Reflections on the Publishing Scene

Some Thoughts on the Present State of the Book WorldmI

Richard Abel

T he small and usually unobtrusive corner of the national and international economies, which is the world of the book (in the United States, total book

sales in 1996 reached $21 billion, roughly 12 percent of General Motors' sales for the same year) has been receiving an unaccustomed spate of attention in the national and international press recently. Time magazine recently devoted a longish piece to the quite staggering capacity of the Oprah television show to sell mass-popular fiction. The Economist shortly thereafter devoted a page and a quarter to the often ignoble practice of the book promotion tour and enter- tainment publishers' crass pursuit of at least a place on the Oprah talk show but better yet winning the selection for a title in the latter's "book club." This piece, in turn, grew out of one in the Village Voice in which some book publi- cists talked to a reporter with some candor about the reality of their stock-in-trade. The Nation devoted the lead articles in a recent issue to apoca- lyptic accounts of the "concentration" of the book trade publishing, whole- saling, and bookselling. These examples are chosen at random from a far more extensive and unusual engagement with the condition of the book world by the general media. Typically, the odd remark about such matters may be thrown out in passing in a book review or a column turning on the social or cultural impact of a particular title but, for the most part, the ordinary affairs of the book world are of only peripheral interest to the general media. The sole exceptions to this customary media disregard are the transient and manifestly implausible references to "the world's electronic library" or "books on de- mand" in the countless breathless articles on the Internet as the "information highway" of the future.

It might be gratifying to those who have spent their lives in the trade to view this unaccustomed attention as long overdue but deserved notice of a sector, which while distinctly an economic lightweight is as clearly a heavy- weight in matters cultural and the shaping of the long-term directions of the society. Unhappily such a sanguine appraisal of the recent spate of media interest would prove ill founded. Rather this is but another example of the way in which one or another of the many issues currently occupying the attention of an economic/social sector is seized upon by what usually proves a

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small, vocal, and often overwrought coterie, which is, in turn, able to capture for a brief period of time the spotlight of media attention. But, virtually all these general media accounts are but pale and distant reflections of the matters that have been the principal foci of concern in the several branches of the book world for some time.

It has become virtually impossible to attend a meeting devoted to bookselling, which deals with any issues other than the chain superstore phenomenon and the perceived unfairness of publishers' discount and/or shipping policies. The library fora are largely preoccupied with the rising prices of books and jour- nals/declining budgets paradox and cyberspace and access thereto (never mind the cost). The publishers when not self-righteously fending off the complaints of booksellers and libraries as well as those of authors are transfixed by the latest merger strategies; how to protect the "content" they create, and when protected how to get this "content" into a salable and profitable "information highway" product. All relieve the tedium arising out of the endless rehashing of these never-ending exchanges by zealous, and not uncommonly, ill-informed excursions into whatever fashionable social cause is widely abroad at the mo- ment.

The dispassionate observer can be forgiven for viewing much of the present book world's handwringing and rhetorical fire with a considerable degree of cynicism. Like most of the interminable controversies and disputed issues, which engross one sector of the society or another from time to time, these matters are made up in about equal parts of myopic self-interest; assorted inconsistent assumptions both sustainable and insupportable; long stretches of questionable logic; well-founded concern; and genuine hardship. There seems a place for a skeptic to advance some alternative views. Not with the expecta- tion that the positions of any of the committed coterie of protagonists will be altered in any significant measure but rather that a few may be persuaded to step back in order to have another look and thereby endeavor to get beginning assumptions and lines of reasoning in better order to the end of proceeding in an intelligent and reasonably well-founded way. This then is the first of a planned three-part essay aimed at presenting some alternative skeptical de- scription and analysis of the present world of the book. The best place to start seems to be with the publishing community--in part, because the initiative for entering a book into the book world rests with this sector, and in part, because publishers seem to be the downstream players' perennial whipping boy.

The first and most obvious characteristic of the publishing community in all the developed world is the extraordinary degree of concentration that has occurred in the last four decades. The trades of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Western Europe as well as Australia and New Zealand are today dominated in varying degrees by a handful of very large firms--often international in their extent. Further, this pattern holds true for not simply that roughly 30 percent of total annual book sales, which is designated as "the trade" (books sold to a general audience by retail bookstores, book clubs, discount stores, etc. and that lesser fraction of the trade, which many in the

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book trade and virtually all the general media view as constituting the totality of the book world) but those less publicly obvious sectors involved in the publishing of religious books; textbooks; scientific, technical and medical books and journals; professional books; reference books; and so on. The omission of publishers of the latter classes of books from most media accounts of concen- tration in the book world is not simply a serious oversight in the marshalling of fact with respect to the present structure of the publishing community. It intrinsically leads to faulty analysis. It is evidence of a fundamentally biased sense of the trade resulting from the sourcing of much of the evidence em- ployed from a "retail book-selling" perspective. (The retail bookselling sector, with a handful of notable exceptions, has for a couple of generations simply disavowed any interest or commerce in these classes of books that collectively represent the largest percentage of the books sold annually. But this is matter for a subsequent installment of this skeptical account.)

