Reference Reviews
Péter's Digital Reference Shelf
November 2006
Title: Publishers Weekly
Publisher: Reed Business Information
URL: http://reviews.publishersweekly.com/
Cost: Free
Tested: November 1-5, 2006
The Context
There are several open access book review collections from newspapers and journals which are excellent, but limited in scope. The most widely respected one — at least from the perspective of book, movie, music, theater and dance reviews — is the New York Times. The books section in its digital version has nearly 33,000 substantial reviews. There are more than 500 hits for the search in the full text for the word terrorism. Unfortunately, the search options are very modest in this content-wise remarkable source. The same is true for other periodicals, such as the Washington Post, or Slate.
There are several journals dedicated to reviews or having significant review collections. In addition to Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Kirkus Reviews are among the most widely used, and in academic libraries, CHOICE. None of the latter three are free.
Booklist used to offer more than 6,000 of its reviews free on the ALA Web site, but they were removed in the painfully unprofessional conversion of the entire ALA Web site, which I reported. Readers of Booklist lost the most as I explain in AW, Look What They've Done to the Booklist Reviews, Ma'. A collection of 100,000+ Booklist reviews was launched earlier this year for subscribers. Not even subscribers of the print edition get a discount from the steep subscription price: $300/year for individuals, and $1,500 for institutions. See details in my review for this column of Booklist Online at this temporary site.
A much larger collection of reviews is also available from Kirkus - at $450 (including both print and online version). Beyond the price, its advantage over Booklist is that often useful snippets of the reviews are available free of charge without even registering.
There are many good and excellent Internet bookstores, and directories of books, audio and video products, and most of them offer a medley of full-text reviews from review journals and newspapers, and other periodicals with substantial review sections. However, the search cannot be directly and/or easily restricted to those records that have reviews from the best review sources.
This is a problem when you need to select a few books on a subject of wide interest, such as terrorism. Amazon (which is far the best Web-born book shop, and has the richest book-directory), alone has 11,240 books on the subject of terrorism, almost half of them have the word in the title. This set can be further limited by additional criteria such as broad subject categories, publisher and format. However, there is no option to limit the search to books with reviews, let alone to books with reviews from the most respected book review journals or newspaper sections.
The Content
The tagline of Publishers’ Weekly (PW) proudly and rightly claims that it is “The International Voice for Book Publishing and Bookselling”. After all, it is the oldest journal dedicated to the book industry, although book reviews have been included in PW only since the 1940s. Of the many other sections related to the book industry, I cover only the book review collection in this review. PW is believed to be the first to publish bestseller lists regularly. I believe that some of the books may have become bestsellers more by virtue of the influence, clout or at least the reach of the reviews of PW, than by the merit of the books.
To its credit, reviews in PW don’t breathlessly dispense praise, and psychobabble about a new author just because he or she made it through the media circus and got to the bestseller list of some other journals or newspapers. For example, the informative review about “A Million Pieces”, the way too much adulated fiction masquerading as non-fiction, gives mixed review (to say the least), pointing out that “Frey proffers a book that is deeply flawed, too long, a trial of even the most naive reader's credulousness-yet its posturing hits a nerve”. Most of the million pieces of publicity releases, commentaries and talk show chit-chats in various media outlets, generated the frenzy, pumped up the book’s sale and the authors’ ego, as if the book were an extraordinary piece of art, and the former drug-dealer author worthy to be nominated for a Pulitzer prize, or sainthood for finding his true calling as an author.Size and composition
The reviews are just a part of the comprehensive entirely free PW web site. Reviews are available from 1987 only, but there are 132,000 of them [pw-all]. This is almost of the same size as the 10-15% smaller subscription-based Booklist review collection. Reviews for non-fiction books make up 70% of the collection, a bit more than 64% in Booklist. About 22% of the reviews are for children and young adult books, the rest is for adult audience. This is almost the same ratio as in Booklist. The numbers above and the hit counts below do not represent unique books. Often there are reviews for the various editions of the same work in paperback, hardcover, audio, large print, concise, or revised edition.
In spite of its somewhat smaller size Booklist has almost six times more reviews for audio books than PW which offers barely more than 1,100, and except for 10 items, PW has no video reviews – even if there is a filter for that medium. Another weak point of PW –from my biased perspective- is the relatively small number of reviews of reference books, which is just above 500. For comparison, Booklist has more than 6,000 reviews of reference sources.
Overall, biographies represent far the largest share in PW reviews, 10% of all the reviews are for biographies and autobiographies, followed by books on History (7.5%), Social Science (5%), Political Science (3.7%), Religion (3.6%), Business & Economics (2.7%), Poetry (2.5%), and Cooking (2.3%). This shows a very similar pattern of subject spread to that in Booklist, except for Technology, which is much better covered in Booklist than in PW.
Searches by words in the title (which provides a level field for comparison) clearly show the superiority of Booklist in the reference category. There are reviews for less than 100 encyclopedias and 60 dictionaries in PW, and nearly for 1,600 and 850, respectively in Booklist. There are 8 reviews for Oxford dictionaries in PW, and 61 in Booklist.
