A case study on book reviews

Abstract Many newspapers, magazines and journals have sections devoted to the area of book reviewing. Editors obviously see these sections as playing an important role, as they often take up a substantial part of the publication in relation to other items. But how useful are they? How do they differ from one journal to another? And how accurate are the reports when compared with the actual book? These are the objectives of this case study, but with reference to one particular field – the field of computing.