  • Current Reads

      Life after Life Jill McCorkle
      This Is Your Captain Speaking Jon Methven
      The Starboard Sea Amber Dermont
      Snark David Denby
      Bring Up the Bodies Hilary Mantel
  • Popular Tags

  • Recent Reflections

  • Categories

  • Moleskine’s All-Time Favorites

  • Echoes

    To Kill a Mockingbir… on [35] To Kill A Mockingbird…
    Deanna Friel on [841] The Price of Salt (Carol…
    Minnie on [367] The Rouge of the North 怨…
    travellinpenguin on [841] The Price of Salt (Carol…
    travellinpenguin on Libreria Acqua Alta in Ve…
    Malissa Greenwood on Libreria Acqua Alta in Ve…
  • Reminiscences

  • Blog Stats

    • 1,028,624 hits
  • Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    Join 1,731 other followers

Future of Book Blogs?

I get another lead from The Boston Bibliophile on the future of (book) blogging, on the heels of BEA closing.

Six years ago I started book blogging. The blog was a self-indulgent project by which I share my thoughts on the books read. The project slowly span out of control as it dawned on me that there were actually people who read my thoughts and contributed such thoughtful comments. That means I am the obligation to response and to interact with my readers. Blogging has certainly changed my habit as a reader, who is now almost completely depending on recommendations from a group of readers/book bloggers who share my reading taste. In fact, book bloggers had influenced me as a reader long before I drank the coolaid to start my own blog. I mentioned before that the growth of book blogs—with their diversity, the genres they cover, and the honest opinions—more than compensates for the loss of book publicity that traditionally represented by printed media like newspapers and magazines. This is why. Book blogs completely change how I acquire new books because bloggers with whom I share almost identical reading taste, have become my primary source of the next good read. I want to know what they are reading and what their verdicts are for the books on my radar. Following their scoops is like chatting with friends about books—and indeed they have become friends. How wonderful indeed to have book recommendation with a personal touch?

The future of book blogging should be bright. I don’t know if the number of blogs would continue to rise exponentially because I have the feeling that blogging in general, has plateaued, as social media like Facebook and Twitter, which allow people to communicate briefly and instantaneously, have taken predominance over blogs. If there are readers out there who dig detailed and in-depth book reviews, book blogs, at least a blog like mine, will continue to thrive. This is a fact, for most the book blogs from which I draw my next-read ideas still exist. Social media come and go, but a blog devoted to specific subject matter shall continue to exist and exert its influence. Compared to status updates on Facebook, blogging seems too big and impersonal, because I only blog about books. If the subject of books is what readers dig, the time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is well-spent. Blogs should continue to thrive as long as readers appreciate prose. Like I said in the BEA introductory post, book reviews should be the main focus of any book blog and this will be the future of blogging—entries will be in longer prose form, but retaining that intimate touch of bloggers who share their passion about the books.

Advertisements

8 Responses

  1. I think there will always be readers passionate about reading, and because of this, there will always been a need for book blogging. Specific blogs come and go, but there also a bunch of them that are celebrating 5, 6 or 7 years, which is amazing to me. The key is not to burn out. I’m still trying to fine tune that one!

    • I totally agree. Some book blogs become the reliable resources of book ideas for me and I always return to them. I have, however, substantially scaled down my blogging time in order to focus on reading and reviewing.

  2. Actually, I think there will be a dip in the number of book blogs. It is a serious investment of time and intellectual resources to read, think and then write about books. Those less committed to it will eventually go silent, culling the herd so to speak. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing, just adding a thought to your astute observations.

    • I’ve noticed this as well. I’ve only been book blogging for a little over a year now, but I’ve seen a lot of blogs that I followed when I first started blogging disappear already. A lot of new bloggers seem to burn out around the six month mark.

      • Book blogging is really a commitment. When I started six years ago, I never thought I would still be posting now! I guess I have a lot of fun sharing my thoughts on books and connecting with like-minded readers. I don’t commit to a daily post because I know before long I would have burned out.

    • It’s almost a full-time job. LOL I don’t feel compelled to post everyday and I don’t like posting anything that digresses too much from the bookish subject matter. I feel that the reviews are what make the blog matter so I always focus on quality of the reviews. I notice a dip in the number of book blogs but have long lost track of the new ones.

  3. Blogging is a commitment of time, so no doubt many drop out and perhaps in the future not as many start up because there are so many other avenues of expression available. But I am not an instantaneous sort of person, so I will stay for the time being.
    One reason is I find I like to share things I find interesting, be they books or places or photos..and I have been exposed to so many books I would likely never have found otherwise.

    • The main focus of my blog is book review. Since I have always kept a reading journal, blogging is just a step forward to make the reviews available online. Like you, I like to spread the word about the books I like because I owe it to many readers/book bloggers for the wonderful recommendations.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this:
https://mattviews.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/future-of-book-blogs/
mattviews.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-05
185644
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:S5FDP3ODBL5DHQNLBYGYO3ACEOWRZJDH
<urn:uuid:526979c6-7cbd-4815-abcc-0ba85aa52e68>
2018-01-23T07:41:40Z
192.0.78.13
application/xhtml+xml
sha1:CDBPD6LX6EKPGZMW5VVKOFLPT5V6SISV
<urn:uuid:2939d606-d9c6-4e7e-88e4-bbd8ee8bd809>
https://mattviews.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/future-of-book-blogs/
length
response
<urn:uuid:57a9eeb3-f1b1-426a-8623-37d0b6bad34c>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-179-56-52.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-05
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for January 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf