Editorial: Online-Only Reviews

“It's positively archaic,” one librarian who reviews for Library Journal said, referring to her colleagues who still pass around the print magazine when they could be getting reviews more quickly on the LJ web site, as she does. “It may take the next generation of librarians to move away from that.”

While it may not be “archaic,” those who just read the print LJ are missing a good thing. Not only are the reviews from the magazine on the web site and available to subscribers (just click on “register” at the top and have your magazine label handy), but also there are hundreds of Xpress Reviews that never saw a printed page. Moreover, the Xpress Reviews are free to everyone (www.libraryjournal.com/xpressreviews). [Readers of the print will find touts for online-only Xpress reviews throughout the Book Review.—Ed.]"

“I want readers to think, 'Check out these early reviews of hot authors,' and I want publicists chomping at the bit for coverage,” says McCormack. “After all, reading the reviews and ordering the books are important, but we should indulge librarians' book-lover side, too, and the readers' advisory nature of so many librarians' jobs.”

“Xpress Reviews are not a substitute for print reviews but rather an additional tool to help collection development librarians do their job better,” says fiction editor Wilda Williams. They've included Carl Hiaasen's Nature Girl, which she starred, and Adriana Trigiani's Home to Big Stone Gap (both, “Xpress Reviews—October 1,” posted on September 26 and 19, respectively). Of course, there's still room for late reviews, like an embargoed title we just got in that's so hot we had to sign a letter agreeing not to even mention the book's topic, let alone its title or author, until pub date. In addition, McCormack has moved Rachel Singer Gordon's monthly Computer Media column (www.libraryjournal.com/computermedia) to the web—a better fit—and has launched a quarterly Computer Media Prepub Alert from Gordon that signals books being published over the next three months." Look for RSS feeds of these and other online reviews soon. [Ed. Note: Our RSS feed of Computer Media Reviews and Computer Books PrePub is now available at http://www.libraryjournal.com/rss135.xml]

This past summer, LJ's Graphic Novels editor, Ann Kim, began putting extra reviews on the web, too, responding to their overwhelming popularity and the flood of titles she's been receiving and vastly increasing the number of titles LJ covers beyond the six-times-a-year print column. “The number one complaint we've heard from librarians,” says Kim, “is that there simply aren't enough reviews tailored to them that discuss issues such as appropriateness for YA collections or alert them to violence, sex, and so on that a particular reader might (or might not) be looking for.” Now, she's begun listing all the Xpress Reviews, not just Graphic Novels, weekly on the LJ book blog (www.libraryjournal.com/bookroom). If you're not familiar with the blog, In the Bookroom, there's a lot more to it than lists of free reviews: great takes—and writing—on books and the book world from LJ's Book Review editors, who want your input, too.

For those readers still addicted to the print, so are we. We have no desire to see the print magazine disappear, nor do we think it will any time soon. But as members of the library community, we're committed to delivering information in any format our readers want. Most of the snap polls we've taken indicate that the shift from print magazine to electronic access is going slowly, but there's no doubt that NextGen librarians, and especially their Millennial counterparts, are web-bound. “Slowly and surely over the next ten years, our audience will work mainly online,” says McCormack. “The Xpress Reviews and book blog are a way to begin. They're in the spirit of the Internet, free and freely accessible to anyone.”

fialkoff@reedbusiness.com