BOSTON: I hope for your sake that you haven't been following the teapotty tempest that has attended several newspapers' decisions to reel in their book review supplements. The Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle cut back their review space, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution eliminated its book review editor, prompting a fountain of crocodile tears from embattled litterateurs.

Book reviews are a perfect example of a service that everyone wants but that no one is willing to pay for.

Publishers love newspaper reviews. They tend to be fair, well written, and, when positive, ideal for plastering all over full-page advertisements. And where do those ads appear? In one paper only, The New York Times. If every newspaper in America acted only in their economic self-interest, they would ditch their book review sections, too.

A door closes, a door opens. And lately the doors have been opening on the Internet.

This month, the U.S. book superstore Barnes & Noble launched a grade-A book review section, featured on its Web site, bn.com. B&N boss Steve Riggio hired James Mustich, the former editor of the Common Reader, to edit the section, which publishes one quality review each day.

So far, the work is very good. Mustich has published reviews by the GQ critic Tom Carson, writer/editor Daniel Menaker and John Freeman, the president of the National Book Critics Circle.

Like supermarkets, Barnes & Noble makes deals with its suppliers in return for favorable store placement. But Mustich says there is a "Chinese wall" between him and the business types: "There are no program tentacles sticking out from the Review." He pays $1 a word, which is better than The Boston Globe and The Washington Post usually pay, and right in line with The New York Times Book Review fees.

B&N Review calls attention to itself because Internet reviewing is still in its infancy. The well-regarded powells.com site, operated by the Portland, Oregon-based bookstore, uses reviews from newspapers and magazines like the Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic. Book blogs have earned their fan base, but the reviewing remains pretty uneven, in my unhumble opinion.

Market leader Amazon publishes some vanilla book assessments, but mainly seems wedded to its stupidity-of-crowds model, turning its mediocre, amateur reviewers loose in its notorious "Customer Reviews" section.

A few years ago, a software glitch revealed that literary lions like Dave Eggers were using anonymous screen names like "a reader from St. Louis" to hype their pals' work.

Log-rolling among the literati. Can you imagine?

Ten years ago, a friend and I nominated ourselves to co-edit the Boston Globe's Books section. The editors just laughed. Quite correctly! If I had Mustich's job, here is what I would be reviewing:

"The Best of Surfer Magazine" from Chronicle Books. While it's true that the magazine's prose doesn't exactly shoot the curl, there's plenty to like here. Had I not read Sam George's 2002 article "Surfing and Sex," I wouldn't have known that native Hawaiians used to surf in the nude, before the missionaries showed up and ruined everything.

"Why I Hate Canadians" - the 10th Anniversary Edition. Only a Canadian could produce this book, with its memorable chapter "Death by Niceness." Doubtless author Will Ferguson got plenty of grief for writing that "America is sexy. It is exciting, dangerous, crass, brash and violent," and for quoting a crotchety Farley Mowat to the effect that "We Canadians are hardly more than house slaves to the American Empire."

But don't worry, Ferguson hates Americans, too.

"War and Peace," from Ecco Press. The central press has been dancing to the tune of the Alfred A. Knopf publicity department, singing the praises of the absolutely unnecessary, 1,300-page new translation of Leo Tolstoy's epic. But that's not the story. The real deal is Ecco Press's new translation, fully 400 pages shorter than the doorstop the Borzoi Boys are peddling.

What's the deal? Several different editions of W&P were published during and after Tolstoy's lifetime, and some axed the philosophical musings that have bedeviled so many Russian Lit majors. "There is no definitive edition," New York University academic Anne Lounsbery told the Wall Street Journal.

Borodino while-u-wait! Go Ecco!

Alex Beam's column appears in The Boston Globe.