Christian Perring, Ph.D.
Dept of Philosophy
Dowling College
Oakdale NY 11769
perringc@dowling.edu

Book reviewing in philosophy and related disciplines has taken a fairly standard form in recent decades. Reviews generally appear at the end of academic journals. Occasionally journals publish longer review discussions of more important books, invite several or many reviewers to write their reactions to books along with a response by the book author (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Behavioral and Brain Sciences), devote whole issues to discussions of books (Inquiry). Book reviews are generally written at the same level of sophistication, and use as much jargon as the books under review. Most academic journals are sponsored by book publishers, often university presses.

I’m not sure how each journal selects reviewers but I do know that reviews can be important for the profession of philosophy: sometimes a person’s promotion or tenure can be affected by whether a book gets good reviews or not. It is less clear how sales are affected by book reviews: often book reviews only get published one, two or more years after the books’ publication, sometimes after the books have gone out of print. Furthermore, most philosophy books have small print runs: they sell to college libraries and to a few individual purchasers. College textbooks have a reputation for making their authors or editors considerably more money because they are used by large numbers of undergraduates. University presses are under pressure to turn a profit, which can make them more reluctant to publish books that will not sell. In recent years they have been publishing books with glossier covers and sexier pictures on the covers, and they have been reaching a wider market.

The advent of the Internet has the potential to affect both book publishing and book reviewing in philosophy. Many academic journals are now available on the web, along with their book reviews. Some journals are available for free, others are available to subscribers, and others are available to people who have access to databases such as JSTORS and Project Muse. Some are even available in Adobe Acrobat format, so that one can see the journal on a computer screen, and print it out, exactly as it appears in print. Furthermore, there are some e-Journals which do not appear in print. One of the most prominent examples is PSYCHE. These uses of the Internet may provide convenient access to book reviews, but they basically are no more than an extension of existing forms of journals and book reviewing, with no difference in the format of reviews nor their style.

Another advantage of the Internet is that it makes magazine and newspaper reviews available. These reviews of course cover a wide range of books, both fiction and non-fiction, but many of them include reviews of academically interesting and important books, and occasionally some relevant to philosophy. These include: The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the New York Times Sunday Book Review, the New York Times daily book reviews, New York magazine, the Washington Post Sunday Book Review section, the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Book Review section, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday book review, The Toronto Globe and Mail book review section, The Guardian, the Independent, the London Times, and many others. Some newspapers charge for access to their archives, and others make them available free of charge. (Maybe the publication most obviously missing from the Internet is the New Yorker.) The availability of these reviews mean that one is able to easily access a far wider range of reviews that one previously could.

There are other possibilities created by the Internet that involve different formats and styles for philosophy book reviews. I will first discuss my experience as an Internet book review editor, and I will then go on to discuss future possibilities for book reviewing on the Internet.

In 1997 I started writing book reviews for an Internet magazine, Perspectives, which was part of Mental Health Net (MHN), with the agreement of the co-founder and then webmaster of MHN, John Grohol. We called this book review section "Metapsychology." I wrote a few reviews quarterly on books focusing on ethical, social, historical, and philosophical issues in mental health. I simply sent in my reviews as documents attached to e-mails, and the webmaster formatted them for the web. After about a year, I started bringing in a few other reviewers. Around the end of 1998, we separated Metapsychology from Perspectives, and made it a separate section of Mental Health Net. I became editor of this new section, and through the use of Internet forms, I was able to add new reviews to Metapsychology without the assistance of the webmaster.

The goal of Metapsychology is to review books concerned with mental health. Reviews are meant to be accessible to a wide public, but they are meant to be thoughtful. My main motivation in putting the work into Metapsychology is to create a forum for review of books relevant to philosophy of psychiatry and mental health ethics. There is one journal for this field, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology, but this journal does not carry book reviews. There are other journals devoted to philosophy of psychology, medical ethics, and the social sciences, but none of these has any reliable focus on clinical psychology. An attraction of the Internet is that it can reach a large number of people: this is ideal when one’s aim is to educate and inform people about a newly growing area of research.

Over the last 18 months, Metapsychology has grown. It now includes over 300 book reviews, and about 20 new reviews are added each month. Metapsychology gets roughly 400-1000 hits per day, 200-300 visitors per day, 400-800 page views per day, and over 7000 visitor per month. It has many different sections, the largest being Philosophy, with nearly 60 books listed. Other sections include Psychoanalysis, Medications, Psychotherapy, Depression, Anxiety, Self-Help and Genetics.

Mental Health Net is a for-profit enterprise owned by CMHC Systems. It makes money through banner advertising, commissions from sales, and sales of some services. Metapsychology Online Review carries banner advertising on its front page, and all books listed are linked to the Internet bookstore Amazon.com. Sales of books earn a commission of 5% or 15%, and sales of other items at Amazon.com also makes 5% when the visit there came directly from Metapsychology. This does not bring in much money—certainly the amount it makes for the number of hours I put into this enterprise means it pays less than minimum wage, and that is not taking into account the costs of supplies, the computer and Internet connections, and the shipping costs. Obviously we don’t bring in enough money to pay reviewers.

