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portal: Libraries and the Academy 1.4 (2001) 535-536



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Book Review

The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read


The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, André Schiffrin. London, New York: Verso, 2000. 181 p. $23 (IBSN 1-85984-763-3)

Good publishers are vital to the academic enterprise because they nurture scholars' writing, enforce standards of quality, and promote and distribute publications to those who need them. Librarians and academics understand these basic contributions, but many probably have questions about the inner workings of the publishing world and the effects of recent trends in consolidation. André Schiffrin's The Business of Books addresses those questions in a stimulating memoir and analysis of trade publishing.

Schiffrin's story of his career--first at New American Library, then at Pantheon from 1961 until 1990 when he founded The New Press--shows that an effective publisher must be cosmopolitan, visionary, and very industrious. Success requires wide travel and even broader reading, imaginative understanding of the interests and needs of readers, and excellent connections (some books result from sitting next to the right person at an event). Particularly at Pantheon, Schiffrin and his colleagues published an extraordinarily impressive group of authors. Many of these, for example, Studs Terkel, E.P. Thompson, and Michel Foucault, remain staples on undergraduate and graduate reading lists. Important books clearly bring great satisfaction to a publisher, but there is constant tension. Schiffrin stresses that the first duty of a publisher is to produce books that encourage wide-ranging debate on important issues. Yet there is always the need to make money. Indicative of the tension between these two poles is the frequency with which he celebrates both best sellers and "demanding" or "challenging" books (normally hard to sell).

Life at Pantheon ultimately ended in bitter frustration. Schiffrin details the fate of this firm as exemplary of the brutal decline in trade publishing. Takeovers by conglomerates have destroyed most of the fine publishing houses on both sides of the North Atlantic. Now the behemoths of trade publishing aim for books that will make enormous profits in the blink of an eye. Such books dilute content to appeal to a wide audience. To attract such blockbusters, top executives with seven-figure salaries give celebrities (not necessarily writers) colossal advances. This environment forces out small-run, demanding books, particularly those that are leftist or counter-cultural and might make readers hostile to the ascendancy of multinational corporations. [End Page 535]

Interestingly, Schiffrin describes numerous instances when plans for bestsellers failed. The explanation perhaps relates to the fact that book publishing historically has returned four percent profit. After all, unlike STM journals, books are not paid for before they are created. There is real risk with books. Given the frequency of failure and the normal rate of profit, one wonders if conglomerates eventually will abandon the standard trade book. Certainly, Schiffrin describes how conglomerates readily unload unprofitable publishing units. More and more, publishing giants concentrate on the profitable tip of the information pyramid - "reference books and information retrieval." (p. 117)

Consolidation of trade publishing has limited the choice and quality of books for the general reader. The academic world and its libraries necessarily suffer in such an environment, for the ivory tower is not far removed from the larger culture around it. Nevertheless, one realizes from Schiffrin's account that there are still numerous sources of books for academic libraries: the university presses, ideologically driven publishers like the Cato Institute and Monthly Review, strong trade houses like W. W. Norton, and his own The New Press, and islands of quality within the conglomerates like Houghton Mifflin - just to name publishers from the United States. For the academy the greater concern is not so much whether there will be books to buy, but whether its libraries will have funds to buy them. For academic libraries, the crucial problem is that a handful of journal...

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