Ref l ec t ions on the P u b l i s h i n g Scene

Touting a Handful of Bobtails Deserving Short Odds in the Book Trade Research

Sweepstakes

Richard Abel

T he logical anomaly of a trade g roup devoted to the propaga t ion and dis- seminat ion of informat ion and knowledge, knowing as little about the

market for and the uses of its products as does the publ ish ing trade has been for decades so c o m m o n an observat ion as to have become an old saw. Yet, however often repeated, it remains as t rue today as it was about a century ago w h e n the observation seems first to have been made. Over the years some of the book trade apologists for this strange and w o n d r o u s state of affairs have p leaded the meager resources, financial and personnel, available in so fiscally marginal an economic sector.

The more c o m m o n response has traditionally been that those mak ing up the book trade know perfectly well by w h o m and for wha t purposes books and journals are used. After all, this a rgument runs, people have been reading for millennia, and their motivat ions and the outcomes thereof have been a part of the corpus of received w i s d o m since the beginnings of literacy. Furthermore, add these protagonists , d idn ' t most of us come to the t rade by way of the decisive influence of reading u p o n our unde r s t and ing of the wor ld and our place in it? By virtue of our p ro found familiarity, indeed intimacy, with the uses of the wri t ten word, we know, if not precisely at least well enough, wha t those uses are and their extent.

But enough evidence to the contrary exists to give at least a partial lie to such facile certitude. The book and journal world, when considered whole, presents too m a n y easily identified contradictions to give us any comfort or assurance with the not ion that we in the trade possess any clear or comprehens ive under- s tanding of what people out there are do ing with the things we produce and trade in.

Probably the most obvious and ove rwhe lming contradict ion is handed us every time we make the briefest excursion into a bookstore. One of the first and most readily accessible major points of sale is the sales tables. The piles of ever-changing titles cannot but astonish the most casual and un in formed of store customers. Were it not for the ubiqui ty and extent of remainder ing,

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thoughtful members of the trade would reel in dismay at the sight of such a massive dissipation of the scarce resources available to so financially marginal a sector as ours.

I do not have in mind that fraction of all titles remaindered which are books of entertainment, both fiction and nonfiction. As I argued in an earlier column in Publishing Research Quarterly, books of entertainment are by nature mass- market products and unrelated, save in their appearance in codex format, to the codices whose contents are devoted to the propagation and dissemination of literature, information, and knowledge. Books of entertainment are simply not amenable to that kind of rational analysis and hence reasonable forecasting which books of greater substance are. Rather, I have in mind all those books of serious intent written to serve genuine aesthetic and intellectual needs which are also seen these days on the remainder tables.

As a second exception, I exclude that fraction of the titles piled on the sales tables published with the clear, even if ethically questionable, aim of publishing to remainder. But even excepting these melancholy examples of a business code better suited to shabby peripheral enterprises, any attentive observer must be overwhelmed by the vast numbers of sound titles dedicated to serving useful purposes to be found on the remainder tables.

As a consequence, our attentive observer cannot help but draw the further doleful conclusion that thousands of failures of judgment are being made in hundreds of publishing firms every year. These mult i tudinous errors in judg- ment are not simply the handiwork of a handful of unskilled or careless editorial and marketing people in a few firms. Rather, these throngs of walking-wounded titles arise out of widespread misapprehensions of the genuine and fundamen- tal markets for books of various classes and kinds.

I must hasten to add another caveat. In our less-than-perfect world, no pub- lisher can hope to correctly estimate globally (or bookseller locally) the size of the market for every book published. Nor can marketing people invariably characterize and promote every title correctly. As a consequence, even under the best of circumstances, there will be some small number of titles in any year which will languish and in time have to find their way to the remainder merchant or the pulp mill. My argument simply is that a radically improved unders tanding of how various classes of titles are used, well grounded in sound and ongoing reader research, would massively reduce the number of titles making their way to the remainder tables.

An aged bangtail which continues to display a remarkable staying power, and so should command a good purse and short odds, is romance fiction. Clearly all the titles falling within this class are devoted to amusing and divert- ing a particular species of reader for a few hours. By virtue of this function, they can be encompassed within the larger genus of books of entertainment and can be v iewed as a surrogate for that larger genus. This is very useful, for if the function of romance fiction in the psychic life of its particular population of readers were well understood, we might be able to extrapolate some bits of

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such knowledge to other classes of books within the economically very impor- tant genus of books of entertainment.

