Customer Reviews

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

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Mr. Schiffrin has used the benefit of 40 years of publishing experience to develop a powerful argument that society is being denied access to important new ideas through books. This is occurring because of changes in ownership (and management philosophies) in the publishing industry, and similar effects in book retailing.

Along the way in telling this story, you will read many interesting stories about publishing now-famous authors like Gunnar Myrdal (later winner of the Novel Prize) and Studs Terkel.

The former economic concept of a publisher was to earn an adequate income overall, and to operate as frugally as possible. Editors were paid like academics, and physical plant was modest. Profits above what was absolutely needed could be plowed back into books that presented important ideas, but might not earn their keep, and books that would require time to develop an audience.

Books that challenged the conventional wisdom were often best sellers in this environment. That kind of public opinion shift seldom happens today through books.

Mr. Schiffrin uses his own publishing experiences as a microcosm of these issues. Pantheon, which his father founded, was sold to Random House in 1961, and mr. Schiffrin joined to work in marketing. After Random House was bought by RCA, financial discipline was brought in to require that each book seek to earn a profit from its own activities in the near term. That began a process of trimming and redirecting lists.

Later, Random House was sold again, this time to S.I. Newhouse. Plans were soon afoot to greatly reduce Pantheon, and the staff eventually resigned en masse to protest just as the ax started to fall. Mr. Schiffrin left, also, and began a search for funding to start a new publishing house, The New Press. He was able to launch this independent publisher with the help of several foundation grants and W.W. Norton being willing to distribute the books. Random House, meanwhile, did not grow its profits very much and was sold to Bertelsmann in 1998.

During these intervening years, Newhouse actually lost lots of money seeking to improve profits in book publishing. Enormous losses occurred in unearned advances in seeking blockbusters. Overhead costs soared as salaries, marketing, and expense accounts were expanded enormously.

By seeking ever higher near-term profits, publishers have established a market test for new books that makes it more attractive to publish an offshoot of a new Hollywood movie than a book challenging the political orthodoxy. Books like the former have swelled while the latter have dwindled. Many publishers and imprints now publish in very few categories, with limited types of books in those remaining categories.

The industry has also become very concentrated. Ten publishers accounted for 75 percent of U.S. book sales in 1999. The publishing operations themselves are now small parts of large media conglomerates. Some of these publishing conglomerates seem to use book publishing as a way to curry favor for other parts of their businesses. Rupert Murdoch appeared to have done so in publishing a certain work while not publishing others, in a way that would be most appealing to Chinese politicians while trying to get permission to take Sky Broadcasting into mainland China.

Even university presses are under tighter budgets. This means that about 1 percent of the book publishing resources are available through independent, university, and religious-organization-connected presses to open the doors to unpopular ideas. He argues that this is a challenge to our very concept of a free society. I agree wholeheartedly.

The main countervailing force is the Internet. No one knows how this will play out, but it could change the economics of book publishing to allow independent publishers and self-publishing to flourish. If electronic publishing becomes more mainstream, fewer authors may feel that they need the traditional publishers. Stephen King's now-famous experiment of publishing his novella electronically is described. Time will tell how this will all turn out.

In the meantime, I have a suggestion for all readers. We should each take some sizeable percentage of our reading and dedicate it to reading works in subjects we would normally not consider, authors we do not know already and who are not well-known generally, and from publishers who are not in the top ten. This would encourage a greater diversity of ideas more than anything that publishers can do. I promise to be sure to do this with my reviews from now on to help you follow up on this idea and have successful reading experiences at the same time.

Overcome more stalled thinking through your reading!

...

At least from a writer's perspective, all of Schiffrin's assertions about the publishing industry are stunningly true. In fact, my agent quit the business some years ago after attending a lecture by a revoltingly wealthy and revoltingly arrogant agent who assured her and the rest of the audience that yes, money is indeed the bottom line.

As Mr. Schiffrin points out, publishers are simply not interested in authors anymore, they are interested only in the book being submitted. That is to say, there is no attempt-as in the days of Max Perkins, the legendary Scribner's editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe-to invest in an author whose first book may not be a great seller, nor even her second but who will nonetheless write books the house can be proud of and may some day turn produce that most marvelous of beasts, the literary bestseller (a la Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Updike, Toni Morrison).

In a smooth, flowing voice that, while it may lack bells and whistles, is exceptionally lucid, Schiffrin tells the story of how publishing houses went from being, for the most part, "family owned and small, content with the modest profits that came from a business that still saw itself as linked to intellectual and cultural life" to an industry in which some of the executives, such as Alberto Vitale at Random House, freely admit they are too busy to read a book! I was riveted almost from the opening page.

