LAST MONTH, André Schiffrin, the editor of the New Press, published a stirring indictment of the conglomeration of American publishing, in which six publishing houses now control four fifths of the market. Others, however, think that, in
QUESTION ONE:
André Schiffrin's book poses an urgent question: "Now that American life is affected by the seemingly never-ending growth of large corporations, it is fair to ask how much all of this matters. Is what we are witnessing truly something new or merely a variation on an old theme? Will it change fundamentally the way we read and what books are available to us?"

QUESTION TWO:
How will Amazon, ebooks, and print-on-demand change the role of the editor?

many ways, publishers, writers, and readers have never had it so good. For this special FEED dialog, we invited two editors -- John Donatich and Dave Eggers, of Basic Books and McSweeney's, respectively -- to join Schiffrin in discussing the state of publishing, and the impact emerging technologies might have upon it (Schiffrin declined to participate in the second half of this discussion). Please join us afterwards in the Loop to continue the conversation.

A NOTE ON THE PARTICIPANTS:

 

QUESTION ONE:

The past few years have seen an unprecedented amount of amalgamation in the publishing business, and the title of André Schiffrin's book -- The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read -- poses a fundamental question we'd like to begin with in this dialog. "Now that American life is affected by the seemingly never-ending growth of large corporations," André writes, "it is fair to ask how much all of this matters. Is what we are witnessing truly something new or merely a variation on an old theme? Will it change fundamentally the way we read and what books are available to us?"

JOHN:

The first thing to be said is that the U.S. has never supported more books being published and read in its history. More people are literate, college educated, and book buying than ever before. We have a greater number of publishers in business, and stats released just last week revealed that independent presses produce seventy percent of the books in a U.S. market that generates more than forty billion dollars in sales annually.

Encouraging as those trends might be, however, there is a change in what kinds of books are being published. But the situation is a complex one and no single business phenomenon can be attributed. The question before us that "American life is affected by the seemingly never-ending growth of large corporations... Will it change fundamentally the way we read and what books are available to us?" is a timely one. The big publishers, who comprise some eighty percent of all publishing volume, are largely owned by media conglomerates who are accustomed to earning profitability ratios of their other media holdings. Book publishing often disappoints those expectations and has to turn to a kind of publishing that will "please their parents."

The question really is not so much whether this is a bad thing as whether it is an inevitable one. Why should this surprise us? Big corporate publishing probably should not be the home of the literature of exile, the voice of discontent, and contrarian intention. Such publishing aspires to reflect free-market taste and the happy consensus. It celebrates agreement with its audience on the best-seller lists. Occasionally that agreement surprises with a work that is challenging and critical.

As publisher of Basic Books, I have seen the changes and challenges of being a small, intellectually based house within a large corporate culture and within a much smaller, independent one. When Basic was part of HarperCollins, we were less a small fish in a big pond than one out of water. Smartly, HC sold the imprint to the Perseus Books Group, and in the last three years, Basic has won a Pulitzer, a Pen, had three national bestsellers and eight regional best-sellers, doubled its revenues, and been able to publish a wide list that includes writers (polemical and analytical, research-based and narrative-driven) like Stephen Carter, Steven Pinker, George Lakoff, John Searle, Kevin Phillips, Niall Ferguson, Beverly Tatum, Daniel Bell, Lawrence Lessig, Howard Gardner, Samuel Huntington, and Irwin Yalom, to mention the first dozen off the top of my head. It's been a great story.

I began this by quoting the apparent health of independent presses; that is not the same thing as saying that they are producing books that otherwise would be marginalized. Many of them are wildly commercial presses and survive as a result. Some are defined by an ideological or political affinity. The bigger question is what happens to those contrarian and critical books. How are they received? What in our culture allows most books to die tiny deaths and several others to survive? The media that informs readers what and how to read, itself often the offspring of corporate conglomerates, also deserves serious examination. In order to survive or even get noticed, does a book have to be polemically succinct, news bitable, template-fitting, paradigm-familiar, nuance-free, expectation-skimming so that reviewers, interviewers, recommenders, and booksellers can point to it confidently and quickly?

