The Midwest Book Review

Established in 1976, the Midwest Book Review publishes the following monthly book publications specifically designed for community and academic librarians, booksellers, and the general reading public:

• The Bookwatch
• California Bookwatch
• Children's Bookwatch
• Internet Bookwatch
• Library Bookwatch
• MBR Bookwatch
• Reviewer's Bookwatch
• Small Press Bookwatch
• Wisconsin Bookwatch

We post our reviews on the Internet with a number of thematically appropriate web sites, databases, and online discussion groups such as alt.books.reviews and Pub-Forum. Our reviews are also available through Internet bookstores. We archive our reviews on the Midwest Book Review web site for a minimum of five years.

The Midwest Book Review has contracted with Cengage Learning to provide them with electronic copies of our book reviews. Cengage Learning then makes our reviews available to library systems nationwide in their print, magnetic tape, and diskette series, Book Review Index (an interactive CD-ROM series designed for use by community, university, and corporate library systems throughout the U.S. and Canada), as well as online databases such as Lexus-Nexus and Goliath.

The Midwest Book Review is an organization of volunteers committed to promoting literacy, library usage, and small press publishing. Our reviews (with the sole exception of reading fees for ebooks) are free of charge. We do not request remuneration from authors or publishers for our reviews of traditional print books, music CDs, and DVDs, in order to avoid any conflict of interest issues.

All of our services and resources, including our book review magazines and Advice for Writers/Publishers articles, are provided free of charge to writers, publishers, and the general public.

Publisher Information

The Midwest Book Review gives priority consideration to small press publishers, self-published authors, and academic presses. Please follow the instructions for submitting books.

Reviewer Information

Ever wanted to be a reviewer? Learn how you can become a reviewer for the Midwest Book Review!

An Unabashed Invitation

We are a major Internet resource for publishers, writers, librarians, booksellers, and book lovers of all ages and interests. If you have a web site that you think would be thematically appropriate to the publishing community and the reading public, we would be interested in linking your site to the steadily expanding Midwest Book Review Internet resource links. Please E-mail your URL to the Midwest Book Review so that your site can be examined.

Support the MBR Website!

The MBR website will never host paid advertisements. Third-party banners, pop-ups, and the like are intrusive, cumbersome, and occasionally carry "bad ads" infected with malicious software! We refuse to take that risk, no matter how small it may be.

This means that we bear the entire cost of hosting the MBR website and its search engine. In these tough economic times, we're not above asking for any help that our reading public can graciously provide.

As a gesture of support and appreciation for what we seek to accomplish on behalf of the small press community, we permit the donation of postage stamps to the Midwest Book Review.

We now also accept postage stamp fund contributions through PayPal. Simply log on to your PayPal account and send your kindness (any dollar amount) to us at

The @ is replaced by "[at]" in the above email address, in an attempt to fool email-harvesting spambots. Please use our regular email addresses when contacting us though, as this email address is set aside solely for PayPal and we don't check it as often.

Just like postage stamp donations, PayPal gifts are always appreciated, but never required! We originally set up this PayPal account to accommodate people who wanted to "support the cause" without the inconvenience of buying and mailing stamps.

Thank you, good luck, and good reading!