ChessCafedotcom still exists as a website. You just have to pay or purchase $X-value of items from their store in order to access the site. Whether they still have people writing book reviews as they used to, I don't know, as I haven't spent the money to check out the site since it was taken over by new owners. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe they paid those who wrote the columns including the book reviews. Are you suggesting that Chessdotcom similarly pay for book reviews?
chesscafe stuff
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In the 6 months since the OP posted that, we've had these threads
https://www.chess.com/forum/search?keyword=Chesscafe
Never saw those. I'll take a look. Thanks!
RonaldJosephCote wrote:
In the 6 months since the OP posted that, we've had these threads https://www.chess.com/forum/search?keyword=Chesscafe
Just FYI - As far as I can see, only two of those threads are more recent than 6 months....thanks anyway!
I did purchase enough to have access to ChessCafe and, sometime after that, they stopped doing new stuff. It has now been a long time since I have been there, and I suppose it is vaguely possible that they have resumed since then, but I am inclined to think some sort of publicity would have caught my attention. For a long time, ChessCafe managed to do LOTS of stuff, so I was hoping that chessdotcom could do some small portion of what they had been doing, but I must readily admit that I don't know much about the economics of this sort of thing.
Yes I would imagine paying book reviewers would be a significant committment for chess.com. I would be suprised if they would do it. On the other hand it would be nice if chess.com were to make chess book reviews by say John Watson, Carsten Hansen, Jeremy Silman, et al, available on this site, such as what used to be available on ChessCafe.
Based on recent postings in these threads, ChessCafe appears to be in its death throes....
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/chess-cafe
https://www.chess.com/forum/view/chess-equipment/what-is-going-on-with-the-chess-cafe?lc=1#last_comment
For things like the "Best chess book for a Novice" discussion, initiated by kitley197 in the Chess Books & Equipment forum, I think it is enormously useful to have access to a well-organized library of book reviews written by strong players. Until recently, such a resource was maintained by chesscafe. Since they seem to have suspended operations, I wonder if it would be possible for chess.com to acquire and maintain the book review feature. Perhaps some of their other former features would be of interest as well. Someone has pointed out that a lot of that Chess Cafe content is still available at
https://web.archive.org/web/20140714190611/http://www.chesscafe.com/archives/archives.htm ,
but, as far as I can tell, there is only the record up to July of 2014. While it is great that that is available (for now?), I think it would be beneficial if new stuff (such as a review of Bologan's latest book) could be added to the record.