QUILLBLOG

Book review ethics 101

The National Book Critics Circle in the U.S. has polled its membership on some basic ethical questions; it’s the followup to a similar poll conducted 20 years ago. The full results can be seen here and a sort of executive summary here. Here are some highlights:

68.5 percent of book reviewers think anyone mentioned in a book’s acknowledgements should be barred from reviewing it.

64.9 percent think anyone who has written an unpaid blurb for a book should also be banned from writing a fuller review.

76.5 percent think it’s never ethical to review a book without reading the whole thing.

Perhaps it’s just Quillblog, but some of those percentages seem surprisingly low.

Even more alarming are a couple of other stats. Almost 20% of respondents think it is “acceptable for a reviewer not to say what she or he really thinks about a book” (question 26). Among the write-in comments are “it’s not nice to be too mean” and “First novels require some delicacy. So do dying authors. Try recusing yourself first, though.”

Which leads us to question 7: “Is it ethical for a reviewer to decline to review a book he has already accepted for review, on the ground that he didn’t like the book and doesn’t want to say negative things in print?” Astonishingly, this drew an even split, with 34.4% respondents answering yes and the same percentage answering no. (“Not sure” accounted for 9.3%, and 21.9% responded with written notes.)

Anyway, the entire survey is probably worth a look, as there’s clearly some room for debate on many of the questions. Interestingly, though, Quillblog couldn’t find a single question along the lines of, “Is it ethical to review a book by an author who’s written negatively about you in the past?” Perhaps that one is thought to be so clear-cut as not to be worth getting into.

(For the curious, Q&Q‘s own reviewer guidelines can be seen here.)