Beatrice Beats WaPo Book World to Story

Remember back in February when I interviewed former Amazon colleague James Marcus about the customer review flap? Nearly two months later, the Washington Post finally gets around to the same idea and invites Marcus to write an article on the subject, drawing upon his experience in the site's editorial department:

Day after day, [customer reviews] kept coming, running the gamut from stylish elegance to stream-of-consciousness blather. At that point, they struck us professionals as something of a sideshow -- a virtual mosh pit where the customers could play by any rules they chose. Most of us came to enjoy the racket, with its noisy assertion of electronic populism.

Some of us, I would add, pretty much ignored that racket; the responsibility of writing and/or editing as many as 70-80 book reviews a month left little time to worry any outside yardsticks of opinion other than actual sales figures. (And, admittedly, the NYTBR--every Monday, we'd get the next week's issue and scramble to review whatever we hadn't already covered, because we knew those books would be browsed aplenty.) But that's an exceedingly minor quibble: all in all, it's a fine article--and despite the belated nature of its commentary, undoubtedly much more useful for James than his appearance here, since it not only will reach a larger audience but appears much closer to the publication date of his memoir, Amazonia, which I eagerly recommend despite the impression of me with which it will leave you.

(Discovered through The Millions, another book blog I just started reading.)