Some of the reviewers have accused Schiffrin of being elitist-maybe because he lives on the Upper West Side or because he believes editors should have some say-beyond profitability--in what is being published. They find him distressingly left wing. The fact is, Schiffrin is arguing for all editors, EVERYwhere to get behind authors of their choice. Many small houses will present many diverse voices rather than 5 huge conglomerates chasing the same dollar with their celebrity memoirs and Tom Clancy thrillers. He argues for the freedom for editors and houses to express their tastes and to let the public decide whether that taste suits them or not. But if a book never sees the light of day because corporate executives, who often know nothing about books (Vitale, Schiffrin points out "did eventually agree to read the novels of Judith Krantz" published by his own company), decide it won't sell enough copies, then you have market censorship. When that happens on a large enough scale, it's not the end of democracy, but democracy is certainly weakened by a shrinking pool of ideas and opinions from which to draw. Schiffrin quotes the German publisher, Klaus Wagenbach: "If books with small print runs disappear, the future will die. Kafka's first book was published with a printing of 800 copies. Brecht's first work merited 600. What would have happened if someone had decided that was not worth it?" Somehow, advocating books with tiny print runs like this doesn't strike me as elitist.

If you are even slightly connected to the book business, if you are at all interested in books, if you give any thought at all to the future of the free exchange of ideas in this country and abroad, this is a must-read. I can't recommend it highly enough.

One of the most important functions of publishers for the last 400 years has been to discover and develop new authors who have something important to say about their culture. The development of a truly democratic society depends upon the free exchange of new ideas, many of which may take a very long time to be accepted as valuable. Therefore the willingness of adventurous editors and publishers to take a chance on publishing and promoting new voices is one of the most important contributions to the development of society. At no time in the past has this been as important as it is today when the rate of social and technical change has speeded up so much that many of the old truths about how we need to conduct our lives have changed and new values need to be articulated at an ever-increasing rate. Schiffrin combines history and memoires, it is true, but so far I have found no other source of the information he provides, which tells the story of the dismantling of the capacity of Random House and the publishers it controls to discover and promote controversial new voices. Schiffrin also reveals how the story he has to tell was systematically kept out of the media with a kind of silent consorship that has truly horrifying implications. What emerges from his book is a first hand story of some of the most frightening vanadalism that has ever been inflicted on a social institution. What's most ironic about his story is that the quest for profits actually decreased the rate of the economic growth and profitability of the publishers involved. Schiffrin takes a dim view of the possibilities for recovering from the blow to the solar plexus that the current me-too capitalism of an ever less socially conscious electorate has dealt the publishing industry. I disagree with him about the capacity of the Internet to help publishing recover from this blow, and I agree to some extent with one reviewer's comment about Amazon as a symptom of the new kind of accessibility of books. That comment is beside Schiffrin's point, however, which is that many of the best authors need the championing of editors and publishers willing to see to it that their books get a hearing, and as such writers may not be very good at sales and marketing themselves, they may end up completely silenced. Hopefully, the Internet will be able to do more about this problem than Schiffrin thinks it can. That hasn't happened yet, though.

Through this "memoir/history," Andre Schiffrin has not allowed a thirty year career at Pantheon to pass without comment. Largely a critique of the dynamic aspects of the publishing industry, Schiffrin bemoans the emerging, profit driven behemoths geared toward publishing commercially viable works while ignoring "books with new, controversial ideas or challenging literary voices." Not without hubris, the author portrays his nurturing of the likes of Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky. R.D. Laing, and a host of literary luminaries. He seems to delight in the contrast of Michael Korda's best selling authors, Harold Robbins, Irving Wallace, and Jaqueline Susann. These authors are discussed in Korda's memoir, "Another Life," selected as one of the best hundred books of 1999 by Publisher's Weekly (see my review of this work). Schiffrin's hostility over leaving Pantheon, along with a coterie of editorial honchos, is understandable. However, he was not flexible enough to get with the program of the new owners. Schiffrin's logic is flawed. It does not follow that a profit making mandate precludes the release of worthwhile works. While Schiffrin recognizes the Internet as an avenue for disseminating information, he balks at the vastness of the material on line. "How can we know if what is offered is reliable?" With characteristic arrogance he avers that, "publishers, above all, are people who make a selection, who choose and edit material that will be distributed according to certain criteria, and then market and publish it. By putting their name to writers' work, they provide a guarantee and guide to the reader." Tell this reviewer, gentle reader, when was the last time you bought a book because it was published by Random House, Simon & Schuster, or the dubious Free Press? What Schiffrin has ignored, and what is bringing about iconoclastic changes in publishing, is the new technology, Print on Demand (POD). This technology will bypass the Schiffrin's, and enfranchise tens of thousands of authors who would heretofore remain unpublished (see iUniverse.com) due to the likes of self appointed mavens, who through whatever whims, wield the power to decide who gets published and who doesn't. Even major publishers are now utilizing POD. This means no significant investment by the publisher for questionable initial print runs. The more the public wants, the more they can get from Print on Demand. If they don't want it, it doesn't get printed. Therefore, the 40% returns from booksellers are diminished or virtually eliminated. There is no need to earn out an advance when one may not exist. While this reviewer does not concur with Schiffrin, his book is nonetheless a worthwhile read.

