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Textbooks. Publishers love textbooks because that is where the money is. A successful undergraduate text in a broad
subject may sell tens of thousands of copies. New editions of established texts are published frequently (primarily to
kill the competition from the used-

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book market), and some scientists have become modestly wealthy from textbook royalties.

A textbook is unique in that its success is determined not by its purchasers (students) but by its adopters (professors).
Thus, publishers try to commission the big names in science to write texts, hoping that major adoptions will result on
the basis of name recognition. Occasionally, the big names, who became well known because of their research, write
good texts. At least, the science is likely to be first-rate and up to date. Unfortunately, some brilliant and successful
researchers are poor writers, and their texts may be almost useless as teaching aids. It shouldn't have to be said but it
does: A good reviewer should evaluate a text on the basis of its usefulness as a text; the name on the cover should be
irrelevant.

Trade Books. Trade books are those books that are sold primarily through the book trade, that is, book wholesalers and
retailers. The typical retail bookstore caters to the tastes of a general audience, those people who walk in off the street.
Because a bookstore has space to stock only a small fraction of the total output of publishers, the bookstore is likely
to stock only those titles that would interest many potential readers. In bookstores, you will find books that appear on
various bestseller lists, popular fiction and general-interest nonfiction, and perhaps not much else.

Bookstores do sell science books, however. They sell them by the millions. But these are not the monographs, the
reference books, or the textbooks (except in college bookstores). These are the books about science written for the
general public. Many, unfortunately, are not very scientific, and some are disgustingly pseudoscientific. Have you
looked at a best-seller list lately? In the nonfiction category, perhaps half may deal with scientific subjects. Books on
nutrition and diet, on psychology, and on exercise and fitness are especially popular in today's market.

Although some of these books are trivial or even a perversion of scientific knowledge, many very good scientific
books are also sold in bookstores. There are many first-rate books that treat science and scientists in an interesting,
educational way. Biographies of prominent scientists seem to find a ready market. Almost all bookstores carry books
on everything from the atom to the universe.

Audience Analysis. The main purpose of a book review is to supply sufficient information to potential readers so that
they can decide

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whether they should get the book. To do this, the reviewer must define the content of the book and also the audience
for the book. Who should read the book and why?

Many books have different audiences. As an example, Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence had a wide general
audience, a major reason being that the book was sexually explicit. However, a different (more scientific?) audience
was in the mind of the reviewer who wrote the following review, which appeared in the November 1959 issue of Field
and Stream:

Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley 's Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-
by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant
raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately
one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous materials in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of
a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping.

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