Equally clearly the numbers of copies of books of romance fiction sold are very large. Not a few romance fiction titles outsell, in quantitative terms, many of the titles on the so-called bestseller lists. Despite their shadowy presence (the consequence of their treatment as poor relatives by the self-appointed Grand Panjandrums of the popular book trade), they offer a fertile field for research into the use of books, not only because they support such a large readership but also because they have developed an alternative, subterranean aftersale marketing network and have been able to compete successfully in the brutal marketplace of film, television, and video.

Enough has probably been noted here relative to the research value of the size of the reader base of romance fiction. But it should also be noted that the class of readers supporting this large market is apparently very well contained. That is, those who read romance fiction seem to allot their reading time largely to this class of books only. Because they appear to range little beyond the field of romance fiction, they are a readily identifiable, and easily reached, research population.

A second desirable research characteristic of this class of books and readers derives from the emergence of an alternative network of used bookstores de- voted to recycling out-of-print titles to afficionados. As I understand the case, only a single printing of a romance fiction title is commonly produced. When it is sold out, copies are no longer available through the usual commercial channels. Devotees who failed to acquire a copy of a favorite author in a timely way were therefore forced to find a copy among the like-minded. An O.P. book market--the O.P. book trade being an almost classic example of the free-market economy--quickly sprang up to recycle this large and growing body of O.P. titles. This continent-wide network of romance fiction O.P. book- stores makes a splendid point of entry for research.

Last, but most important, it would behoove the book trade to understand why romance fiction readers have in large numbers remained faithful to reading books in the face of what seems on first appearance much more satisfying entertainment technologies--the movies, television, and video. The latter offer live people engaged in dialogue and action in a pleasing setting, and all in color. One might expect that such a full-scale, rounded presentation, appealing to all kinds of basic human interests and allurements, would have monopolized the time and attention of that self-defined population of romance afficionados. But not so. Why? In an earlier column in Publishing Research Quarterly, I ad- vanced the hypothesis that the staying power of the book in the face of such daunting competition comes from the greater satisfaction readers of books find in limning out much of the detail of the unfolding story and in nuancing the writer's storyline to proportions better suiting their psychic world. Only a significant research undertaking could lead us to the truth of the matter.

A couple of other observations deserve some attention. First, Harlequin En-

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terprises undertook a major marketing research program before launching their path-breaking series of romance fiction. Several other publishers followed their research model before inaugurating competing lines, including Fawcett and Simon & Schuster. This research was largely aimed at what readers preferred in terms of storyline, characters, and so forth, telling us little about the role reading this class of book plays in the life of readers. Others, and most notably Janice Radway in her book, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, have undertaken to explore this much more important question of the use of such books. While some may quarrel with Ms. Radway's conclusions, which derive from the narrow socially activist interpretive structure she em- ploys, her work proves the feasibility of undertaking such research--not simply in the arena of romance novels but for other classes of books as well.

Research on this issue in the context of this class of readers and books might prove useful well beyond this particular research domain by providing useful clues on the ways in which electronic forms of information and knowledge packaging and dissemination might be used. It might also, and possibly more importantly, shed light on kinds of packaging to be avoided. Such clues and insights would greatly improve publishers' and booksellers' odds when con- sidering the tradeoffs between entries into a new medium vs. standing pat. Clearly this jade deserves some research into what makes her run so marvel- ously well.

I could go on at considerable length pointing in comparable detail to other bobtails of other classes of titles and readers on the track for which research would be of more or less value to rationalizing the book world were matters of space and readers' continued interest not respected. So I will close this betting sheet by pointing out only one other blooded horse deserving many punters' critical interest and attention.

There is one publishing domain which can only be characterized as sur- rounded by dark rumors infrequently uttered--and quickly amended if publicly censured by figures of any stature in the world of scholarship.. I have in mind the scholarly journal. Journals have in the last four decades moved to a position of appearing to dominate the information transfer process in broad areas of scholarship, particularly in the sciences and social sciences. The place of the modern journal in the conduct of the scholarly enterprise can with some accu- racy be measured by the enormous growth of the international publishing firms engaged in publishing both scholarly books and journals. The vast bulk of this growth has come from the journal divisions: that attributable to the book divisions can essentially be viewed as the twin outcomes of worldwide inflation and price increases resulting from reduced print runs consequent on declining unit sales. A more telling measure of the apparent dominance of the scholarly journal is to be found in the startling changes in budgetary allocations by the world's leading scholarly and research libraries in the last thirty-five years. In the 1960s the budget for books accounted for 60 to 70 percent of the total materials acquisition budget, while the amount allocated to journals

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amounted to 30 to 35 percent. Today this ratio has been inverted: 60 to 75 percent to journals, 25 to 30 percent to books. In short, journals seem to have replaced the book as the primary tool of scholarly communication across a wide spectrum of the world of scholarship.

