Book reviews in online newspapers - an evaluation of an area of web publishing

The Age’s Book Reviews

The homepage of The Age’s Book Reviews has a clean design where advertisements don’t impede the content. The non-serif font gives an approachable feel and the simple four-colour scheme (red, black, blue and grey) makes skimming and scanning easy. Information is chunked into three columns, providing the reader with the paratext that articles are on the left, book reviews are in the centre and advertising material is on the right.

The book reviews are given half as much space as the articles and less space than the advertising column. But eight out of nine of the reviews have images which draw the reader’s eye—much more than the article section. Each image carries through to the review page in a larger format with a caption but sometimes these captions are not explicit—in ‘Affection’, a quote with no citation is used and who the photograph is of is not explained.

Headlines, dictated by the book’s title, are typically five words and standfirsts are less than 20 words (there are no kickers). What is shown on the homepage is taken directly from the review so content repeats as you move into the review page. Since the headlines use the books’ titles, they make excellent use of keywords, although the standfirsts are not always as successful. Affection’s standfirst is misleading, describing the memoir as arrogant but having an opposite opinion in the review. It also provides no information about the author or content of the book. On the other hand, ‘The True Story of Butterfish’ has a much better standfirst—the author is named and a synopsis of the book is given so the keywords are pinpointed.

Each review is about 1000 words and usually two ‘pages’ long with the option of viewing it as one page. The body text of the reviews does not make use of links, external or otherwise, despite there being ample opportunity to do so—author websites, publishers, other book reviews and so on. In fact, out of nine reviews, there is only one link (to the NGV). There are plenty of cross-promotional links around the review however, mainly to other sections of The Age or Fairfax Media companies (RSVP, Essential Baby and Stayz). Other external links are provided through advertising.

Unfortunately, advertising, often dynamic, is always slapped in the middle of a review which is distracting particularly because the review’s content has to wrap around it. A more elegant solution would be to move the advertisement to the far left and fill the space with the features currently on the right: Find a Book (list of links to the latest reviews) and Today’s Entertainment Coverage (list of links to articles from the Entertainment section of The Age). Ideally, Today’s Entertainment Coverage needs to be replaced with features about books (as does the links to Today’s Top 10 Articles also on the right).

In terms of reader interactivity, The Age has a top-down approach, establishing what is important with virtually no input from readers. The reader is limited to emailing reviews, adding reviews to facebook and del.icio.us, Digging the story and getting a general RSS feed to The Age’s Entertainment section. Because commenting is not available—even links to the most popular book articles and reviews is not available—there is no real reader interactivity. Asking readers for a response and actively seeking out their opinions would allow readers to engage with the website at a deeper level. It would also allow an objectivity that is currently not there.

Overall, The Age’s book section does not offer much in content or variety and reviews are not updated regularly (the latest review is from 16 August, over two weeks ago). Populating the website with content from The Age’s Saturday A2 book section would be a resourceful solution, and adding multimedia and interactive content (blogs, podcasts and videos) would give the reader options and variety. There are also numerous inconsistencies in editorial style (standfirst formatting and location of byline/publication details) and mistakes (incorrect copyright year throughout the pages). These aspects erode the website’s accuracy, authority, credibility, currency, coverage and value.

The New York Times’ Books

The homepage of The New York Times' Books is full of features. Along with reviews, articles, news and essays, a selection of these are: ‘Sunday Book Review’ (main book reviews), ‘The Future of Reading’ (article series on reading and education), ‘Best Sellers’ (best-seller lists), ‘Book Review Podcast’ (one a week since April 2006), ‘Paper Cuts’ (blog about books), ‘Time’s Critics’ (more book reviews) and ‘Browsing Books’ (pages dedicated to specific genres). The breadth and volume of coverage is complimented by imagery, podcasts, slide shows and commenting facilities.

The homepage would be overwhelming if not for the ordered structure and clear delineation between elements. Kickers also help—‘The Future of Reading’, ‘Essay’ and ‘TBR’ (Times Book Review) are used to label what a segment’s niche is. Content is grouped into sections that fall into one of three columns and the colour scheme is simple—black, blue and grey. Although a non-serif font for the body text may work better with this amount of information.

The Sunday Book Review is given the most prominent position on the left-hand side, accentuated by the lead review’s headline having a larger font size and image. Headlines (maximum of eight words) are the titles of books under review—a technique that pins down keywords. The reviews’ standfirsts (typically around 25 words) always name the author and give a brief synopsis of the story, soundly incorporating keywords as they do so. Also included in the teaser information is the author of the book and a byline—a detailed touch—and links to excerpts of the books, blogs and multimedia content.

Clicking on a review takes you to the review page but with a different headline. For example, ‘Strength in What Remains’ takes you to ‘Against the Odds’, the review of the book (1650 words). The standfirst synopsis of the book does not appear in the article itself. Instead, the review leads with an appropriate feature or opinion style. The photo shown on the homepage is carried through and enlarged on the review page with a magnification option and relevant caption. Advertisements are not intrusive and the reader can opt for a one-page view if preferred.

