The Decline of Book Blogging?

Not long ago I discussed here why I thought it was the case that the independent blogger, an individual who is not famous and does not have the benefit of association with a big platform, leaving them with nothing to commend them but their thoughts and words, had a sharply decreasing chance of finding an appreciable audience. The web was getting more crowded, the audiovisual was taking increasing presence over the written word, the dynamics of search engines were favoring past success over newcomers, etc., etc.--and of course, the search engines were being "enshittified," favoring paying advertisers over everyone else.

Certainly this has seemed to me evident in the area of book reviews. Previously searching for reviews of a book took me to . . . actual reviews of that book. Now it takes me to book retailers. These retailers often make a place for customer reviews. But the hodgepodge of customer reviews were rarely a substitute for the reviews I used to see. (There are jewels among them that would do credit to any publication--but most are frankly slight, stupid and often irrelevant to anyone interested in a conventional book review, as with the many, many, many reviews that consist entirely of someone complaining about the physical condition of the particular copy of the book they received and saying nothing of the content. Yes, the physical condition of a retailer's books are a legitimate topic of discussion, but no, this is not what people are usually looking for when they use a search engine to look for reviews of a book.) Moreover, the search engine would take me to the retailers even when those retailers did not actually have a single review for the book I wanted to know more about in the allotted space.

Besides wasting my time this elevation of the retailers in the list of search hits also demoted all the places that actually had book reviews--which of course makes them much less likely to get clicks and, subject as they are to the vicious circle that characterizes search engine algorithm operation over time, shoved down the list of search hits yet again.

All of this is, of course, irksome for people who are interested in books. It is worse than that for those who want to share their thoughts on a book with others--or, like self-published authors lacking big budgets and access to the mainstream publicity channels, depend on book bloggers to give them a chance of coming to wider public attention. And it is just one small example of the destruction of the search engine as a tool for actually . . . searching, with all it means for the connectivity the Internet was supposed to provide its users, as the dreams of the cyber-utopians of old die that little bit much more.