I
suspect this interview with TLS editor and Man Booker Prize judge
Peter Stothard will stir up a fair old storm online. I think he's got a fair
point with regards to the decline of literary criticism in newspapers and
journals, but I'm not really sure what the blogosphere has to do with that. I
suspect word of mouth has always been as big a driver of sales as reviews, and
surely the internet is just that on a large scale?
His
claim that "People will be encouraged to buy and read books that are no
good, the good will be overwhelmed, and we'll be worse off," is rather
strange. Even if you accept that the professional critics generally get things
right (and they clearly don't, as they often disagree violently with each
other), the book-buying public don't necessarily pay that much attention to
them, and never have. I don't remember critics encouraging people to buy
Jeffrey Archer's novels, for example, but his sales never seemed to suffer.
