Independent Book Shop Starts Publishing Reviews

An independent bookshop has started publishing its own weekly in-house book review as a way to start filling a growing dearth of book-focused media coverage. 

Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, started posting book reviews written by its booksellers last month. 

“The decline of books coverage in the media, including a dramatic decline in regular old book reviews, has been well documented,” the shop wrote in its announcement of the review. “Readers had relatively few newspapers, journals, or media outlets to turn to learn about books. This lack of coverage hurts everyone in the books ecosystem: readers, writers, publishers, and, of course, bookstores.… Well, we’re not just going to complain about it!” 

Josh Cook, a co-owner of the shop, said he had the idea to start the review as a way for the shop to help fill the books journalism gap, and as a natural extension of the work it already does in its community.

“ Booksellers naturally do a little bit of the book review process anyway,” Cook said. “We read books, we assess them, we think about how to describe them to other people. We decide if they’re a good fit for different types of readers. So it kind of made sense to me that we could just push it a little bit more and start, in our own little way, filling this void specifically around book reviews.” 

So far, the review has covered four titles, three of which were published in the past few months: Sourland by Ariel Delgado Dixon, The Caretaker by Marcus Kleiwer, and Plastic, Prism, Void: Part 1 by Violet Allen, as well as Women by Chloe Caldwell, originally published in 2014. 

“ It’s totally bookseller-driven,” Cook said. “I’m not assigning any reviews, and each bookseller has their own process. I personally have long had a commitment to try to make sure that the books I highlight are the ones that people would not have heard of if I didn’t highlight them, so I tend to focus a lot on small presses, works in translation, and also marginalized communities, especially now that there’s so much attack on their stories.”

A team of about six booksellers currently plan to consistently write reviews, and they are paid for each publication. Cook says he hopes the operation will grow beyond Porter Square, too.

“I  haven’t seen any [other bookshops] doing full reviews. But I hope there will be someone,” Cook said. “I hope a lot of stores copy this. I hope it’s successful enough, there’s enough interest, that we start reseeding the local journalism a little bit.”