However, in all the other sample tests for words in the title and for authors, PW had more or many more reviews than Booklist. The following numbers refer to the reviews in PW vs Booklist: love (2,382 vs 1443), murder (1,136 vs 561), dance (342 vs 300), Iraq (103 vs 62), Islam (139 vs 115), war (2,623 vs 2,248), wartime (44 vs 34), warning (24 vs 12). For fairness, PW does automatic truncation excessively as I discuss in the software sections, and in cases when the search term is short and part of other words, the hit numbers should not be taken at face value.
Author searches also favored PW. The search for Pulitzer-winning Taylor Branch found 3 reviews in PW, none in (the online version of) Booklist. There were 7 reviews for Bill Maher’s works in PW, and only 3 in Booklist. These numbers include reviews for both print and audio books, and the letter should have favored Booklist theoretically (as it has almost six times as many reviews for audio books than PW).Record Content
I found the reviews that I sampled informative and accurate, on par with most of the reviews in Booklist. The reviews are short, usually around 200 words, which is also similar to the length of the Booklist reviews, and both of them shorter than the typical reviews in Kirkus Reviews.
The books are classified using the BISAC Subject Headings – a very practical solution. Both the main subject headings and the subdivisions appear in the excellent result matrix [matrix], which immediately gives some hint about the topical focus and –in case of children and young adult books – the targeted age group of the book. There are 578 books which are not classified, including some strange ones, like Rapunzel by the Grimm Brothers, while 55 other reviews for books by brothers have BISAC Headings and age group indicators, including half a dozen reviews for other editions of Rapunzel.
Omitting the ISBN from the result matrix would make it even more compact, and there would be no loss as the ISBN does not help in picking items from the results for viewing the review, while in the full records there is enough room for it. The only content disappointment I had was the lack of review for books of possibly wide interest, such as Bob Woodward’s State of Denial or Carmen bin Laden’s Inside the Kingdom.
The Software
PW's software does not offer as many options as Booklist. It is closer in functionality to Kirkus Reviews – with one big difference. PW does not offer an option to search the full text of the reviews. (Strangely, Kirkus does not have a title search option). PW offers a template for searching by Author, Title, Publisher, ISBN, and Review Date. Oddly, there is no date range search option. Luckily the day cell is not required for the date search as the template may suggest, but search is not permitted by year or year and month alone. This is not critical, but it would make much more sense to provide a date range option to allow searching for reviews published between, say, June-November, 2006.
It may seem to be a useful feature that the software automatically pluralizes the search word, so that terrorist will also retrieve terrorists, and terror would find terrorist, terrorists, terroristic, and terrorism, but it is not really pluralization and linguistic stemming (which would retrieve dancing for the search term dance, and PW does not), it is just picking up any word that starts with the character string represented by the search term. It can be confusing that the search word cat will fill the result list with titles that include catastrophe, catalog, catalyst and catholic.
This “feature” may be more confusing when the single cell search function is used which searches the title and the author, and the users may not have an idea why a particular book was retrieved for the search term cat. It is because books by authors whose names start with "Cat" are also retrieved.
Obviously, there is no need for truncation symbols, but neither is there an option for phrase searching, to tell apart Snow White from white snow. The space between search words triggers an AND operation, the only operation the software seems to know. In a title search this is not a significant problem, but phrase searching still would be useful
Searching by author last name is possible, so you don’t need to think about what Malamud’s first name is, all the six reviews of his books will be found. Of course, with a name like Roth which will retrieve not only Philippe, Helen, and Stephanie Roth, but also Jennifer Rothschild. This is where automatic truncation backfires, and the users can’t help it, because no exact search is possible to prevent this kind of possibly massive extension of the search term to totally unrelated words.
The search can be limited by media type (book, audio and video, although currently the last one is irrelevant) and audience group (which would be better with a check box for books for adults) to be more apparent, just like it is done with limiting the search to book which received star review to indicate that they are outstanding. This way, the 28 books with the word terror and its variants in the title which are considered the best by the reviewers, can be quickly found. Limiting is also possible by 50 broad BISAC subject headings. Actually, all these limit options work also as standalone search terms, making it easy to find, say, reviews of reference books.
Sorting is possible by date of review, title, author, editor, narrator and other contributors, publisher, media type (referred to as binding in the list of sort options), and ISBN.
The management of Publishers Weekly apparently recognized that there is not much to loose by making the review collection, and the entire journal open access. After all, Publishers Weekly is included in many of the largest and most widely subscribed databases of ProQuest, Thomson Gale and EBSCO at least for the past ten years in full text. Most of the PW reviews are also available in Amazon’s book records, and in a number of other fully or partially open access databases.
It was the right move by PW to change to the open access model (and probably making more money from click-through ads than from the earlier required subscription fees). I would not be surprised if ALA would come to the same conclusion about the Booklist Online service when it turns out to be a hard sell for the price.
— Péter Jacsó