John Freeman, president of the NBCC, spins some damage control over at Critical Mass:

Some comments on the blog have suggested we believe print reviews to be the only venue for doing this, or that we want to save criticism by trashing blogs, or that we believe the NBCC and the NBCC alone can save reviews. That's not the case at all -- we wouldn't be staging this campaign from a blog, across the web, linking to bloggers and asking other bloggers to contribute posts if we didn't believe in the medium's capacity to bring intelligent debate to books. Nor do we believe that print reviews have a monopoly on good writing or contextualizing.

I'm still not moved. However, I am now curious to read future essays and op-ed pieces posted on their blog. Specifically, I wonder what the new arguments for saving book reviews in print will be.

The print vs. pixels issue reminds me of the "Introducing the Book" video that made the rounds a while back. I wonder if Gutenberg had to suffer through so much criticism for his revolutionary technology.