Book Business Near Collapse?

Joshua Henkin writes:

As many of you know, the book industry is in serious trouble. It was in trouble when economic times were good, and now that times are bad, things have gotten really precarious. Book sales across the industry are down as much as 40 percent, publishing houses are laying off people and cutting imprints, one big publishing house announced that it was no longer reading new manuscripts, and a major chain bookstore is on the brink of bankruptcy.

Many of these problems have been a long time coming (the decline of newspapers and especially of book review sections has been a big blow, as has the closing down of many independent bookstores), but in recent months the problem has become especially acute. I don't mean to sound alarmist, but these are alarming times.

What's at stake is the future of books, and of reading culture.

Although books will continue to be published (Stephenie Meyer and J.K. Rowling will publish their next books), for everyone except a handful of bestselling authors, the future is far more uncertain.

What's at stake is the wealth and diversity of book culture. Many classics (books we read in our English classes in high school and college, books our children read or will read), simply wouldn't be published by today's standards and, if they were published and didn't sell well immediately, they would be removed from the bookstore shelves.

This is why it's so important that you buy books for the holidays. There's a website dedicated to this enterprise, BuyBooksForTheHolidays.com, which you might want to check out, and publishing houses are running ad campaigns focused on holiday book-giving.

You really can make a difference.

A typical paperback novel costs less than fifteen dollars, far cheaper than a necklace or a sweater or dinner at a nice restaurant. I would especially encourage you to buy books from independent bookstores, which are in the most serious trouble and which promote books that go beyond the usual bestsellers and where the employees really know about books. Independent booksellers are the unsung heroes in what are very difficult times.

Thanks for reading this, and have a happy and healthy holiday.

Joshua Henkin's website.

Previous Posts 1, 2.

Comments

[Isa]

Hey anybody been to College lately?....
Buy a high priced text book NEW because it is a brand new edition for $$$$$$$
THEN two years(or less) later cannot sell it for anything because ANOTHER newer edition came out.
Right! I should be crying for the poor book industry
sarcastically
Boo hoo boo hoo

[Shmarya]

Textbook publishing and regular book publishing are in essence two separate businesses.

Henkin is right about this.

[Yochanan Lavie]

I was in publishing for 15 years, before I went into teaching full time. Shmarya is right. Textbook publishers price gouge because they have a captive audience. And professors make students buy their expensive and overrated books to boost their own sales.

Trade publishing is a different story, with a low profit margin. To some extent, textbooks and blockbusters like Rowling subsidize the rest of the list. And the backlist of classics sell well, at minimal cost (much is in the public domain). But good literary fiction or non-fiction is a hard sell.

We are headed towards a post-literate age. As people of the book, this doesn't bode well. To me, there is nothing more pleasurable than the warm, palpable feel of a paper book in my hands, along with the smell of the ink, paper, and binding glue. Electronic books would never do that for me. And besides, I like a low tech, traditional Shabbat where we turn off the computer and MP devices and curl up with books- both sacred and secular. There are few greater pleasures for me. That's why my home resembles Borges's Library of Tlon, and my bank account is depleted.

First, the great Detroit dream machines are dying, in favor of bland (if reliable) rice burners. Then, the Guttenberg dream machines are being taken over by pixels (as I hypocritically write this on a blog, rather than scratch it on vellum). The soul of Western Civilization is dying.

BUGGY WHIPS!
BUGGY WHIPS!
BUGGY WHIPS!
BUGGY WHIPS!
BUGGY WHIPS!

Books, that is.

[Jason]

I have to disagree with Yochanan that we are headed for a post-literate age and that the soul of Western civilization is dying. With the rise of the internet, people are reading and writing more now than at any time in recent history, although the types of things they are reading and writing, and the way they are writing, is much different. And even the more passive forms of media are more challenging to people than in the past. There was a book published a few years ago titled "Everything Bad is Good For You" that made the argument that, for example, the plotlines of dramatic tv shows have gotten much more complex and intellectually demanding from those in even the 80s and early 90s, to say nothing of those in the 50s and 60s (go back and watch those old tv shows and see how boring and passive they are compared to what's out today).

