PW book reviewers: Who are they? And why are they paid so little by a conglomerate worth billions?
In The Reviewers Come in From the Cold, the New York Observer writes up some of the people reviewing books for Publishers Weekly. They’re a diverse bunch ranging from a prize-winning mystery writer to recent college grads. Laudably PW is now identifying reviewers by name rather than just speaking in an institutional voice.
Here’s hoping, however, that PW in the future can pay the reviewers better. Current rate—for all reviewers or just new ones?—is now a disgraceful $25 per review.
While some would blame editor Sara Nelson and others in PW management, my hunch is that the real culprits are much higher in the corporate hierarchy. PW and other Reed Business Information magazines are for sale, so why not screw the people at the bottom to optimize profits to show off to prospective buyers? Meanwhile I’m curious how much money, if any, this division of Reed-Elsevier is getting from Amazon for use of the reviewers’ words. Current Amazon market cap is $28B.
Reed itself is worth billions and reportedly is paying or will pay $4.3B for an information-related company called ChoicePoint. Among other things, ChoicePoint has helped Washington spy on American citizens. Interesting corporate priorities at Reed-Elsevier, eh? Big bucks for snoops, not book people.
Related: PW e-book blog deletion still unexplained: Info-biz ramifications in the Google library debate and elsewhere? Also see PW E-Book Report blog on hold. For latecomers, that was my PW blog, where I wrote uppity posts about eBabel, DRM and the like, in addition to tamer items on e-book folks.
July 15th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Not to be glib, but the solution is to start a competitive litmag and pay your writers more….