Customer Reviews

The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford Business Books)

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This book purports to answer the question, 'Is publishing a cultural or commercial endeavor.' The answer, of course, is a simple, 'Yes.' To the large corporation owning a publishing company the answer is 'mostly commercial.' To a unversity press (this book is published by Stanford University Press), the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. This book, for instance, is not likely to make the best seller charts. To a church owned press, or a self-published book the answer is probably 'mostly cultural.'

This book concentrates mostly on the larger companies, the publishers whose names we all know. There isn't much from the World War II soldier that has just decided to publish his memoirs, or the church that has put it's significant books on the web for anyone to read.

The general feeling about the industry is not good. The percentage of readers in the country has gone down. The small book stores are having to find niches where Barnes & Noble and WalMart don't compete. And all of this is true.

Then there's Harry Potter, where even the announcement of the title of the next book gets announced on the evening network TV news. And there were 172,000 new books published in the US in 2005; 375,000 published in the English Speaking World. New technologies makes small print runs more profitable. Internet marketing is as of yet, an unknown. As this book says in it's final sentence, 'The game changed in the summer of 1995 when Jeff Bezos opened Amazon.com; we just do not know whether the game changed for better or worse.

This book is one view of the book publishing industry in America. Anyone with a position of responsibility in the business will ignore it at their peril.