Blurb

The name and term stuck for any publisher's contents on a book's back cover, even after the picture was dropped and only the text remained.

In German bibliographic usage, it is usually located on the second page of the book underneath the half title, or on the dust cover.

In the 1980s, Spy ran a regular feature called "Logrolling in Our Time" which exposed writers who wrote blurbs for one another's books.

For example, Gary Shteyngart announced in The New Yorker that he would no longer write blurbs, except for certain writers with whom he had a professional or personal connection.

[citation needed] Movie blurbs are part of the promotional campaign for films, and usually consist of positive, colorful extracts from published reviews.

But the blurbing game is also evolving as newspaper film critics disappear and studios become more comfortable quoting Internet bloggers and movie Web sites in their ads, a practice that still leaves plenty of potential for filmgoers to be bamboozled.

Helping to keep studios in line these days are watchdog sites like eFilmCritic.com and The Blurbs, a Web column for Gelf magazine written by Carl Bialik of The Wall Street Journal.

Studios do have to submit advertising materials like newspaper ads and trailers to the Motion Picture Association of America for approval.