Book reviews!

That's right, reviews of plain old fashioned print on paper! Though maybe these books are or will be also available electronically.

The 3 books are:
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy, by Andrew Keen.
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams.
The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book), by Sherman Young.

The first set of reviews was written by Helen Razer in the Australian Literary Review on 5 September 2007. Before discussing the individual books, Helen Razer gives a warts and all outline of Web 2.0; how it's so easy for any and all of us to create and publish content and how this is used both for fun and for business. She also discusses Kevin Rudd's and John Howard's ventures into Web 2.0 - and she feels the former has handled it better than the latter.

Keen, author of the first book , does not like Web 2.0: he feels it will "poison the culture, encourage intellectual property theft, and completely undo the literary canon". Web 2.0, he says, "is a haven for dingbats". The reviewer feels this book is good, in patches only.

Tapscott and Williams posit enthusiastically, that the collaborative nature of wikis, especially Wikipedia (which does have its uses, the reviewer admits) will be great for business.

Young's book "attempts to situate Web 2.0 culture in the context of postmodern literacy" and, according to the reviewer, his attempts are welcome.

Not long after I'd read this article I discovered another review of Keen's book, this one written by Gideon Haigh, in the September 2007 issue of The Monthly. Haigh's review is titled, " Let a Thousand Weeds Bloom". Keen, it seems, is concerned about the impact of the great mass of user-generated content, much if it trivial, on the main stream media (MSM) and its standards (varying in degree) of quality thoughtful content. Haigh's final paragraph starts, " Keen has written a mediocre book whose rich subject nonetheless makes it worth your time."

The October 2007 issue of The Monthly has a brief review of Young's book, written by Chris Womersley, and he takes a different tack. Young is enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by the internet for book publishing. "Literature will live on in a different form, read on a device that is yet to be perfected." However, the reviewer is skeptical about Young's assertions that, technically, "texting on a mobile is writing" ("barely", says Womersley), and that "writing is, thanks to the ease of uploading digital content, inseparable from publishing".

Would I read these books? I guess I should read all, to better understand the various points of view - if only I had time. So many books, so little time ....