BilmBlog500

The Kindle will soon be available in Best Buy. The Wall Street Journal is said to be starting up a book section for its Saturday weekend edition. The NY Times had actual science fiction novel reviews in the paper a Friday back and may do this on a regular basis. The column is from actual sf writer Jeff VanderMeer, and this is the seriousestish coverage of the field from the Times in years. The Kobo reader is rolling out a desktop computer app. Not doing the usual linkage because I am still on the road and these filtered in from different places.

So the news is announced today, not in any very exciting way so you can follow this link to Andy Wheeler's blog and other links from there (PW, NY Times etc. all have had little reports, Adweek was the first up maybe) that Kirkus Reviews is closing. Kirkus was one of the major pre-publication review sources in the publishing trade for many years, along with Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist. Since it had a tendency to be snarky, a good review always made people very happy, a starred review exceptionally so, and a bad review could be ignored because after all weren't they all that way. Even the Wikipedia page for Kirkus is terribly shallow, however, because nobody outside of the trade really cares. My recollection is that it had been family owned for many, many years. It was sold mostly to libraries and to publishers with very little circulation beyond. In a day when there were very few sources of broad coverage of books, it was a very important subscription ...