Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (review)

Following his 2005 survey of scholarly publishing, Books in the Digital Age, John B. Thompson turns his attention to trade book publishing in Great Britain and the United States. The readers most likely to benefit from Merchants of Culture will be authors who crave assurance of their importance and who want to understand agents. The final chapter, 'Trouble in the Trade,' exposes dangers even experienced authors overlook. Thompson also has good news for aspiring authors: 'Ironically, in a world preoccupied by numbers, the author with no track is in some ways in a strong position, considerably stronger than the author who has published one or two books with modest success and muted acclaim, simply because there is no hard data to constrain the imagination, no disappointing sales figures to dampen hopes and temper expectations' (200). Thompson is prudent in his method, generous with generalization, and sympathetic to his subject. Publishing professionals will encounter much that is familiar and can skip merrily ahead, but Thompson's attention to different segments of the trade offers something new for everyone.

Thompson begins by defining the 'field,' following the example of Pierre Bourdieu. He counts five different kinds of 'capital' in trade publishing: 'economic' (cash and infrastructure); 'human' (management and staff); 'social' (networks); 'intellectual' (licences and copyrights); and 'symbolic' (prestige). After 400 pages it is evident why he ranked them in that order.

Thompson says, 'It is vital to see that the field of trade publishing does not consist only of publishers: there are other players who inhabit this field and who exercise a great deal of power within it, and we will never understand what happens within publishing firms unless we see that their actions are to some extent responses to forces and developments that lie outside their direct control' (100). He spreads a wide net, gathering in vendors and middlemen, audiobooks and movie tie-ins, authors and agents, print on demand, optical scanning, piracy, Oprah, BookScan, Google, YouTube, and blogs. Of course, he has limits. His account of the trade presence of university presses is confined to the New York-Boston ambit (181-6). Canada is overlooked. He bypasses libraries and their associations, barely mentions the Association of American Publishers, and ignores government agencies that tax and censor. Book reviewing is discussed in passing in scattered places (see 243-4) but is not taken up as a distinct topic. Even so, Thompson covers much.

Before he gets to publishers, he introduces two other major players: retailers and literary agents. His research into retailers looks past bookstores (used, new, and online) to mass merchandise outlets like Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco, and the special case of Amazon. His chapter on literary agents surveys the profession from its beginnings in England in the late nineteenth century to the exceptional careers of Morton Janklow and Andrew Wylie. Only in chapter 3 does he focus attention on publishers. Late in the book he lays out what he calls the 'logic of the field,' justifying his chapter sequence (291-2).

Thompson's chapter on publishing corporations summarizes the acquisition and divestment that led to the current consolidation of trade publishing, with 63.7 per cent of the US market controlled by twelve conglomerates, four of the largest five of which are foreign owned (116-7). Foreign conglomerates such as Bertelsmann were willing and able to buy large publishing firms in the United States because 'they don't have to deal with the Wall Street quarterly mentality and they can afford to take a longer term strategic view' (112).

Thompson respects giants. He believes the great publishers had to grow enormous to defend themselves from the giant retailers and says that small publishers should not fear large ones; instead, publishers large and small must battle the chains and mighty Amazon. He writes that 'the rise of large publishing corporations has gone hand in hand with the proliferation...