This air of dominance has been associated with a substantially revised method of calculating the worth of members of university faculties and, hence, hierarchial rankings, salary levels, and levels of institutional support. This association between publishing journal articles and measures of academic worth has been summed up in the overly familiar and simplistic formula, "Publish or perish." The allocation of the fruits of three decades' growth of government research funding has largely been tied to the same measure of journal paper output. Clearly huge sums of money, the occupational rankings of hundreds of thousands of highly trained people, and the stature of thousands of scholarly institutions around the world are mediated through the vehicle of the journal. Small wonder that dark rumors circle about so critical an instrumentality.

For the purposes of this column, matters of scholarly fraud, plagiarism, and associated shenanigans can be put aside. The question here is the ways in which journals are used. The terms of reference of the word use must be even further narrowed, however, for if broadly construed the term might legitimately be expected to encompass the various practices employed by some aimed at exploiting the system by manipulating the ways in which they function within it: the least publishable unit, salami publishing, publishing the same research results in modified form in several journals, etc. So we must also put aside considerations of such uses, however interesting the inquiry might be, to focus narrowly on the use readers of journals make of them.

Some of the most telling information at our disposal derives from journal usage studies conducted in libraries. Virtually all the studies of which I am aware find that a very significant percentage of journals subscribed to by any particular library are seldom, if ever, taken off the shelf. Other reports tell of librarians so bold as to terminate subscriptions on their own initiative who have received no subsequent complaint from the faculty members who initially requested the library to subscribe to those journals. From these uncoordinated and ad hoc studies the observer might conclude that the acute sense of need expressed by faculty, research staff, and students for journals is at best an overstatement of actual journal use.

Such a conclusion is belied by other library studies which report use of some journals so heavy that multiple subscriptions seem the only satisfactory re- sponse. The burgeoning business of document supply, first initiated in a major way by the British Library at Boston Spa, but with numerous recent competitors in the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America, speaks volumes about the place of the journal and the papers which make it up in modern scholarship.

Where in this conflicting evidence does the truth about readers' use of jour- nals lie? Had this question been seriously addressed beginning some years ago, resulting in a defensible set of findings to guide publishers, librarians,

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and authors, the present increasingly nasty quarrels involving journal publish- ers, librarians, faculty, and data-processing experts need never have reached the pitch of mutual name-calling and recrimination which now marks their en- counters. And such research would have provided a firm foundation for the kind of information presently going up on the international and domestic electronic networks employed by scholars and others genuinely concerned with serious cultural matters. As it is, a substantial portion of the "cultural material" on the networks seems to be an absolute jumble, ranging from the first-rate through utter tripe to the positively demented. Given human nature and the radical egalitarianism presently abroad, all but the most committed disciples of Dr. Pangloss must shrink at the prospect of trying to make their way through or across the mountains of drivel which the serious user of the information highway will be compelled to surmount to find anything useful, absent the guidelines which could have flowed from a sustained research pro- gram aimed at understanding the users and uses of the journal literature.

It is still not too late. Much good work leading to widely useful insights could still be undertaken in the context of the well-known and widely used printed journal environment. Will this work be done before the electronic information transfer channels become clogged with the noxious weeds which will almost certainly prosper in the new and ecologically propitious electronic information environment? The initiative for inaugurating research on this last issue, as well as the many others which cry out for a broader and deeper understanding of the uses made of printed books and journals, must lie with the book and journal trade. Were some one of the leading organs of the trade to take the lead, a considerable cadre of qualified research people could readily be recruited to undertake the job. Equally importantly, several of the large foundations which have over the years maintained an interest in the book and journal could, I expect, be counted upon to come forward with significant financial support.

I'd tout any of these nags as odds-on favorites on which the book and journal trades should place a substantial amount of money. The returns would, I'd wager, compare more than favorably with the negative returns now being realized on many of the bets recently placed.