Founded in 1933, Kirkus churned out nearly 5,000 reviews a year. Although typically not seen by the general public — except in blurbs on books or excerpted on barnesandnoble.com — Kirkus reviews were often used by librarians and booksellers when deciding how to stock their shelves.
“None of us can read everything we suggest, so we lean fairly heavily on reviews and reviewers as basically our own advisers,” said David Wright, a fiction librarian and readers’ adviser for the Seattle Public Library.
Mr. Wright, who said he read reviews from Kirkus as well as its rivals Publishers Weekly, Booklist and Library Journal, said the reviewers for these publications “always really seemed like this gathering of friends and family that you could gather to get feedback on what really was in a book to see if a reader might like it.” He added, “Kirkus has always anchored that table.”
Booksellers gave mixed reviews about Kirkus’s influence. Some said they read it along with other journals, as well as talking with publishers’ sales representatives and reading advance galleys, when deciding what to buy. Others said they had long since stopped reading Kirkus.
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