What's Happening in Book Publishing?
ADLER, JAMES B.
BOOKS What's Happening in Book Publishing? by JAMES B. ADLER "What's happening in book publishing?" More and more, those of us who earn a living in book publishing are asked this question by...
...He is especially hopeful about some of the newer trends in teaching methods and learning materials...
...They founded houses that have since made publishing history: Dial Press, Alfred A. Knopf, Random House, Simon and Schuster, Viking Press, to name a few, were founded by individuals who personally owned and operated their businesses all through the 1930's and 1940's and into the 1950's...
...About a fifth of the market is divided among publishers of book club editions, children's books, religious books and Bibles, and mass market paperbacks...
...They undertake virtually all the worthwhile regional publishing done in this country today...
...Columbia University Press...
...Author of Buy Now, Pay Later and four other books, Black is currently a senior editor at the trade book publishing house of William Morrow...
...His most interesting chapter deals with the revolutionary curriculum revisions being pioneered by such scholars as Jerrold Zacharias, and the exciting technological developments like Omar Khayyam Moore's "talking typewriter" and the computer teaching experiments of Patrick Suppes...
...They issue one in every eight new non-fiction titles published in the United States, and probably a quarter of those with scholarly significance...
...So it goes...
...The big hunks of ice are in textbooks, which account for more than twenty-eight per cent of the industry's annual income, and subscription and reference books (mostly encyclopedias), which account for almost twenty-three per cent...
...With the advent of microfilm and Xerox, book publication is no longer a Ph.D...
...Hillel Black has made an admirable attempt in The American Schoolbook...
...With such a small distribution base, it is understandable that the well-known trade publishing houses had little appeal to the corporate giants until recently...
...Under such circumstances, the curse of giantism would seem to hang heavy over the publishing industry today...
...Reynal/Morrow...
...The resulting marriage between books and big business took place rapidly...
...The account of this development makes an exciting tale of publishing success...
...Each textbook, however, is in competition with many others covering essentially the same subject matter...
...Random House swallowed Knopf and Pantheon, only to be swallowed in turn by RCA...
...paper, $1.95...
...Not any more...
...What Happens in Book Publishing, edited by Chandler B. Grannis of Publishers' Weekly, has become in its first decade of publication something of a minor classic...
...At present, the basic decisions about curriculum approach and learning materials still are made at the state and local levels...
...They are all non-profit operations, free to pursue quality without worry about profit...
...But in the 1950's, a rash of horizontal mergers began, combining trade and text publishers to an unprecedented degree...
...If so, what are the implications, both for education and for publishing as we know it today...
...Harper has managed to maintain its tradition of quality publishing at the same time that it has become a rather effective book merchandising organization...
...Nowhere in publishing is competition so fierce as it is here...
...Morrow...
...The old-fashioned, creative, personal publisher is going to have to find himself a new base—probably at the interstices of the corporate giants— from which to pursue authors and ideas that are ahead of their time...
...Consequently, as Black points out, the "competition" can easily degenerate into a contest to see who offends least...
...prerequisite...
...Cloth, $5...
...this kind of publishing is simply too important— and too much fun—for publishers to give up doing it...
...and none of them is any longer both owned and operated by the men who founded them...
...In trade book publishing, each book is a monopoly unto itself...
...It is hard to take entirely seriously the literary pretensions of a man who boasts of his clever flackery in making Mickey Spillane "respectable," and describes as "possibly the greatest and most auspicious honor ever accorded an American publisher in England" the fact that he delivered a speech at a banquet sponsored for publicity purposes by the Royal Shakespeare Society...
...Meanwhile, the communications giants on Madison Avenue began to awake to the potential in the education market...
...193 pp...
...To Advance Knowledge: A Handbook on American University Press Publishing, by Gene R. Hawes...
...In 1900, after three generations of family control, the house of Harper went into receivership and was saved from going completely under by the house of Morgan...
...The Making of A Publisher: A Life in the 20th Century Book Revolution, by Victor Weybright...
...Both require large-scale capital to operate...
...360 pp...
...As a former sales director for a publishing house, I would say he is extremely generous...
...Grannis estimates that there are perhaps 1,000 "effective" retail book outlets in the country...
...Even in the relatively small area of their specialty, general book stores probably account for less than half the total sales of adult trade books...
...To be too advanced is to commit commercial suicide...
...Nonetheless, it is worth noting that after Weybright's resignation, NAL plunged into a policy of bidding wildly for authors with huge amounts of Times-Mirror cash...
...The market began to expand enormously —book sales have tripled in the last ten years...
...Exman, former head of Harper's religious books department, has written an affectionate history of this venerable institution...
...4.50...
...The "knowledge explosion" has been good for the university presses...
...His report of this corporate infighting is undoubtedly one-sided and of limited interest to people outside the publishing industry...