DAVE:

"Now that American life is affected by the seemingly never-ending growth of large corporations," André writes, "it is fair to ask how much all of this matters. Is what we are witnessing truly something new or merely a variation on an old theme? Will it change fundamentally the way we read and what books are available to us?"

I think there are a lot of smaller questions you have to ask first, and, unfortunately, the answers point us in many different directions, few of them clearly anti-Big Company. Q: Has there been a decrease in quality books since all the amalgamation(s)? A: Well, no. The quality, from a production standpoint, is about where it's been for thirty years or so. Q: Are publishers more conservative in their publishing choices? Are less marketable books being squeezed out? A: Well, no, not really. Very very strange and uncommercial books are published every day by huge multinationals, proving that publishing is still, on pretty much every level, a fairly whimsical and impractical business. I could personally point to many very recent examples of extremely odd books being bought, for very decent sums, by large publishers. And that's good.

That's not to say, however, that they always do the best job with these books once they're published. The sheer size of these companies definitely favors the larger titles, while the smaller books are often forgotten, more or less completely. The thing that invariably happens when companies grow is that they become more impersonal and less responsive to their customers, not to mention those in their employ. And that invariably opens the door wide for smaller companies who can react quicker, more effectively, more personally -- first and foremost by treating customers, and in this case writers, too, like people. So as the larger publishers grow, smaller publishers actually benefit, by offering a clear alternative. Small publishers, I think, will proliferate at the same rate, or faster than, the rate at which these big companies merge.

And I have to say, as maddeningly slow and silly as are the customs of Big Publishing, they are, in my experience, very willing to at least pay some attention to new ideas -- even when that attention is directed toward red herrings like ebooks and print-on-demand, two concepts that -- tangential editorial coming -- deliver no visceral pleasure whatsoever to a reader. They both specialize in removing absolutely all of a book's tactile appeal -- and then they charge a premium for it. There will be a market for these things, but ebooks, for example, will most likely appeal to the sorts of people who wear calculator watches and ride solar-powered bikes. Gadgeteers. Our opinion is that the average reader likes owning books, actual books, period.

Not sure if I answered the question.

ANDRE:

I realize as I read the answers from Dave and John that it is really difficult to discuss a book that they haven't had a chance to read yet. The question I ask is the beginning of a long and detailed answer, which I hope would persuade them both when they have the time to actually look at the book. In the meantime, we're talking about different assumptions and different conclusions.

I think I disagree more with David in that having looked carefully at the catalogs of the major companies over the past decades from 1950 to the present, I do find an enormous difference in the quality of what's being published. Not the physical quality, which has in many degrees improved as he suggests but the intellectual quality. I devoted a whole chapter to this in the book, which I hope people will read. Just to give you an example, I mentioned the fact that in past times Simon & Schuster would publish such books as Bertrand Russell's On the Threat of the Nuclear Arms Race or that Harper's would publish Todd Gitlin's early sociological books, books that would not by any stretch of the imagination come from them now. To be sure, there are strange books that are published each day. Some of them are interesting. But they are chosen for their potential profit, not for their contribution to a world of ideas. That change is, I think, an overwhelming one, and one that I believe I have documented thoroughly.

David talks about publishers paying attention to new ideas, and in terms of format, that is certainly true. Ebooks, print-on-demand, any number of areas where it's felt that more money can be made are being investigated thoroughly and to be sure intelligently. But that has nothing to do with the content of the books, which is what I am trying to talk about.

As for John's comment, I agree with much of what he says, though we seem to have different numbers. The figures I have seen in Publisher's Weekly suggest that the U.S. book market accounts only for twenty-two billion in sales not forty. More to the point, not only do the top five conglomerates control eighty percent of the market, but the top twenty control ninety-three percent. So the small publishers may well publish the majority of the titles, but they have very little chance of selling any sizable numbers of these.

