, captured the mood of the time. As novelist Richard Powers put it, "I think our crisis is instant evaluation versus expansive engagement, real time versus reflective time, commodity versus community, product versus process. Substituting a user's rating for a reader's rearrangement threatens to turn literature into a lawn ornament. What we need from reviewers in any medium are guides to how to live actively inside a story." (The campaign is archived on the National Book Critics Circle's blog Critical Mass at bookcritics.org/blog.)
Five years later, we remain a nation of passionate readers-even during a time when movies can be streamed on demand and countless distractions are built into every smartphone and tablet. Book-related discussions take up millions of characters on the Internet each week and connect readers in book groups in many communities. No matter the form-digital, electronic, print, or spoken word-a majority of the nation's readers recognize good writing and yearn for fresh voices from authors and critics.
The best of the feisty group of literary bloggers who began pushing the...