I
came across a book that was published in 2000: Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future. The author, Jason Epstein, was the
right person to pen it nearly two decades ago.
The book offers
insights as to how book publishing functioned, dating back to when the author
broke in during the 1950s and even references how things were back in the
1920s. To now read a book nearly 20 years after it was written, one that tried
to predict where book publishing was heading, is a very interesting exercise.
This
book is an expanded version of three lectures that he had delivered in October
1999 at the New York Public Library, sponsored by the Center for Scholarship
Writers.
Here are some
selected excerpts from the book – I think you will find them revealing:
Movable Type to Electronic Books
1.
In
the past dozen years movable type has been replaced by technologies that were
unimaginable when I entered the book business in the 1950s. Like the technologies of oral and written
language and of movable type, these electronic technologies will radically
change the way information is transmitted, stories are read, and cultures are
formed. Book publishing in the next ten
or twenty years will be very different from the quaint trade that I entered
fifty years ago.
Print on Demand Books
2.
Books
as physical objects will not pass away to be replaced by electronic signals
reader from glowing, hand-held screens. Nor will bookstores vanish. But they will coexist hereafter with a vast
multilingual directory of digitized texts, assembled from a multitude of
sources, perhaps “tagged” for easy reference, and distributed
electronically. From this directory
readers at their home computers may transfer the materials they select to
machines capable of printing and binding single copies no demand at innumerable
remote sites and perhaps eventually within their own homes.
A Concentration of Best-Selling Author Dominance
3.
Between
1986 and 1996 the share of all books sold represented by the thirty top
best-sellers nearly doubled as retail concentration increased. But within roughly the same period,
sixty-three of the one hundred bestselling titles were written by a mere six
writers, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton,
and Danielle Steel – a much greater concentration than in the past and a mixed
blessing to publishers, who sacrifice much of their normal profit, and often
incur losses, to keep powerful authors like these.
Retail Booksellers in a Digital World
4.
It
is less clear how new technologies will transform retail bookselling as the
chains in their over-saturated marketplace face competition from Internet
booksellers and the prospect of limitless virtual inventories available on
demand in electronic or printed form at random locations. These factors have already discouraged
investment in the retail chains, whose share prices have stagnated at low
levels. Nonetheless, a civilization
without retail booksellers is unimaginable.
Like shrines and other sacred meeting places, bookstores are essential
artifacts of human nature. The feel of a
book taken from the shelf and held in the hand is a magical experience, linking
writer to reader. But to compete with
the World Wide Web, bookstores of the future will be different from the mass-oriented
superstores that now dominate the retail marketplace. Tomorrow’s stores will have to be what the
Web cannot be: tangible, intimate, and
local communal shrines, perhaps with coffee bars offering pleasure and wisdom
in the company of others who share one’s interests, where the book one wants
can always be found and surprises and temptations spring from every shelf.
A New Literary Culture
5.
In
the technological future, readership of such books will expand as authors, with
the help of editors and publicists, and no longer constrained by the turnover
requirements of a physical marketplace, present their work directly to readers
over the World Wide Web, where word of mouth is instantaneous, credible, and
widespread. Publishers had welcomed
television as a powerful tool to promote their titles to the mass market
created by the malls. But television is
a one-way medium addressed to an undifferentiated audience to which access is
at the discretion of the broadcaster.
The Internet, by connecting readers and writers one on one, offers the
possibility of almost limitless choice and foreshadows a literary culture
thrilling if also alarming in its potential diversity.
A Consortium Sales Solution
6.
If
publishers formed a consortium to sell their books directly to readers over the
Internet, the logic of Internet marketing, to which middlemen are extraneous,
would be acknowledged and the problem of insufficient margin would be
overcome. What I had in mind was a
consortium open to all publishers, old and new, large and small, on equal
terms. This consortium would create a
combined annotated catalog of all its titles and maintain warehouses where
books from diverse publishers would be packed and shipped directly to Internet
buyers. The elimination of wholesalers
and retailers would permit the consortium’s component publishers to reduce
prices to consumers, pay higher royalties to writers, and increase their own
margins. To the extent that books are
sold by the consortium directly to consumers, the problem of returns from
overstocked retailers would also be eliminated.
The concept of such a consortium was
simple. To implement it proved
impossible. Though the Internet made
such a consortium sooner or later inevitable, the conglomerate managers to whom
I presented the idea were not enthusiastic, nor was Jeff Bezos when I suggested
to him that a solution to his problem of insufficient margin might be to
convert Amazon from a retailer to a brokerage, transmitting orders for a fee to
a publishers’ consortium, if one could be arranged.
The Future
7. My
guess is that future publishing units will be small, though they may be related
to a central financial source. To the
extent that writers deliver the contents of their minds directly to the minds
of their readers over the Web, as Stephen King has done, such vestigial
publishing work as marketing, sales, shipping, and warehousing together with
their bureaucracies and inefficiencies can be minimized and assigned to
specialist firms. Book publishing may
therefore become once more a cottage industry of diverse, creative autonomous
units, or so there is now reason to believe.
According
to the book’s flaps, here is what you need to know about the author:
“Jason
Epstein has led arguably the most creative career in book publishing during the
past half-century. In 1952, while a young editor at Doubleday, he created
Anchor Books, which launched the so-called quality paperback revolution and
established the trade paperback format. In the following decade he became
cofounder of The New York Review of Books. In the 1980s he
created the Library of America, the prestigious publisher of American classics
and The Reader’s Catalog, the precursor of online bookselling…
“For
many years, Jason Epstein was editorial director of Random House. He was the
first recipient of the National Book Award for Distinguished Service to
American Letters and was given the Curtis Benjamin Award by the Association of
American Publishers for “inventing new kinds of publishing and editing.”
He has edited many well-known novelists, including Norman Mailer, Vladimir
Nabokov, E.L. Doctorow, Philip Roth, and Gore Vidal, as well as many important
writers of nonfiction.”
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