Globe Books is Live At GlobeandMail.com
When I got home tonight I saw (via Twitter) that The Globe and Mail is laying off 10% of their work force. Apparently they posted news about the layoff on their website. When I went there I found a broken link. Accidentally I stumbled across the new Globe and Mail book section. My focus quickly shifted to that. Here is a laundry list of what is new with my nit-picky comments thrown in along the way. I will post my general impressions separately.
What’s New at GlobeBooks
- New Section. New Tab. The books section is truly on its own. It is no longer a sub of GlobeArts in the site navigation.
- Outbound Links. Hallelujah. Below the heading ‘Good Reads From Everywhere‘ they are actually linking to the UK’s Independent and the New Statesman. I would love to see Harpercollins link to Random House but that is a topic for another post.
- Industry News. Their news menu also includes outbound links. And James Adams and Peter Scowen will apparently be co-writing an industry news/bibliophile blog, although that isn’t live at time of writing.
- Pretty Pictures. Book cover images and still more outbound links (to publishers’ websites and author websites) can be found in the book review page template. Good compromise here to link to publishers although the only links I could find were to RandomHouse.ca — a major sponsor of the section’s launch. Hopefully all reviews will eventually get links. Praying those links aren’t paid. The Amazon ads are no where in sight.
- More Reviews. A new review every day.
More Lists. Some genre bestseller lists have been included. The top 10 Mystery and top 10 Children’s books will appear every week. Lists for two other genres will cycle on a weekly basis. At launch bestsellers in the Romance category and Biography category have been included. I had hopes that we would see expanded coverage for the genres the Globe had hereunto refused to cover — like manga and romance. I guess this is the best they’ve got.- BookNet. It is a dirty little secret of book journalism that bestseller lists are notional and have no basis in the empirical world. Given the opportunity, the Globe staff could have been clear on this — instead they have made things more opaque. The Fiction and Non-fiction lists will be editorialized using sales data from the BookNet sales tracking service plus anecdotal reports from phone calls to unnamed bookstores. Those stores are presumably located around the country but no word if those stores already contribute to the bigger BookNet number or what their methodology for this informal reporting is. Strangely the Globe is also factoring in numbers from “BookNet Canada’s national sales tracking service” as well. An average reader might wonder what the difference is between the sales data service and the national sales data service. There is no real difference except national sales data is reported store-by-store giving the Globe the ability to “juke the stats” in favour of one retailer or another. I am annoyed that isn’t clearer. If you say you are reporting BookNet numbers then report them. If you want to interpret the BookNet numbers then don’t make a claim on them at all.
- More Canada. Separate lists for the top10 Canadian Fiction titles and the top 10 Canadian non-fiction titles will be posted everyweek. Malcolm Gladwell has two of the top Canadian bestsellers at the moment. I am proud that Gladwell is from here but his inclusion on this list seems bogus. These lists should be compiled according to the acquiring publisher not by nationality of the author. I am reminded of another Malcolm. Would Malcolm Lowry make this list after living in Canada for 16 years? This kind of thing is a rat hole and gives publishers another chance to game the results.
More Blogs. Book section editor Martin Levin’s column has been reproduced as a blog. What do we get in blog format that we didn’t get in print? Bigger font, a longer bio of him, and comments. No internal linking. No linking at all actually. This week his first sentence is “here’s more of a bountiful batch of film books from the past six months”. He says here. I say where? Susan Perren’s Kidbooks column and Jack Kirchhoff’s paperbacks column are similarly reproduced faithfully from the print edition. Sadly It doesn’t look like their columns nor Levin’s blog will include images or book jackets anytime soon.- Author Interaction. The Ask the Author feature is going to be asynchronous thank goodness. Reader questions can be left as comments or emailed to webbooks@globeandmail.com.
- Cross-Posting From Other Sections: Harvey Schachter’s business book reviews are here. No sign of any book mentioned in the travel or lifetsyle sections. (They do have some bookshelf porn from the lifestyle section)
- More Slide Shows. There is a picture perfect feature showing a slide show of select pages from the inside of The Phaidon Atlas of 21st Century World Architecture. I assume other coffee table book showcases are to come.
- A Bookclub Profile. “Each month over the course of four Saturdays, we will introduce you to a new club, the book they are reading, their history and traditions, and their verdict about the book.”
- Audio podcasts form the IFOA are included. Some video is there too.
What’s Not at GlobeBooks
- The database of past reviews isn’t available yet. I hope it comes soon and is well indexed.
- I also hope navigation for related books/reviews appear with currennt reviews.
- Mystery book columnist Margaret Cannon isn’t mentioned anywhere
- The “Ask The Author” message board is missing. I can wait for that, but it will be a great addition.
- No sign of a super RSS feed for the entire section.
- I was also hoping to see mention of Peter Scowen’s Twitter activity. No luck.
- I was also hoping to see the bestseller list for 2008. With the hiatus that seems to have been overlooked
Overall the section is well done. It seems very much a product of their CMS. The addition of the bookcovers to the page template is nice. I look forward to seeing all the features rolled out, but I will post more on this later today.
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