The commonly agreed media view of the book world is that this striking concentration within the publishing sector has led to the increased domination of the "trade" by a handful of very large houses publishing enormous num- bers of new titles each season. In one of the more egregious patches of shaky logic widely employed, a great leap is made from this fact to the conclusion that the tawdry and banal character of the vast proportion of trade books published is attributable to the profit-maximizing behavior of the operational and financial managers of the large publishing firms and the dictates of the parent organizations. This questionable analysis leads to such overworked formulations as: "Publishing is no longer controlled by editorial types"; or its obverse, "Publishing is controlled by financial types"; or "Publishing now appeals to only the lowest common denominator"; and so on.

It is clearly true, publishing, not simply trade publishing, has in the last four decades become highly concentrated. On the best estimates the large publish- ing conglomerates now control something on the order of 80 percent to 85 percent of all trade book sales in bookstores and other retail outlets in the United States. Forty years ago the fifty largest houses controlled but 50 percent to 55 percent by contrast. Something approximating these estimates is also true of the U.K. trade.

This consolidation occurred in three distinct waves, the first in the 1960s. All were justified, whether by broadcasting networks in the first wave, newspaper chains in the second, or multimedia entertainment empires in the last, by some kind of perceived synergy. Hence, the continuing concern with "content ' -- the formulation of the text of the book in such a way as to make it readily adapt- able to media other than the book. The succession of large media corporations or conglomerates, which have largely engineered this concentration have obvi- ously, rationally, and understandably sought to obtain a profitable return from their investment. But this return is still to a greater or lesser degree calculated, consistent with the notion of synergy, in terms of the book-publishing divi- sions' contribution to the overall profitability of the combination of distinct corporate entities making up the entire conglomeration.

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But profitability has never been the sole motivation in acquiring book-pub- lishing houses. The mass media, which by their very nature require that they largely work the mass-popular precincts, are always in search of greater re- spectability. What other sector is so well suited to conferring such respectabil- ity than book publishing? And what other sector seems so closely related to the ink-and-paper, word-and-image, "content" character of the media? In short, and enlisting the aid of an old saw by way of pithy explanation, such acquisi- tions added a touch of class to what would otherwise be seen as a common barroom brawl. So, within some very elastic limits, profitability was never the sum of the game---the search for status and esteem have always remained a greater or lesser but largely unacknowledged factor in each of the rounds of consolidation.

That said, the charges with respect to the mean quality of the bulk of the books presently capturing the spotlight in book-trade circles remain unan- swered. The trade publishing houses have, certainly, well learned the lessons for the promotion of the intellectually shallow, ethically debased, and aestheti- cally gauche so artfully formulated by the newspaper, magazine, film and television industries. Some, and the most highly rewarded, in virtually every trade publishing house have unquestionably become adept purveyors of akin kinds of mass-popular rubbish. Further, together with many in academe and the "avant garde" media they have joined in the now half-century-old assault on the compass and canons of the received tradition to bring to the society a "product" that is thoroughly degraded intellectually, ethically, and aestheti- cally. They have willingly joined hands with others of the "clever" and "smart" disaffected in ill-founded, and, more importantly, massively ill-advised attacks upon the standards of mind, behavior, and taste so laboriously constructed by tens of thousands over three millennia. The publishing community's most notable role in this continuing assault has been the elevation of the lowest common denominator of mass-popular taste to the forefront of public atten- tion and its celebration as intellectually, ethically and aesthetically sound and substantive. The aura of public respectability acquired by the book world over centuries has provided the perfect cover or camouflage for the legitimation of mass-popular shallow taste and vapid preoccupations.

Now this is not to say that the publishing community has ever been free of rogue's and mountebank's intent simply on plying the credulity and incomprehension of vast proportions of the populace for their own sense of power and the fattening of their purses. Examples of debased and destructive publishing can be identified in large numbers in every generation, including Gutenberg's. But this kind of corrupt undertaking was usually the work of those at the periphery of the book world--hawkers and itinerant mischief- makers--not those at the generally acknowledged heart of the book trade. The modern case differs from the past in that the cynicism and contempt for people and the received cultural tradition once largely confined to the margin has gradually moved to the center.

