It’s stunning. Not to mention compelling, resonant, masterful and even (sorry about this) unputdownable. These are the clichéd words of book reviewers according to this interesting research on how newspapers report on books, presented to last month’s PANPA conference.

Just as sport reporters have their clichés (“hunger for the ball”, “best team won on the day”) and political reporters don’t do much better (“how it will play” “Howard’s battlers” “wedge” ), so too do book reviewers. Would you believe that the word “unputdownable” occurred nine times in book reviews in the first six months of 2007? It should be a criminal offence.

The Fairfax broadsheets are apparently likely to use the word “resonant” to describe a book, while The Australian likes “stunning”.

There’s a Phd thesis in that.

The tabloids, predictably, like to talk about “page turners”.

More serious, though, is the analysis on how much space newspapers give to books, and which books get covered.

Nobody will be surprised that the broadsheets come out ahead of the others, but the telling thing is that The Age is a country mile ahead of all the rest, giving much more coverage to books than any other paper, including the Sydney Morning Herald.

Despite its government subsidised Australian Literary Review insert, The Australian tails in third place. Melbourne papers generally like books more, with the Herald-Sun far outranking its Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph.

Another surprise (well, not really a surprise) is how poorly the Adelaide Advertiser performs, given that city’s landmark writers’ festival and bookish reputation. The Tiser covers less than the Herald-Sun, and level pegs with that intellectual powerhouse, the Townsville Bulletin.

Thankfully the Age’s emphasis on books seems likely to continue – despite murmurings some years ago from Sydney that this was one of the sections where money could be saved by combining and running the same material in both Fairfax broadsheets.

That suggestion was knocked on the head by then editor Michael Gawenda, and today the paper’s literary editor, Jason Steger, told Crikey that nobody had suggested such a thing to him in recent times – and that he prides himself on not running syndicated reviews.

Meanwhile current editor Andrew Jaspan is behind the UNESCO Melbourne city of literature bid, and has recently assigned former op ed editor Ray Cassin to report on the city’s books and publishing.

The research shows major publishers clearly dominate the book review pages, but not evenly. Harper Collins gets more coverage from Fairfax despite being owned by News Limited. The amount of coverage for publishers, however, is not necessarily reflected in sales volumes.

There are some concerns about the research’s accuracy. Why aren’t biggish small publishers like Text included, for example?

Nevertheless for authors and reviewers, it’s meaty stuff.

In fact, quite compelling and definitely resonant.