Nevertheless, the week after the Chronicle canned the stand-alone Book Review, readers pounced on the paper with more than 400 e-mails and calls. Local lights like Stanford literature professor Diane Middlebrook and novelist Herbert Gold led the epistolary charge. They reminded the Chronicle, politely at first, that the Bay Area had a few readers in its midst -- teachers, physicians, scientists and writers -- a few internationally renowned universities and even a few hundred bookstores.

And then not so politely. When Hearst took over the Chronicle last year, Gold said, "They promised they were going to produce a 'world-class newspaper.' By eliminating the book-review section and making more space for entertainment gossip, they are producing a world-class disgrace."

The Chronicle's top editors claimed they were surprised at the reaction. "Astounded, really," said senior editor Narda Zacchino. "The number and passion of complaints we received were beyond anything we got over other changes in the paper." If executive editor Phil Bronstein "had anticipated this kind of reaction to doing away with the stand-alone section," she said, "he wouldn't have done it."

It might be surprising that a major metropolitan paper wouldn't anticipate an angry reaction from a community that loves books. But it's only surprising if you don't know that top editors -- "just another replaceable face in the management constellation," in the words of the American Journalism Review -- are now holed up in their shaded offices, where word from the outside is often communicated in the PowerPoint presentations of hired consultants.

Newsrooms have become cultures of fear -- "the fear of offending readers," said Charles Layton, who has conducted a nationwide study of the negative impact of market research on newspapers. Layton is co-editor of a new book on the newspaper industry, "Leaving Readers Behind," and was a foreign affairs and magazine editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 22 years.

Editors now rely on the safety in numbers -- demographic studies and reader polls -- to determine what stories to pursue and what sections to keep or cut loose. But pre-business school journalists would like to tell the world that market research is a pitiful tool for guiding a newspaper. Ask a bunch of readers what they want, and results inevitably skew toward the middle. Independent or original views are ignored when hunting for a consensus.

And today, the consensus in boardrooms, where editors and marketers meet, is that advertisers are in love with young people, who supposedly do nothing but go to movies every night and so can't get enough articles about Reese Witherspoon. To editors, Layton said, in his slow, ingratiating drawl, "book sections appeal to a small, elite, older readership -- not a real high priority."

Layton doesn't doubt that book reviews rank low in reader polls. But in his view, newspapers have a responsibility to operate like a supermarket, offering a variety of enticements to a wide range of people, including fresh book reviews. Interestingly, he added, given newspapers' hallowed traditions of editorial integrity, newspaper managers don't want to be viewed as indentured servants to lordly profits, and so hide behind their polls. "It's nothing but a fig leaf for their cuts." Although, more recently, executives don't even bother citing the research, Layton said. "The attitude now is, 'Fuck it, let's just cut costs.'"

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"