The leading publishers of the nineteenth century were, for example, in large

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measure, informed by a sense of promoting intellectual, ethical, aesthetic "up- lift" among their readers even while pitching a substantial fraction of their books at the level of a low common denominator. But their purpose was only in part to indulge such a taste and such standards. They were at the same time endeavoring to introduce an emerging and growing middle class enjoying a rapidly increasing standard of living to the world of culture formerly known but foreclosed to them--as the journals and correspondence of many publish- ers and readers attests.

Such a sense of cultural responsibility is in the more highly visible and influential circles of modern trade publishing the stuff of a bad joke. One might speculate on whether the modern disrespect for readers and the cultural tradition results from simple greed or from a willful disdain for all that has gone before or from the parallel corruption of intellectual, ethical and aesthetic standards in literature and social science faculties or from simple ignorance or from the entrance into publishing of many whose training and taste is but a small cut above that of the mass-popular audience. But such speculative ven- tures quickly decay into unproductive ad hominem wrangles contributing little to either understanding or mitigating the avalanche of shabby publishing--the contemplation of which can but repel and sadden every genuine bookman and bookwoman.

Having acknowledged ample grounds for much of the present criticism of the quality of vast stretches, and the most widely publicized span of the "prod- uct" of trade book publishing, the candid observer must quickly add that many first-rate books dealing seriously and honestly with crucial cultural mat- ters regularly appear over the imprints of the same publishing conglomerates. Such titles, mostly nonfiction--for the writing of novels, poetry, drama, liter- ary criticism, etc. has been the most thoroughly trashed of all the genre em- ploying the written word--regularly appear in the catalogs of virtually every one of the conglomerates. Several have quite consciously acquired small houses with a track record of significant and authentic publishing. The buyers have then exercised the good sense of leaving their publishers and editors alone to continue the tradition of first-rate publishing. Houses such as Free Press, Basic Books, Metheun, etc., immediately come to mind.

Even more important in coming to a balanced assessment of the present state of book publishing is to properly acknowledge, first, that roughly one- third of total book sales derive from STM, professional, and reference publish- ing and, secondly, the roughly remaining third derives from textbook publish- ing. The mandarins of fashionable opinion are virtually bereft of either any grounding in or understanding of or respect for the immense and critically important worlds of science, technology, the professions, or in general most serious scholarship. They have increasingly elected to isolate themselves from those disciplines and fields of inquiry devoted to the critical study of the world we live in and the conduct of the day-to-day affairs required for abiding therein with some sense of appropriateness and understanding and, therefore some degree of equanimity. They prefer the tepid, shadowy cocoon of their

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world of fancy and the exchange of esoteric literary conceits with the like-minded of their coterie and its provincial hangers-on. I Hence, the quite astonishing growth of profoundly meaningful and consequential books in these varied fields--both technical syntheses written for practitioners and books written to elucidate such bodies of knowledge for the nonspecialist (the book world's mythic "general reader ')--are entirely passed over by the mandarins of popular opinion. Yet arguably some of the most important cultural work of the last two generations is encompassed in this now massive body of litera- ture. And, at least as importantly, this body of knowledge has created all manner of immensely challenging intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic issues that are still being worked out by philosophers, theologians, historians, and social scientists. This work will most profoundly recast the way in which we under- stand our own nature, the nature of the world we live in, and the way in which we must conduct our lives. Happily, the traditional cultural intellectual and ethical standards govern all this publishing. Such publishing is indeed consistent with and a worthy contribution to the received cultural riches of the world.

The second major category of books routinely ignored by the fashion-creating literati when addressing the world of the book is the textbook. It hardly bears repeating that the textbook has become, in the roughly century and a half of its separation from the mainstream of general publishing, one of the most power- ful and useful tools in the world's cultural armamentarium. While often di- verted in greater or lesser measure from its profoundly important cultural role by the politically correct of numerous sects, religious and sectarian alike, of every generation, textbook publishing remains a bastion of excellence and achievement.

What is further overlooked by all the chic commentators is the rapid prolif- eration of small to medium-sized publishers in considerable measure coinci- dent with, and indeed almost the reciprocal of, the sequence of consolidation affecting the larger houses. Here I do not have in mind the "alternative press"-- publishers of cliquish ephemera--but authentic publishers publishing in, and to, the mainstream of the cultural tradition. (Among the latter are the univer- sity presses, although many of them have markedly blunted their relevance to the cultural and knowledge-seeking concerns of the general reader by virtue of their excessive, long-term preoccupation with literary criticism, which has, in turn, led them into the intellectual and ethical [and incidentally marketing] dead end of deconstructionism, multiculturalism, etc.) These small /medium houses have taken up whatever slack in the publishing of the so-called "mid- list" book--particularly in the area of serious and substantive nonfiction-- which the consolidation of large publishers has opened. Theirs is, in many respects, a quite different publishing paradigm than that of the large houses dominating the trade, one more akin to that of the large STM/professional houses. That is, they publish carefully edited books written by well-qualified authorities in a specialized field in relatively small quantities, which are mar-

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keted via direct and specialized selling means to readily identifiable audiences having an interest in that subject specialty. They are, in the present vernacular of the book trade, "niche" publishers.