As sure as the sun rises in the east, every generation seems to bemoan the crassness of the culture compared to the previous generation, or the dumbing down of culture, but the fact is that IQ scores have been rising, by some estimates as much as 3 points per decade since the early 20th century.

It is important that we try to preserve books and newspapers, but it is the content that is important, not necessarily the paper on which they are written.

[FriedFalafel]

I too suffered through the ridiculous pricing of text books. However, you have to understand also that text books are very expensive to produce (usually they're hard bound with good quality paper), they become outdated very fast, and they're meant for niche markets. In fact, textbook publishers are just about at the stage where they're not willing to publish anything anymore. All textbook publishing is going to shift to ebooks -- but that's ok since the collegiate audience will accept ebooks. I don't know if general publishing is ready for that shift, but the Amazon Kindle is a step in that direction.

[Yochanan Lavie]

The medium is the message: Marshall McLuhan.

99% of the stuff on the internet is ephemeral crap, not quality writing that will last- including my stuff. Textmessaging is not Shakespeare.

[Nachum]

And everything printed ain't Shakespeare either.

[Jason]

I was waiting for someone to come back with the McLuhan quote. But I'm not really sure what it means in this context. Granted that most stuff on the internet is crap, but, as Nachum points out, most printed stuff is crap too. Is it better for people to read a blog that makes them think about something real, or read a Harlequin romance novel that happens to be printed? Is the printed novel superior purely because it's on paper?

Anyway, printed books will not go away. Read "The Long Tail." The average bookstore can hold several thousand titles, but Amazon can carry every book that has ever been printed. Combine that with the coming technology of on-demand printing and it is clear that the printed book is here to stay, but will obviously be supplanted to a great extent by digital printing.

My own feeling is that the digital revolution will be a boon for writing, not its downfall. Right now, if I want to write a book, I need to find a publisher and a distributor, etc. But the digital revolution democratizes the process and allows me to self-publish very easily, even if there's not a huge commercial market for my subject matter.

Jason, with all due respect I think you would define literature and dare I say, literacy, differently than YL. I must agree with Lavie across the board. Speak to any high school or university student, person on the street or anyone you could buttonhole and his concept of a post-literate age being upon us becomes quite clear.

[A. Nuran]

Let's get back on track shall we? And before anyone insults our intelligence, don't bring up Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. They are no more representative of professional writers than the Rothschilds are of Jews.

The textbook industry is a red herring designed to distract attention from the subject of the article. The fact is that the publishing industry has been in serious trouble for years. Solid writers who actually make a full time living at the trade are finding no market for their books. Publishing schedules are emptying. Release dates are getting pushed back. Advances are half what they were a year ago, and those were down from five years back.

Maybe there will be a glorious Internet literary revolution. In the meantime we'll have to go with the real world. In the real world the publishing industry is in serious trouble.

[Yochanan Lavie]

Nachum: Point well taken. Publishing is a business, like any other. Not everything is a timeless classic; most is probably no good.

But as a teacher and adjunct professor (of English) I can see the downside to the electronic revolution. I am not not a Luddite, but I'd hate to live in a post-literate world.

[Jason]

I do think there is a tendency to romanticize the past. I bet if you asked the average person on the street 50 or 100 or 300 years ago (granted, it depends which street), you would have come to the same conclusion. Same thing with high school or university students, with the caveat that high school and university were not available to everyone back then, so it was a much more select group who attended. Now that the high schools and universities are filled with people who a few generations ago would have been working in a coal mine or on a factory floor at 14, it is true that the average literacy or exposure to the classics is probably a bit lower.

[yidandahalf]

That was me @ 10:09
What is read on the internet is information not literature. This is a sad time for literature in all its forms.

[Yochanan Lavie]

Some students do not have the capacity for high level work. They are not stupid, but their talents lie outside academia. Now, no child is to be left behind. So, like crabs in a barrel, the brighter academic students are dumbed down, while the non-academic students are tortured with unrealistic expectations (while they could be great mechanics, carpenters, etc.). In the past, people studied grammar, logic, rhetoric, and Latin. Now, it's multi-culti pablum. Shakespeare and Dickens were not high art; they were the popular entertainers of their day. That's a decline.

I am not romanticising the past. Racism, sexism, and bad teachers were found in the good ole days. The difference was that the culture was intact, and the family as an institution was intact.