If you seem to have fond memories of the well-stocked bookstores of twenty or twenty-five years ago, it may not be all false nostalgia or a curmudgeonly disgust with modern "culture." Schiffrin, the former head of Pantheon Books, lays out in detail the sad decline of American publishing. The chief culprits are the mega-mergered conglomerates that have established a virtual stranglehold on the book trade in this country and elsewhere. Schiffrin's experience at Pantheon is used as an example of the disastrous effects of the takeover of small independent publishers by large, bottom-line oriented corporations. One remembers the incredibly interesting books Pantheon itself used to publish, which, if similar offerings were to even see the light of day now, they would be taken on by a university press, if at all. Schiffrin's thesis that the short-term bottom-line oriented outlook of the major publishing conglomerates is the main culprit, and it is hard to dispute this. Although a lot of titles continue to be published in this country, there has been a marginalization of serious "challenging" books from the mainstream publishing houses, and there has been a rightward shift in the politics of those books that deal with social and political issues, to coincide with the politics of their publishers. Schiffrin's accounts of the mendacity of the often near-illiterate businesspeople in charge is funny and sad. Book publishing should not be totally dictated by short-term profits. The intellectual decline of this counrty will only accelerate if this trend is perpetuated. My only gripe with this book is that Schiffrin himself is in need of better editors, as there are some mistakes here that his publisher should have caught.

Many of the other reviewers have done a fine job pointing out the merits and flaws of this book, so I will only add a quote that I find significant from Hardy Green, Business Week's Books Editor: "Much of Schiffrin's indictment is accurate. Questions of quality are, of course, highly subjective, but to this reviewer, it seems that some publishers have indeed lowered standards without much improving the business picture." With such a pro-business authority as Business Week seconding Schiffrin's concerns, Schriffin's claims appear stronger - and, sadly, those of the publishing industry's to quality and good sense appear that much weaker.

I enjoyed the book very much. The story telling was enjoyable. As to the "whine", I work in a completly different industry that suffers from the money only direction of the country. It is sad that no one is allowed to be in any vocation in this country for its own sake. Even if you make money, you have to make the most money, good is not good enough, only best will do.

M. Schiffrin's book is a must-read for anyone who cares about ideas, literature, books, and the First Amendment.

From a lifetime spent in the industry, Schiffrin explores the current trends in the publishing industry, where profits are rapidly becoming the only priority. In such a system, Schiffrin shows that not only do ideas and the profession diminish, but paradoxically, so do profits. Over and over, he shows how narrow views of profits actually undermine the profitably of a title, or even of the entire industry.

As he describes these things, Schiffrin also gives a microcosmic view of the constant tension, ever present in free democracies: on the one hand, powerful corporations have generated much economic might (and therefore political and military might) to the West; and on the other hand, that power, left unbridled, now undermines the foundations of openness, that protect not only our civic freedoms, but the freedoms of the market as well.

Schiffrin's book is provocative and well written. There is a little too much "And then I published...." along with a lot of name dropping. But there are also eye-opening insights into changes that the last 30 years have brought to publishing, as well as some good behind-the-scenes stories. Schiffrin clearly has an axe to grind, but he also has a point of view worth hearing. Reviewers who suggest this is a "whine" or a leftist diatribe would seem to have axes of their own that they are working on.

I think that all reviewers have some points here.
The book is a bit whiny. There isn't any documented research. But I think to discount what this book is saying would be denial. The facts that conglomerations own the majority of publishing is bound to inhibit the selection of books they produce or seek out. What this book gave to me is that I should seek out smaller publishers, whether at amazon.com or the library and see what they have to offer instead of assuming that the books in the prime POS spots at the bookstore or on the Best Of Lists are the only books worth seeking out.