I agree with John that publishers like Basic and ourself are the beneficiaries of the changes in the large corporations. We too have a very distinguished list of authors in our catalog, which can be seen on the Web at www.thenewpress.com, so I won't list them here. There's no doubt that the independent firms will benefit enormously from the fact that the larger conglomerates have abandoned many areas of serious publishing. But it's a little bit like saying that it doesn't matter that the networks in broadcasting and television have given up all cultural programming because we have PBS and NPR. The book is about the change of the whole of publishing in the country. The large firms used to play a major role in intellectual publishing and the fact that they have changed that role is a dangerous trend.

In addition, John rightly points out in his final paragraph that we are not fighting on an even playing field. The conglomerates do control many of the media, and the chance of the books being published by the independents receiving equal time is rare. There are times when there is an open competition, when books such as Embracing Defeat by John Dower, which we published last year, can win not only the National Book Award, but the Pulitzer, the Bancroft, and six other major prizes. So talent can make its mark. But all too often, the distribution and the publicity mechanism are in the hands of the larger firms, making it harder for the smaller independents. But the battle is still an ongoing one.

DAVE:

Well, I wasn't aware that we were supposed to have read any particular book(s) to participate in this roundtable; it was my understanding that we were just chatting about current publishing trends. (Also, André, feel free to call me Dave.)

As for André's message: I am the last person to defend any or all conglomerates -- obviously, McSweeney's is about as tiny as a company can be, and it's that way for a reason -- but the bottom line is that I just don't feel threatened by the conglomerates. Much of the most groundbreaking publishing, here and abroad, for as long as you care to look, has been done by smaller firms. And that will simply never change.

And our experience with McSweeney's is telling, in that so far I've seen absolutely no barriers put before us -- certainly not by some nefarious amalgamated media giant out to squash all independents. Has McSweeney's, as a company with exactly one paid employee, had much trouble printing/distributing/selling our books thus far? We have not. Neither, I would posit, do the hundreds of other indie houses or university presses. If anything, our position outside the huge houses has been an advantage, on every level.

André mentions the publishing of the books of Bertrand Russell and Todd Gitlin as examples of the decline of intellectual rigor in mainstream publishing, and then implies that because, to cite Gitlin specifically, he's now being published by smaller presses, his sales are proportionately smaller, etc. But I would be curious to see if Gitlin's books, which have always been read by a particularly erudite class of people, sold much better under the larger houses. Have his sales and cultural influence sagged because he's being published by, say, the University of California Press? I could be very wrong, but my guess is that Gitlin's books are going to sell in the same quantities no matter who publishes them. And besides, don't we want our Todd Gitlins to be published by independent houses? Would he even allow his stuff to be put out by HarperCollins?

The fact is that things change. Are big houses publishing the Bertrand Russells of today? Maybe, maybe not. Is someone publishing the Bertrand Russells of today? Of course. If it's not S&S, it's FSG. If not FSG, then the University of Chicago Press.

Now, tangentially: When you imply that the TV networks have "abandoned cultural programming," I'd love to know just when it was that the major networks were involved in serious cultural programming. Are we counting Milton Berle and George Burns among yesteryear's purveyors of high TV art? This is not Britain, and we will never be able to get our airwaves back. They were given away decades ago, and it was astoundingly wrong, but here we are. But in general, I just have never actually expected my mainstream media to be providing me with the highest level of cultural output. In the year 2000, are we really looking to the networks to be educating us? It's like citing a rack of 'NSync CDs as proof of the decline of music. I mean, why are you in that section of the store in the first place?

