Bookmarks Magazine

It's not immediately obvious what the editors of Bookmarks were thinking when they decided to launch their new magazine, which debuts this month. After all, while the rest of the country may not be in a recession, the media's recent swoon has been a curtain call for the Great Depression. Bookmarks is starting at the tail end of a magazine die-off of epidemic proportions, a 10-month period that shuttered, among others, Brill's Content, Mademoiselle and Yahoo! Internet Life. Ad revenue is down almost 7 percent from 2001, and no one has a good idea of when things will pick up again.

On the other hand, the magazine's editors, Allison Nelson and Jon Phillips, aren't alone. Like the tiny mammals that emerged amid swirling, dinosaur-killing dust clouds, in recent months a slew of well-niched titles have emerged to fill rack space once occupied by The Industry Standard and its ilk. There's Heeb, a DIY-inflected quarterly that calls itself "the new Jew review." There's Seed, the self-proclaimed "Science/Culture" magazine, which recently moved its headquarters from Montreal to New York. Finally, there's The Week, which takes in the news and spits it back in subway-ride-sized chunks. These three very different magazines all have one thing in common: identifying a definite market. Bookmarks fits right into the current reigning wisdom in the magazine industry.

Billed as "your guide to the best in books," Bookmarks, like Pages and Book, two other reading-oriented titles, hopes to rope in the legions of well-educated young people who like to read but have spent the last five years stuck in 12-hour days typing code and writing PowerPoint presentations. Now they've got time on their hands to read, but they've lost track of what's new, so the thinking goes. They're intimidated by the New Releases table at Barnes and Noble. More than likely, they've got a hyper-literate friend they could ask, but they're afraid of looking like a cretin. Enter Bookmarks.

Think of it as the Consumer Reports of reading. Bookmarks, aimed at those "who don't spend they're entire weekends studying review after review," collates reviews of major releases and processes them into a ratings system. Most books receive about a half page of discussion, including a plot synopsis, excerpts from major reviews and a short summary of the rest. Each book then receives a one-to-five star rating. Reductionist, sure, but just because people have more time on their hands doesn't mean they're not still used to easily digestible info-nuggets.

By its editor's own admission, the system may be "frustratingly reductionist," but it nevertheless should help readers weed through the mounds of new releases — and mounds of reviews of those new releases — that appear each season. The reviews are thorough, but not so that they give anything away. Just enough to whet an appetite. And there are no long, text-heavy features in Bookmarks. The magazine is practical, and little else.

While the magazine does carry a few image-heavy, quick-read features (the preview issue covers Steinbeck and V.S. Naipaul), they're window dressing for the reviews. Clustered in the New Books Guide section, they cover more than 50 books across the spectrum — from "literary fiction" to science fiction to sports.

Bookmarks can be, at times, anti-intellectual to a fault — the features, while full of information, are woefully shallow when it comes to critical analysis. At other times, the editors let the magazine veer too far toward the didactic; a sidebar quiz asks readers to match authors with the cities they are most associated with (the hardest one would be Steinbeck and Salinas Valley, if the answer weren't printed in the feature, on the same page).

But the magazine keeps the miscellanea to a minimum; along with the features, there are a few pages dedicated to reader-recommended "Have You Read?" lists, and a page of book-related news. All the rest is Reading for Dummies, in installments — what to read and what's being read.

Magazines are increasingly becoming things to be used rather than read. The silver lining on the storm clouds over medialand is that much of the decline in sales (though not in ads) comes from the long-term decline of the massive monthlies like Readers Digest and Woman's Day. In contrast, overall readership is actually up, 5.3 percent since 1998 (over a 4.4 percent growth in the U.S. adult population). And if the thus-far success of The Week and the recent retooling of Rolling Stone are any indicators, this burgeoning class of magazine readers is looking for less substance and more easy-to-use information — like Bookmarks' reviews.

Obviously, Bookmarks is not for those who find a touch of philistinism in numerical book ratings, or those who bristle at "literary fiction" (as opposed to what, they ask?). Nor is it for people who read book review sections on a regular basis — anyone who has followed the hype surrounding "Everything Is Illuminated" shouldn't bother with Bookmarks. But those people are in the minority. While Nelson and Phillips probably overstate their case — no one needs to be a review hound to know what constitutes a good book — they've clearly hit on a clever marketing angle. Lots of people like reading, but literati snobbery turns many away from what should be a fun, stress-free activity.

In this economy, Bookmarks has a long way to go before it can prove it has staying power. It's possible that its hand-holding approach to contemporary books will turn off the very readers it's trying to help — the too-well-educated may also be too proud to be seen leafing through it at lunch. But if it starts selling copies at newsstands and racking up subscriptions, you can bet that a good number of those will end up tucked into a coffee table stack in a dot-com refugee's apartment, a dirty secret waiting to be read.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)