But it must be quickly acknowledged when discussing the extraordinary growth of this class of small/medium publishers that many are publishing, in the whole or at least a major part of their lists, titles aimed at the same mass popular audiences so markedly targeted by the large, heavy-weight publish- ing conglomerates. One need only review a fair sampling of the catalogs of the "small press" distributors--which have grown up and flourished as the conse- quence of this proliferation of small/medium-sized publishing houses--for massive evidence in support of this conclusion. The astounding growth and substantial presence in the retail trade of mass-popular titles from recently formed, small/medium publishing houses quite effectively put the lie to the erroneous assertion of the cadre of true believers in the intrinsic iniquities of the present economic system, both in and out of the trade, that the employ- ment of shallow, crass, cynical, and narrow-minded editorial screening prin- ciples is restricted to the large houses demanding a high rate of return on the money invested. Smallness is no substitute for excellence of standards in book publishing.

But the fact remains that the combined effect of the lists of many of the recently formed, small/medium-sized houses have quite satisfactorily closed all the gaps in the publishing of sound, meaningful books created by the last four decades of consolidation. The door to publication in any of the developed countries and, hence, a lectern in the marketplace of ideas is simply not closed to any author with something of substance to add to the culture's stock of knowledge.

Whether large or small; trade, professional or text; for-profit or not-for profit; publishing in English or other languages; all publishers are rightly concerned wi th the possible impacts of the Internet. This concern is closely coupled with the issue of the protection of the copyright "content" of their publications. The widely shared and extraordinary sensitivity on this issue stems from the unex- pectedly heavy copying--and consequent losses of revenue--resulting from the spread of photocopying technology in the 1960s, by which publishers were nearly universally blindsided.

The concerns of the STM, reference, and general professional publishers center particularly on the fate of journals; forms having many of the character- istics of journals--"loose leaf" services, periodic supplements, etc., and tabu- lated information of various kinds-----encyclopedic, data bases, compilations. etc. All are readily assimilable to and accessible via computer networks--and such a development has been vigorously and widely touted by some in library and computer circles.

This concern initially spilled over into similar concerns with respect to books, as well. There seems to be a growing consensus that these fears with respect to the book were largely unfounded. The vast proportion of books--all those

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writings characterized by extended and connected bodies of text--are, in digi- tized form, so "user unfriendly" relative to the codex, as to reduce the possible market for "on-line publications" to uneconomic levels. (Even the presentation of scholarly journals on networks has proved, in several recently completed trials to be more costly and less acceptable to users than the paper versions.)

Which then leads to the further question as to whether journals and journal- like publications will ever prove sufficiently efficient for users in the cyber-medium to be economically viable. Location indices, subject directories, digest/abstract services, collection holdings guides, and such-like bibliographic devices and tools may be the only species of publication that are of sufficiently widespread utility in the network environment to be economically sustainable.

So, while publishers will keep a wary eye on the Internet, it no longer looms in quite so threatening and overpowering a way with respect to editorial con- tent. In the meantime, however, the populist cultural pundits and literary hacks will undoubtedly continue to prattle on with glib and uninformed refer- ences to "the world's electronic library," "books on demand," and related science fictions, thereby misleading a credulous public.

By way of summing up: It is safe to say that despite the grievous disfigure- ment of the most visible segment of the book-publishing community in the developed world by the descent into the shabby world of entertainment, once largely occupied by marginal houses, the flow of significant books dealing with cultural matters of genuine substance has not been crippled by the ex- traordinary concentration of publishing of the last four decades. The market- place of ideas remains well-stocked with lecterns for any writer bearing a message of any substance.

Note

There will undoubtedly be those who contend that I ignore the critiques of science, technology, the professions and scholarship generally by deconstructionists, multiculturalists, and others of their ilk. They will further argue that most of the doctrines of deconstructionism, etc., were incubated in the theoretical studies fashioned in faculties of literary studies or sociology. Hence, my characterization of the mandarins of popular culture, most of whom come from literary or social science backgrounds, is without foundation. I submit that the scholarly community has, after having been immobilized for a time by the shock of so radical a set of propositions and the rapidity of their reception attributable to the public relations and political skills possessed by their propagators, largely succeeded in demon- strating the emptiness, nay the sheer perversity, of this related set of "isms." Only time is now needed to restore the received cultural tradition to its full vitality and health.