Here’s a round-up of posts on the current purpose of book blogging.

1. Elberry: “i don’t really understand why people read the blogs they do. i am often puzzled that anyone reads mine. Maybe they just look at the pictures.”
2. Mark Athitakis: “But in terms of them being inspirations and models, I largely looked at them as models for what not to do. Not because I disliked them, but because I figured that they had already claimed their particular patches of turf, forcing me to avoid their most common habits. (No knee-jerk whining about the contents of the New York Times Book Review, I told myself; no dutiful mentions of the death of a Syrian poet I’d never read and never heard of until the obit popped up in my RSS feed.)”
3. Michael Gilleland: “One could make the case that blogging, i.e. rushing into print, is bad for one’s style. Horace (Ars Poetica 388-9) recommended that writers postpone publication for nine years. Nevertheless, the discipline of writing something every day is salutary.”
4. Benjamin Stein: “Blogging has not only brought back the pleasure in writing. It liberated me as a writer.”
5. Frank Wilson: “In fact, book blogging seems to me to have restored to literary journalism a good deal of the passion and immediacy that had long been missing from it. It had become restricted to pretty much the same people writing pretty much the same thing about pretty much the same sort of books. Blogging has opened up the field immensely.”
6. Miriam Burstein: “. . . book bloggers aren’t necessarily tied to the rhythms of publishing and marketing: you can write about a book when it comes out; you can write about it several years later; you can write about it a couple of centuries later. (This is not to say that publishers don’t see book blogs as a marketing opportunity, however.)”
7. Terry Teachout: “To blog is to become a public figure. Ad hominem attacks go with the territory. If you can’t stand the flames, log off.”
8. Brad Bigelow: On how blogging differs from similiar material in newspapers or magazines “The simplest answer is that someone asks a reviewer to write about a book. Aside from a few well-known bloggers, none of the rest of us gets asked by anyone to write about any topic. The other main difference is time. Book reviews almost always have to come out just before or after a book first gets published. One can post about a book whenever one feels like it. A good thing, because some of us have missed the deadline by decades.”
9. Ron Slate: “Auden said a critic must differentiate between taste and judgment: I can know something is trash and still have a taste for it, and I can know something is well-made and not have a taste for it. Generally, attacks are perpetrated by nitwits who can’t tell the difference or who haven’t had a good breakfast.”
10. Nigel Beale: Quoting Jonathan Swift “A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that ‘great wits have short memories’: and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there.”
11. Levi Stahl: “. . . when I started blogging about books, I explained that I was starting a blog so that I would stop reading aloud at parties. I was only half joking”
12. James Marcus: “In my book, Amazonia, I actually anointed Emerson as the First American Online. I think he’s a better candidate than, say, Montaigne, since he was a small-canvas artist whose unit of thought was the sentence: that seems very bloggy to me.”
13. Patrick Kurp: “I’ve spent 30 years writing professionally, mostly for newspapers. This has instilled a fairly strict work ethic: meet deadlines, don’t wait for “inspiration,” write tight, humor editors but don’t encourage them . . . A blogger is a writer and a writer’s only obligation is to write well.”
14. D.G. Myers: “. . . I am encouraged by the wit, knowledge, and book sense on exhibition in a few well-tended parks of the literary blogscape. But I am also discouraged about the future of book blogging. I no longer believe, as I once did, that book blogs might revive a free-wheeling and raucous literary culture.”