Every time a big publisher dumbs down its list, the alternative presses get stronger. Just as has happened with cable television and the Internet, the growing access that more people have to the means of production and communication -- whether that's with desktop publishing, Web publishing, cable access, Web radio, etc -- the more choices there will be. It cannot be denied that the Web has exponentially increased the choices we have, in almost every media. Right now, anyone in the world can publish a book, slap an ISBN on it, and sell it on their own site or through Amazon, where it becomes instantly available to anyone else in the world. This is, frankly, an unprecedented and incredible time in the history of the printed word. There is now no middleman between any self-publisher and a worldwide audience. Would you have us go back to the days when a very few large houses in New York -- they with much more exclusive access to printing and distribution than now -- decided precisely what would be made available to the public?

My feeling is that the power of the large houses has peaked, and in the next ten years, we'll see a growing democratization of the publishing world, because the glacial pace and sometimes poor responsiveness of big publishing will be unable to keep up with the pace and vigor being set forth by the smaller houses. The opportunities are there, and with the help of the independent bookstores -- which, remember, still account for a majority of book sales in this country -- the small presses will thrive.

One final point: André says that On the Threat of the Nuclear Arms Race would never be published by a major house now. Just a few weeks ago, Random House published Tom Frank's One Market under God, not only a very uncommerical book, but one that exists to eviscerate the New Economy. So the situation is not as bleak, or as cut and dried, as it seems.

JOHN:

In reading André's response, I realized that the stats are revealingly irrelevant. My guess is that if the top 20 publishers control 80%+ of the book market, the remaining 20% is probably dominated by the next largest group of publishers. These concentrations are as regular as a rule of physics it seems. The significance of all this, though, is that certain kinds of companies have become excellent at dominating not only what gets published but what gets bought and read.

We could look at the Internet as the great slush pile of the cosmos: great unedited blurts of information and opinion ready to be accessed or ignored. Which sites become then the great selectors or editors of all this content? Is it the search agents (Yahoo, AOL, etc.) who try to be invisible networking systems? Is it the e-zines, like Slate, Salon, FEED, etc., who represent an aesthetic and/or political sensibility? The point is that exactly what publishers do and have always done aches to be done on the Internet. The reader or "end content user" needs to have a trustworthy intelligence to sift through, witness, choose and shape what gets read. All of which gives me great faith in the future need for editors and book publishers.

I do agree with Dave that a surprising number of valid and weirdly unlikely books get published -- and do get published at big commercial houses. They may not be Bertrand Russell, but then again the very posture of serious nonfiction has changed somewhat. It's less given to pronouncements or alarm bells. It seems to be rooted in self-doubt; the nature of inquiry is less absolutist. For better or worse, autobiography seems to be the starting point for any questioning. We create new forms and stretch the parameters of nonfiction, publishing "biographies" not of people but of ideas, characteristics, water -- a fascinating new kind of abstraction (or at least conceit). We insist on scientific and empirical knowledge of the way things work but we insist also on preserving and honoring their mystery. It is intolerable that anything be explained away. We struggle and grope, avoiding anything too definite or overdetermined. Look at how we approach titles and subtitles. How many of these have you heard: A meditation on... In Search of... The End of... To me, there is an ambivalence about the certainty of knowledge or ideology. Doubt has become the starting point of inquiry. This might also make books somewhat more free, spontaneous, personal, and creative. Or just less certain.

Well, I really wanted to talk about the miracle of on-demand printing and how to get books noticed, but I'll save that for next time.

 

QUESTION TWO:

John, let's end by taking you up on that question: How will Amazon, ebooks, and print-on-demand change the role of the editor?

JOHN:

I like Dave's feeling that the power of the large houses has peaked; it's hard to imagine sustaining this kind of growth. In fact, it's probably that kind of stalling that set in motion the fury of merging that has happened in the last decade; there simply was no other way to grow except to buy and absorb. I also agree that the marketplace is going to respond to the nimble way in which small publishers are able to act. We've been awarded books simply by pledging our willingness to get them into the marketplace more quickly than others could or would.

