To continue of the theme of The Washington Post closing Book World, here are some thoughts about newspapers and bloggers from author Joshua Henkin and Becca Rowan, creator of the Bookstack blog. Their comments are from a guest post I wrote for the Poe's Deadly Daughters blog last year. But they bear repeating in light of the Post's announcement:

Henkin, who wrote Matrimony, may be one of the authors most attuned to -- and supportive of -- bloggers. In an email exchange, he wrote: "The rise of book blogs is a good thing, it seems to me, but the concomitant decline of book sections in newspapers certainly isn't. It gets harder and harder for new writers to be discovered when the page space for book reviews keeps shrinking. ... So for a certain kind of book of literary fiction, book reviews are indispensable, and to the extent that book review sections are, in fact, being dispensed with, it's a loss for literary culture."

Blogger Rowan said in an e-mail, "if the trend keeps up at this rate, I can see blogging supplanting the role of newspaper reviews, with the exception perhaps of the 'gold standard' reviewers like the Times and the Guardian. ... And though I grew up as a huge newspaper junkie, I rarely read the print versions of papers or book review pages." (She does profess to like Read Street, for which I'm grateful.)