Most publishers are willing to provide free review copies of new books, but they rarely send review copies unsolicited. As editor, I still have to find out what books have been released, and request review copies by e-mail, fax, or letter. I also have to find reviewers for these books, send books out to reviewers, provide guidelines for reviewers, set deadlines, send reminders, and once reviews are sent in, I need to copy-edit them and put them up on the web site. I also send out notices to various e-mail lists about reviews we have published, and occasionally solicit responses from book authors to Metapsychology’s reviews of their books. Most of this is similar to the work done by a book review editor for a print journal.

There are, however, some differences. One of the most important is speed. I can get a review up on the website on the same day that it is sent in, and it can be less than a month between the release of a book and our review of it. Occasionally we get advance copies of books, and then it is possible to publish a review at the same time as its publication. Another difference is flexibility of format. As part of the project of making philosophy accessible to a wider public, I can insert hyperlinks into reviews so that when a reviewer uses a technical term, a link on that term can lead the reader to a definition or explanation of the term elsewhere on the Internet. The length of reviews is very flexible, and can range from a paragraph to about 2500 words. Associated with Metapsychology is an e-mail list for list-members to discuss the book reviews.

I think the most interesting aspect of my experience is the ease with which it is possible to set up a book review site compared with how difficult it would be to set up a print equivalent. Furthermore, the reviews in Metapsychology are read by many people, and my hopes are that the readership will increase significantly in coming years.

A crucial question for such book review sites is whether they can be for-profit and still maintain objectivity, or whether it is necessary for academic journals and magazines to be not-for-profit in order to be credible. But the question is no sooner asked than easily answered. We need only think of the New York Review of Books or the New York Times Sunday Book Review section. These publications not only are commercial, but their associated websites also sell the books that they review, by linking to online bookstores. Indeed, for a publication to keep a readership, it must have a reputation for fairness at least amongst some substantial portion of the population.

Another question for Internet publications also connected with the pressures of the free market concerns the democratization or dumbing down of discussion. Publicly accessible web sites are accessible to a much wider public than academic journals, although they generally reach fewer people than major newspapers and magazines. If a website is intended to make money, then there is obvious pressure for it to reach as wide an audience as possible. On the one hand, one can see this as a force for good, eroding the elitism of the academy and also helping the discipline of philosophy by showing its strengths to more people and thus helping people see its importance. On the other, one may fear that such web sites will have less quality control, and that the opening up of philosophy will reduce the intellectual quality of discussion.

Obviously, in creating a web site, one can attempt to get the benefits of the web while avoiding the pitfalls. Different people will try to do this in different ways. For my own part, in editing Metapsychology, I make an effort to get good reviewers with the necessary expertise to comment on the books they review. Part of the reason I am motivated to pursue this enterprise is that I think that much writing in philosophy has major stylistic flaws, in being jargon laden and awkward. Thus I encourage reviewers to write clearly, explaining jargon when they use it.

But no matter how clearly our reviewers write, many of the books will not appeal to a wide audience. We currently sell very few philosophy books through our links to Amazon.com. The kinds of books that most visitors to our site read about are self-help, memoirs, popular psychology, and, interestingly, books on genetics and evolutionary psychology. It is a welcome feature of the Internet that as editor, I can find both what reviews get read most, and which books sell as a result of reviews. In the short term, we might be able to sell more books by writing very enthusiastic reviews, and it is quite easy to find other review sections of websites which are transparently trying to sell books. But in order to get repeat visitors, one needs to earn their trust in our reviewers’ judgments. So my policy as editor is to encourage reviewers to not be too enthusiastic about books, and always consider both strengths and weaknesses.

It would be possible as editor and as a person with a Ph.D. in philosophy to simply take the opinion that my real aim is to promote philosophy, and that the reviews of self-help and other popular books are merely a way of financially supporting the more serious side of Metapsychology. That, however, is not my opinion. Rather, it strikes me that there is a terrible lack of serious reviewing of most popular books, and that a site such as Metapsychology can serve a valuable function in encouraging more thoughtful discussions of such books. Strangely enough, while it is relatively easy to find reviewers of philosophy books (there are plenty of graduate students and even faculty who want to find a forum for their ideas and are also attracted by the incentive of a free book), it is enormously difficult to find sophisticated reviewers of self-help and other popular books such as memoirs. One long-term goal I have in my commitment to Metapsychology is to open up the possibility of such reviewing.

In some ways a website on books concerned with mental health has an advantage over many other areas from a commercial point of view, since self-help books generally sell much more than other books concerned with psychology or philosophy. But on the other hand philosophy of psychiatry is a very small and largely unrecognized area of current philosophy. The Internet can give us a wonderful way to increase awareness of this new subfield of philosophy, especially one that could potentially interest a large public.