My colleague Richard Wallis yesterday pointed me to a book review site www.revish.com which has been set up by Dan Champion as a serious book review, filtering out lite reviews by imposing a 250 minimum word count on each review. Intrigued, I had a look.
I spent a fair while browsing around the site, but I was more or less immediately struck by how solidly middle-brow the reviews were. As far as I can see, and I've had a good look, this seems to be quite consistent across reviews and reviewers. There were one or two heavyweights with reviews of novels such as Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (reviewer didn't like it; I loved it, but the review was solid) and Pynchon's Gravity's rainbow (reviewer loved it; I'm scared of it, having read Pynchon's The crying of lot 49, nearly losing my sanity in the process). So what I'm saying upfront is that this isn't about me thinking that I'm too good for www.revish.com, although in passing, it's a shame that the reviews aren't really much better than Amazon's.
The really interesting thing is from a marketing perspective. If you decide to target a particular market segment, in this case serious readers, to a Web 2.0 (therefore defined around participation) site, then how to control that effectively. I'm not sure whether the measure of imposing a minimum word count was effective in differentiating www.revish.com from Amazon et al. Some reviewers just fill the space with a summary of plot, rather than engage deeply and critically with the text. You may have a particular niche in mind for a Web 2.0 site, then, but the all-important participants may have different ideas, and ultimately they will determine the natureof the site, the creator of the site merely setting up a shell for their content. If the site really takes off, and the creator wants to advertise, then how to define the audience. This point is a general issue in marketing with the "new media" but I think that participative sites such as www.revish.com raise particular issues.