One correction: It's a sad fact but the independent bookstores actually represent only fifteen to twenty percent of book sales in this country, not the majority. However, the e-tailer bookstores (Amazon, bn.com) have had an amazing and beneficial impact on the industry. For the first time really, you can see a media hit have a direct and immediate impact. You can tell what event sells what kinds of books and what confluence of events sells lots of books. Also, the brick-and-mortar bookstore is indispensable for the book browser, who wants to physically see and touch what cross section of the marketplace is represented there. The shopper on Amazon tends to be more directed; s/he knows what kind of book or actual book is needed. The customer taste-profiling that e-tailers are starting to do is both sophisticated and limited by its own structure, but the potential in such a venture is huge. There could be a time when all those customer comments become an interactive dialogue in which sensibilities can be cross-referenced and find each other; that potential is exciting. Lastly, the book e-tailers provide a vast database service; it's a great bibliographical resource. For the consumer, it also provides the illusion that every book is virtually available. It exists physically on the screen and one can buy it. Even if you don't have the actual book yet, you get the gratification of the purchase.

Perseus has invested in on-demand printing, which can print any number of books on request. This allows us to keep books actively in print that otherwise might have disappeared because we could not sell enough copies in any given year to justify running a minimum print run. These digitized files turn into good quality paperbacks very easily and quickly. Nothing theoretically needs to disappear any more. Monographs and dissertations will be available electronically, which opens up whole new avenues of research that can cross reference and search indices, text, and bibliographies with the habits learned from Web surfing. I believe this will have serious impact on the future scholar whose research will require newly nimble, resourceful, and creative methodology.

As modes of publishing multiply, the role of the editor will largely stay the same. That role can be described in several ways: refining sensibility, gatekeeper, chooser, shaper, developer. The reading world still depends on someone to choose and prepare something worthwhile. A publishing house's identity or imprimatur is largely the (critical and commercial) value and success of its choices. Most relevantly, an editor's major duty is even more important now: to remain transparent or invisible. An editor has to allow for the illusion of a book's seamlessness; that nothing gets in the way of the reader's experience of a text. In the new electronic book, an editor will have to learn to lose the vertical bias of the physical book form. In other words, an editor will have to learn a new empathy with a new kind of reader: one who can sample the text as a fluid stream, alter narrative, search for word correspondences, create customized tables of contents and indices. As content learns to "stream," so does the editor have to update his/her own editing techniques to empower that.

DAVE:

Editors should be facilitators. They should help a writer do his or her best work. They should spend a lot of time saying Yes, Go, Yes, Great, Keep going. (Though many use their mouths to say Nah, Better not, Too expensive, Too long, Too difficult, Make it lighter, etc.) When the connection between editor and writer is a good one, then a writer's work can become much, much better. But how many editors actually edit? A fairly small percentage. And not everyone needs an editor -- and if they do, do they need an editor working for a large company, who sits in an office in midtown Manhattan (as good as many of them are)? Probably not. Most of the writers I know have their work scrutinized by their friends, or hire outside editors. So these forms -- ebooks, etc. -- will in many cases cut out another middleman, in this case, the editors.

Then again, it opens up a larger market for freelance editors, a profession that has of course been around forever. But John's right in that books under this or that imprint, endorsed by a certain editor or publishing house, will signal to a reader a certain quality, or flavor, or whatever. At McSweeney's, we're hoping that people who like McSweeney's in general will pay attention to the books we publish -- will trust our taste enough to give the books we publish a shot. And part of what people are attracted to is the way we don't top-edit so much. We try to give authors control over pretty much everything, thus allowing for the creation of the most personal book possible, on all levels. Lawrence Krauser, whose book we're publishing next, asked to create, by hand, a different cover for each of his ten-thousand copy print run, and of course we agreed. And by doing that, we think, we make Lawrence happy, and we make readers happy, even though our role is reduced.

But when it comes to the actual editing, it won't change what I do at all. When we're publishing a book or an issue of McSweeney's, I'll still be in a little room making marks on manuscripts.

Share your thoughts on the state of publishing in the Loop.