Michael Orthofer: preference

Transcript context

…You don’t put them down like I do. Take New York Times or Amazon; I know there’s both. If you had to choose, which do you trust more? I don’t know if I can — I like Amazon because I can get a lot of information out of Amazon, the way the information is presented and, in part, with the reviews, depending on how widely it’s been reviewed. Part of the problem with the New York Times, of course, is that they can only review so few books. You have really so little information, or information about so few titles, whereas Amazon, you have at least some information about practically everything. In that sense, Goodreads is perhaps even more useful, especially with the foreign-language books. There will usually at least be people who have already reviewed the foreign-language edition. That’s helpful. One of the things I find remarkable about my site is I try to link to big media reviews. And an extraordinary number of the books which I cover basically go unreviewed in the major media, often even in Publishers Weekly, which I find kind of shocking. I do review obscure books, but it’s not that obscure. I’m fascinated — the Literary Hub is a very good website now, which collects a lot of literary information. They’ve also now started a review-aggregating part of the site called Book Marks. Basically what they do is when they find reviews in three of the publications they monitor — which are basically all American major publications and a few Internet sites — if they have three reviews for a book, then they’ll put that on Book Marks with the summaries and links to the reviews. So, sort of what I do. I find maybe one out of ten of the books I cover qualify for that. I find that shocking. We know you can read in a lot of different languages, and we know you read a lot of books. To close, what are three other things about yourself you might want to tell us, not to do with books?…

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