The Washington Post is closing its stand-alone Sunday section, “Book World,” and folding book reviews into other sections of the paper.

That leaves only two papers, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, with separate sections devoted to book reviews.

The explanation given for this is that the sections lacked enough advertising to make them financially viable. Maybe so. But let’s be honest: The reason the sections lacked advertising is because nobody reads them, and nobody reads them because they are boring.

This will never happen, so I can safely say it without torpedoing my chances: If I were to have another job other than my own, I’d love to edit the New York Times Book Review. It is terrible. The NYTBR is so boring, it not only makes me not want to read it, it makes me not want to read books altogether. The choice of books is boring, the choice of writers is boring, the format is boring, the presentation is boring. It feels like homework on a Sunday morning, and who wants that? There’s a lot of other good things you could be doing on a Sunday morning.

(I feel the same about the NYT Sunday Mag, by the way. Dreadful.)

Here’s the litmus test I’d offer—and did once, in a job interview with the NYT mag, which, predictably, didn’t go well: If people didn’t get the Sunday Times book review/magazine with the rest of their paper, how many of them would actually get it?

In other words, if you gave people a chance to get the Times mag in their Sunday paper or any other magazine they could choose—which is a pretty good idea, actually—how many of them would actually keep getting the Times mag?

Maybe 50%, I’d bet, at first, because of force of habit. But over time, that number would dwindle to, oh, ten percent.

You have to edit a magazine so that people want to read it, not because they feel like they should read it, like eating their broccoli…. And I’m sure I’ve failed in this mission myself from time to time, but that awareness that is a sine qua non for publishing an interesting journal, and I think you lose it when the thing just shows up on people’s doorsteps once a week whether they want it or not.

Introduce color to the book review, both literally and figuratively. Interviews. Debates. Columns. Charts. Short pieces. All the things you find in, well, magazines. Give it some decent design and photography; print it on decent paper. Make it lively! Not just: Here’s one review. Here’s another. Here’s another. Here’s the bestseller list. Here’s another. The end. Make people want to read it, and then you can turn to advertisers other than publishers.

I’ll now wait for that call from the 556 prefix…..