The Daily Nous has a short piece about the decline in the number of book reviews at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR), with some comments about why this might be. Daily Nons will share news of open access book reviews, provided journals alert them.
I’ve noticed too that publishers are now reluctant to send physical copies of books to reviewers. Given that a copy of the book is the only recompense for the work of reviewing, I’ve refused to review a pdf or other e-format. I’ve also tried to avoid reviewing when the review would only be available to journal subscribers. But these seem to be losing battles.
(Update: I should clarify that I do sometimes review for subscriber-only outlets, but in those cases do try to make the review available easily by sharing a link along with contact details so people can ask me for the copy.)
Discover more from Progressive Geographies
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
We maintain a flow or reviews in the Journal of Political Ecology. I no longer need physical books. No space, a deal of carbon emissions associated, and I’ve always have trouble getting through them, in French or English. We argue in this article that the world has moved on.
I hit return too quickly, wrote a longer reply, but it was disallowed because th eone above was not approved. It is lost now.
Sorry you lost your longer reply. I have approved both comments now. Please at least post a link to the article you mention.
We may simply disagree on e-books, though I recognise their value in some respects. For me, I read a physical book differently, and would want a copy for a review.
The British Library situation recently has also shown some of the limits on e-books being the version of record – complete inaccessibility to recent legal deposit copies for months.
But I realise some people prefer e-books now.
The Area debate with Matt Gandy. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12916 We argue that OA books do not really hurt professional geographers and their ilk, and some print-on-demand copies will always be available anyway – although generally unaffordable to the Majority World, which could be reading academic work in books but often does not have access/cannot afford it. OA books overcome that. I have not seen a decent response to this issue from supporters of printed books, who are generally authors, or readers with money to purchase books [or can borrow from libraries], not access-challenged readers who struggle so hard to get any type of text. But maybe Matt will have an argument in his reply to us.
Off the cuff other remark: the ‘AAG Review of Books’ needs to be available OA. On this publication – in v11(4) a book review of Sara Ahmed received 1236 views. It is an OA review. The other non-OA reviews in the same issue were at or below 100 views. A change in access to that journal would make a difference. It should be a service to the community, if still run by AAG in future. And ‘Antipode’ needs to put its reviews back in the main journal, keeping them OA. Were they removed to improve impact scores, maybe?
In the JPE we have not separated the reviews from articles, even though they are never cited much. We do got offers to review books from authors and publishers in our 3 languages, and we send them out, or supply a PDF, getting 6-10 or so reviews back a year.
I think in answer to your question though – there is less incentive to review books than in the past. I was educated in the 1980s and the world has moved on from that time when one or two interesting texts were published in a subfield each year, with some prospect of them being bought by libraries and readers [now libraries mainly want the OA version, that’s it]. Also writing a book review is not a good use of time if you are time-poor and as a ECR, needing a longer cv. I suspect the half-life of a new book has got shorter anyway, because there are so many of them compared to the past. For that last point I am relying on stats from our own journal, where there has been a huge rise in PE books published in the last 8 years. It is getting hard to keep up. Good that this is happening, but not translating into lots more book reviews.
Perhaps new OA book mandates for books will improve book readership at least? And if we publish books with ethical and academic led publishers, [which I have not been able to do with my first] we will be striking a tiny blow for social justice publishing.