Against the Odds has numerous links in the body text (as do all the reviews) but nothing external to the archives of The New York Times. The insularity of the links is not off-putting as the articles are well written, professional and come from differing viewpoints. However, external links would give greater objectivity to the prose. Nevertheless, the review cleverly makes the most of the newspaper’s database, cross-linking to anything relevant to the book being discussed. This mastery of cross-referencing provides context and extends to a ‘Related’ selection of links on the left-hand side of the review, and a ‘Past Coverage’ and ‘Related Searches’ selection of links at the bottom of the page.

Links included under the Related section are to the author’s website (the only truly external link), an excerpt of the book, a blog post related to the book and a 15-minute podcast of a review of the book by New York radio station WQXR (also owned by The New York Times Company). Although comments are not enabled for reviews (they sometimes are for the articles), there is scope for interaction with a range of share tools (Recommend, Linkedin, Mixx, Permalink, Digg, Myspace, Facebook and Yahoo! Buzz). Annoyingly, the ‘Most Popular – Books’ section shown on the right-hand side of the homepage changes to a general ‘Most Popular’ when on the review page. However, the fact that readers are able to email and blog about book reviews, and that this popularity is recorded is constructive—it’s highly likely that it is used by The New York Times to inform the future content of the website.

Overall, The New York Times is consistent in style and approach, and regularly updated. It makes the most of the resources it has and provides readers with valuable, diverse and intelligent reviews with various interactive and multi-formatted options. The online content also makes the most of its print-media resources, adapting reviews, features and articles from the print newspaper—often exploiting its immediacy by appearing before the print version.

The Guardian’s Books

The Guardian’s Books homepage is visually stimulating—it makes use of large imagery and colours to provide a slick and polished design. The formatting is in a clear readable style that clearly sections all components within features. The choice of pink to edge and highlight also gives the site a contemporary and sophisticated feel. As does the treatment of blogs on the right-hand side which are made to look like book covers—hovering over these ‘blog books’ gives the reader a ten-word summary of the content, a quick and easy alternative to clicking to find out more.

The homepage offers a range of choices to the reader: articles, book reviews, blogs, ‘More from our blogs’, ‘Latest multimedia’ (podcasts and audio), ‘Quizzes’, ‘Book club’, ‘Buy books’, ‘This week’s reviews and features’, and ‘Most viewed in Books’. Many of these features are reader interactive which the Guardian actively encourages as commenting is a staple of the articles and blogs. In fact the sheer number of blogs available—17 options are presented on the homepage—show that interactivity is a priority. Consequently, the homepage feels like a reader-generated website, where there is a great deal of input from readers and content is shaped by their contribution. Bloggers also take the time to respond to comments providing more than a reader-to-reader interaction.

Book-review headlines are determined by the title and author name of the book, and are ten words at most. The standfirsts are summaries of the book being reviewed and usually around 20 words. The names of the book author and the review author are always in the standfirsts, and the overall writing style of the headlines and standfirsts captures all the pertinent keywords. Pictures of the book’s covers, rather than images of the author, are provided which is more relevant to the subject matter of the review than author photographs.

Clicking on the review ‘Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby’ takes the reader through to the same headline and standfirst, and the book cover image is repeated and enlarged with some publication details as the caption. There is also a discreet option to buy the book at the Guardian bookshop, a subtle cross-promotion. A different standfirst and headline for the review page would be beneficial here but on the whole the review page is crisp and clean, taking design elements from the homepage, and relegating distracting advertising to the side.

In the review’s body text (800 words), there is only one link to the Guardian’s coverage of the author. This is surprising as there is ample room for internal and external links (American singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, Julie Myerson, Anne Tyler, The Lost Child and so on). However, there are author-related links on the right-hand side and plenty of book links surrounding the review. Refreshingly, most links surrounding the review are book related excluding a GuardianJobs section in the bottom-right-hand corner. The body-text links need to be a slightly bluer in colour as they are difficult to see.

There are no comment options for reviews but Buzz up! Digg it, Clip it, Send to a friend and Share are available. Audio is very common on the Guardian Books homepage but none is available on this review page—a track from Crowe could have been used.

Overall, the Guardian is a fun and funky site with a strong focus on reader input—I particularly like the Not the Booker awards voted on by readers. The reviews are informed and balanced and surrounded by like-minded content.

Google forced to reveal blogger’s identity

In a precedential move, a US court has ordered that Google reveal the identity of a 'slanderous' blogger.

The anonymous 'Skanks in NYC' blog, published a year ago on blogger.com, made malicious statements about model Liskula Cohen. Below is a sample:

“[she's] a psychotic, lying, whoring, still going to clubs at her age, skank.”

The blog has been removed but apparently there were five nasty and vindictive posts dedicated entirely to debasing Cohen's appearance, hygiene and sexual conduct.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that Cohen was compelled to sue Google so that the person responsible for the blogs could be revealed.

In court, the blogger's lawyer argued that the blogs "serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting". But the Manhattan judge disagreed and ruled that the blogs were more than "trash talk".

Now that the US supreme court has ruled that Cohen is entitled to the information from Google, she is deliberating about whether to sue the blogger.