Today, we have nice kids, but their family life is chaotic. Everyone has a different last name, and school aged children are on the streets after 9:00 pm on a weeknight. The universities are filled with tenured radicals who sell half-baked theories to poltiicians who don't know any better.

I like the best of popular culture. The best movies, tv shows, and popular music are art, too. I like email and the internet, but not as a substitute for the printed word. But we have to remember our roots. For us as Jews, it's tanach, and for us as Westerners and Anglophones it's the Greeks and Brits.

[Yochanan Lavie]

I am Yochaanan Lavie, and I approved the above message.

[yidandahalf]

You must be one amazing professor, I envy your students.

[Yochanan Lavie]

Thanks Yid 1/2. I don't ;)

[Anderson]

The only thing I learned from a graduate-level creative writing course is the following snide comment (apropos of publishing houses):

"The smart son got the steel mill."

[The Monsey Tzadik]

"books we read in our English classes in high school and college... simply wouldn't be published by today's standards"

You say it like it is a bad thing

[TorahDefenestration]

hey would lamport have given this a good grade?

[Archie Bunker]

http://features.csmonitor.com/books/2008/12/17/new-york%E2%80%99s-proposed-%E2%80%98itunes-tax%E2%80%99-could-impact-books/

New York’s proposed ‘iTunes tax’ could impact books

By Chris Gaylord | December 17, 2008 edition

[thanbo]

FriedFalafel: it's not just the physical units that are expensive (and as often as not, they don't use the best paper davka because they will soon be outdated), but the production of copy is labor-intensive. Most textbooks are heavily illustrated, which means people have to draw (even with the aid of computers) all the charts, graphs, photographs and line-drawings. That takes a lot of man-hours. And if this edition will only sell for 5 years, and then you need to produce a new edition, boom - that drives up the price again.

Also, textbooks don't generally have the kind of print runs that popular bestsellers get, except, I suppose, for some of the top textbooks, like my uncle's physics books (Mark Zemansky)

[Yochanan Lavie]

What I meant by quoting the McLuhan cliche is that the form affects the content. It is not a mere delivery vehicle. Some content can be reshaped to suit the format, i.e. movies made from books, or musicals from movies, but something is changed in translation. That's why stage plays survived tv & movies. Hopefully the printed word will find its niche. All forms are unique and should be nurtured, or something is lost.

[David F.]

I strongly agree with your posts, Yochanan.

One of the advantages of the Internet for me is that I can loot archive.org for beautiful scanned PDF's of hundreds of very rare and interesting 17th and 18th century books. I enjoy reading these on my computer (and I also think English style reached its apex in that period).

On the other hand, one of the reasons I can benefit from the digital revolution in this way is because I grew up treasuring *books*.

I am also concerned that students today are used to getting information easily from the Internet, but aren't developing the attention span and concentration necessary to deal with a train of thought that is developed over hundreds of pages.

[Yochanan Lavie]

Thanks David F. Plagiarism is also a problem because students either don't care, or don't know that cutting and pasting, even with a works cited page and no internal reference, is plagiariasm.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration cannot save the book industry from collapse because the president is famously inarticulate. (Disclosure: I bash Dems more often; I'm an independent).

[invisible hand]

Re the prices of textbooks:
Not only are textbooks different from trade books, but college textbooks are very different from K-12 texts.
Textbooks are actually a lot like pharmaceuticals. They are protected by intellectual property. One person selects them (Professor or Doctor) another person pays for them (student or patient). A lot of money is spent marketing to the one who selects, but they really have no incentive to care about the price. Companies compete by raising their marketing budgets, not their selling prices.

[Jackie Aldridge]

Textbooks could easily be electronic. But so far all the e-books I've paid for stopped working in less than a year. Adobe and Microsoft keep changing the software. Same thing happens with e-music. So I can't see paying for items I can't keep. I'd love to have electronic books. I've a ton or more of paper books and they take up a lot of space. But I expect my books to last as long as I want them. So, I'm not spending any more money for e-books.
Did you know that HP followed the same kind of scheme as the electronic book and music companies. I bought a new printer/fax/copier/scanner this year and nothing on it would work because the inks had dried out before I set it up? There's something in the software to stop the printer working unless the inks are all working!!!