At some point in the past twenty years or so, someone in the advertising ranks of the New York Times had the idea of selling placement for teaching and health care jobs as small display ads in the venerable News of the Week in Review section. These have become one of those features in the expansive Sunday paper, like wedding announcements, that define the eclectic embrace of the New York Times for its readers. It can’t be all that expensive to solicit candidates for assistant professors of sociology at a state college or else no one would do it.

As a book publisher, I have tried at various times to persuade executives at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune, the newspapers with free standing book sections, to adopt the same principle for book ads: small, low-cost ads with a book jacket and a brief description that would give paid visibility to books and support the book reviews. The closest I have come to success is at the Chicago Tribune, where author appearances at stores and libraries are publicized and sometimes illustrated with a picture of the author. The other papers have said that the labor involved in selling small ads is not worth the revenue and would discourage those who take big ads—for, say, books by Danielle Steel—from doing so.

The New York Review of Books is full of book advertising, because its display ads are handsome and within reach of small marketing budgets, and “independent” or small publishers get their own section for even less cost. Among the online elite, Slate has added a similar feature. Meanwhile, with the exception of the New York Times (and lately, the New Yorker, and for lower-end fiction, USA Today), print book advertising is almost gone, leading to another round of hand-wringing over the endangered book reviews in our newspapers and magazines. This is not a new problem. In the 1960s, the Herald-Tribune, Chicago Tribune, and Washington Post published a combined book review section from New York . It was excellent. A few years after the Herald-Tribune folded, the section ended, and ever since the book editors of the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune have scrambled to maintain their sections, although they are demonstrably not sustainable with advertising revenue alone.

In all the turmoil around today’s print media, this may seem an especially esoteric issue. But the prospect that reviews of books will diminish to an irreversible degree is a real one. While sports, business, real estate, and entertainment are considered indispensable, book coverage clearly is not, especially (the newspaper accountants argue) since book publishers refuse to support their wares with advertisements. This is a classic example of talking past solutions to focus on the problems until, one way or another, the problems overwhelm the issue and, in this case, books are no longer featured. In most newspapers these days, there is a page or two of reviews in the Sunday edition with a couple of commissioned pieces and a selection of other book-related stuff; not much, and getting to be less.

Before offering a suggestion (or two), let me address a myth about the marketing budgets for books. Except for the top tier of bestsellers, they will always be small and always have been. Every book is a separate “product” requiring a distinct strategy for sales, and given that most books sell relatively small numbers (10,000 copies, say), ingenuity in reaching the audience is the only recourse. But these days, if you want to get a significant place in bookstores or on the Web sites of online retailers for any book, you have to pay for it. There are euphemisms for this practice (co-op advertising, or shared spending between retailer and publisher), but the reality is that publishers choosing between a $5,000 one-time ad in a newspaper and two weeks of getting books front-of-store across the country will always choose the latter option. So when newspapers (or authors) complain about publishers not advertising, the answer is that limited resources are going elsewhere.

So what is the answer? Let’s go back to the example of ads for teaching positions (or paid obituary notices, another newspaper staple). The one thing that can be said for certain about all book readers is that they read. Every newspaper culture editor should ask his publisher how much they are prepared to spend to serve the portion of their readers who buy books. Book groups are flourishing, especially among women reading quality fiction. Surprise bestsellers are generated by all kinds of venues that didn’t even exist a generation ago: Oprah, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and Starbucks, which has helped make a bestseller out of testimony from an African child soldier. Editors should use the budgets they have for space to make their book page part of the new and ever-changing process of attention and discussion about all kinds of books, instead of relying on a static model of two or three review pieces, with no particular logic to the selection. As for ad salespeople, they should offer up reasonably priced space that would encourage an alliance between local booksellers and publishers (which is what has happened in the movie industry). Does some of this already happen? Of course it does, but not nearly enough to stop the erosion of book coverage.

And as for what book publishers can do: we should provide newspapers with more links or URLs so that readers can find the excerpts that we now routinely make available; arrange for authors to sit at the end of an 800 number or in an Internet chat room and answer questions from readers around the country; recognize that newspaper Web sites are portals that will take readers wherever they want to go and buy the still very cheap advertising available on them. Books, as has been said many times, have proven to be durable objects of popular interest against the onslaught of movies, television, and the Web. Book review sections and pages are vulnerable to the pressures of economics, but they always have been. What we need is for the people on both sides of the proverbial divide, the people who make and sell books and the people who publish newspapers and magazines, to realize that protecting and supporting book reviews is worth the trouble.                                             

Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. Sign-up to receive Osnos’ columns weekly by email here. Read past columns here.