Google has assured the public that they:

“sympathise with anyone who may be the victim of cyber bullying ... take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order."

It's difficult to comment on the ruling without having seen the photo content and exactly what was written in the blogs but I do think that cyber-defamation laws eventually need to be introduced. I believe we all have a responsibility about the manner in which we contribute to the Internet and I don't think that extending our real-life laws to cyberland will curb our freedom of speech. I've seen many posts that completely disagree with me but I think defamation on the Internet needs to have legal ramifications. Opinion, of course, is different to slander. What do you think?

PIRs. My thoughts and response to Allan Fels

Thanks for the additional links to recent articles from The Age, Reneespeak. I'm glad you listed Allan Fels' Reading through the Lines, I’ve got a general response to his article…

The PC does not say that repealing PIRs will lead to cheaper books – I don't know how Fels can assert that it does when this is not in their report. He’s made his own theoretical leap (and even if there are savings to booksellers ensuing from an open market there’s no assurance that these will be passed on to the consumer). Perhaps the fact that this is inconclusive is one of the reasons why the federal government has asked for a working group to be formed to respond to the PC report prior to any decisions about PIRs being made. (This is not the sole reason: scrapping PIRs will have large and negative consequences for employment in the industry – 10% shrinkage the PC says; the suggestion from the PC of subsidies instead of PIR protection needs to be developed and explored in greater detail if it is to have any credence; and if PIRs are removed, how to curb the extent of the negative effect on cultural externalities – as the PC terms it – needs to addressed.)

Fels also asserts that the PC report finds books more expensive in Australia than in comparable foreign markets and that this is due to Australian PIRs. Again, another leap, the PC does not state this. Instead, the report consistently mentions that it doesn’t have accurate, current and relevant data to make price comparisons and that comparisons are largely dependent on (amongst other factors) the strength of the Aussie dollar (which in most of 2008-9 made Aussie books on average comparably cheaper). Even the price comparisons that the report does use do not overwhelmingly show that books in Australia are more expensive than the same editions in overseas markets. Many publishers also provided the PC with their own analyses which points to the same result. But perhaps this is off track. After all, when did anyone say that Aussie books were always cheaper (Fel’s second sentence)? Leaving this aside, what the PC report did conclude was that PIRs exert an ‘upward pressure’ on book pricing (NOTE: the PC reached this conclusion through economic theory rather than actual evidence). But this conclusion is different to Fels’ assertion that Australian books are more expensive than in comparable foreign markets and that this is all because of Australian PIRs.

So what’s the problem? If Aussie books can compete in pricing with their foreign counterparts why can’t PIRs be removed? Well, I have a limited understanding of this whole issue (and am readily confused) but I think the crux is this: if PIRs are removed Australia could be inundated with a flood of remaindered stock from foreign markets – stock that foreign markets can’t sell which will be picked up cheaply by book wholesalers and retail chains, and dumped in Australian stores. This remaindered stock, injected into the Aussie market, will mean that there are ‘cheap books’. These dumped books could then potentially compete with Australian products. There is a distinction between these types of books and the price-compared books mentioned earlier – these books will be unsellable product from other markets, their value in their own domestic markets has crashed, so they can now compete with Aussie books at an unbeatable level. Cheaper, yes, but…

From what I can see, most of the content of this cheap supply of books will be crud and there will be no Australian equivalent (same book, different version) so really there is no problem (apart from this crud being read by Aussies potentially at the opportunity cost of other, better Aussie books). But perhaps as Bernard Keane (Crikey) points out we should have faith in the Aussie consumer and in what they will and will not purchase/read. There will be a problem if the dumped books compete with Australian (unremaindered) versions of the dumped books – if there is the same book available from a foreign publisher and it is a lot cheaper, the consumer may not necessarily know what they are missing out on – price will be the only hook.

A primary export designer I work with is often asked to change content of our primary educational textbooks to meet the needs of overseas markets. Over the last two years, these are some of the content modifications she's made:

1) for a book on where milk comes from: remove the udders on a cow as it was too sexually explicit
2) for a book about Ancient Egypt: add tops to the men so nipples and chest are not seen (the men now have toga tops which is historically inaccurate)
3) for a book on building dams: remove the word ‘dam’ from title and in-text citations, ‘dam’ is too close to ‘damn’.

These examples are humorous but sobering. Can you imagine this content reentering our shores and being purchased instead of the original Australian version? This goes beyond ‘mom’, ‘color’, ‘gridiron’ and ‘faucet’…

So, back to Fels. The PC report did not say that removing PIRs will make books in Australia cheaper nor did it say that our price comparisons with like books in foreign markets show that Aussie books are more expensive because of PIRs. Yes, there is the potential that removing PIRs will enable cheap books to be available to Australians but most of these will be the castoff crud not wanted by other territories (why should we?) or, much more dangerously, they will compete in price but not quality of their Australian equivalents. I doubt this dumping will make Australian books cheaper on the whole.

Again, I don’t know extensive amounts about this issue and I do get befuddled so correct me if I’m missing something or oversimplifying. Also, apologies for length – I wasn't going to blog about this issue further as it isn't strictly class content... but I got swept along when writing about it.