...The American Schoolbook, by Hillel Black...
...Big corporations have always tended to pay more attention to the medium than to the message...
...They are growing in strength and number: from four in 1900, to thirty-five in 1948, to sixty university presses in 1967...
...It has swelled the ranks of both academic readers and academic authors...
...Henry Holt gobbled up Rinehart and Winston, and then was taken over by CBS, and we all know what happened to the Yankees after they were taken over by CBS...
...What will happen to literature when all the publishing houses are controlled by corporation managers instead of gentleman-publisher types...
...Libraries account for most of the rest...
...Will they give the publishers in their book subsidiaries the freedom to make this kind of decision in the future...
...But while the Morgan banking interests took over financial control, they were generally careful to leave publishing control in the hands of the publishers...
...At the other end of the spectrum from the frantic mass market stand the dignified university presses...
...Textbook publishers, like television programming executives, complain that they are at the mercy of the market to which they cater...
...It is about time that somebody told the American public about the industry that produces our children's basic learning materials...
...There are many states in this country without a decent bookstore...
...He points out that while publishers now sell more than $2 billion worth of books a year, most of that output is as submerged from general view as the base of an iceberg...
...the firm has a history and a tradition going back to 1817...
...When you have invested perhaps $500,000 to develop a new eleventh-grade American history book, or $3,000,000 to launch an elementary reading or math series, you can not afford to lose many adoptions...
...American University Press Services...
...Texts are bought—or "adopted"—on a large-scale (often statewide) basis...
...Publishers, in an industry which has always been notoriously under-capitalized, headed for Wall Street in search of cash for expansion...
...Harper & Row...
...The contributions are uneven, but, because of the scope and attention to detail, any person who cares to know how the publishing business operates will find this book an excellent starting point...
...The remaining fifth is devoted to law, medical, technical, scholarly, and other specialized books...
...What Happens in Book Publishing, 2nd Edition, edited by Chandler B. Grannis...
...More and more, those of us who earn a living in book publishing are asked this question by curious friends...
...One hopes that the owners of other publishing subsidiaries will attend the warning...
...Harper (now Harper & Row) is America's oldest book publisher...
...In a new introduction to the second edition, Grannis offers a good picture of the book trade today...
...Unfortunately, Black stops short of facing the key question about educational publishing...
...With their impressive technological and marketing facilities, they could take care of the package— if only they could find somebody who knew what to put into it...
...Meanwhile, many worthwhile scholarly books are being written which, because of rising costs, cannot be published commercially...
...In To Advance Knowledge, Gene Hawes describes in workmanlike fashion this productive branch of the publishing industry, and the manner in which it works...
...It was he, with his Signet and Mentor editions, who proved that quality books could find a mass market in paper covers...
...The net result was a whopping loss for the company...
...In the 1920's and early 1930's, a generation of young, dynamic publishers armed with flair, determination, and strong personalities breathed new life into American book publishing...
...There is no doubt that a distinctive era in American publishing is coming to a close...
...The question is a natural one...
...It remains to be seen whether it will turn out to be a happy one for both parties...
...By his account, Weybright spent the next few years battling an "Orwellian bureaucracy" for control of publishing policy...
...8.50...
...8.50...
...Competition may lead to product improvement in other industries, but its effect on schoolbooks has not been entirely salutary...
...In this regard, the story of The House of Harper by Eugene Exman may offer some ground for encouragement...
...Has the industry gone merger-crazy...
...At the base of the book publishing iceberg lie textbooks, and the largest part of this market is on the elementary and high school level...
...Five current books shed varying amounts of light on the current state of American publishing...
...Only about seven and one-half per cent of publishing output is in "adult trade books"—general books that are distributed to the public through bookstores and public libraries...
...At one time or another, the house has been involved in the most important facets of American book publishing, and it has played a major role in the magazine world as well...
...467 pp...
...He can be forgiven his wholly uncritical attitude towards his subject...
...Corporate executives in other lines of business, however, are not often encouraged to think this way...
...But textbook publishers, in general, are devoted men, and, as Black makes clear from his colorful survey of the industry's history, schoolbooks are far better today than ever before...
...Weybright is a founder and former chairman of the New American Library, a pioneer in the postwar paperback revolution...
...in any case, it is one that merits much respect...
...University presses used to be handy dumping grounds for dull doctoral dissertations...
...The subsidized university presses are doing an admirable job of taking up the slack...
...It may not be easy, but I have no doubt that it will be done...
...Today, all except Viking have become either large corporations or elements in huge corporate complexes...
...and as administrators have begun to recognize the academic and prestige value that a good press brings to a university, subsidies to the presses have grown...
...The House of Harper: 150 Years of Publishing, by Eugene Exman...
...Here is one case where competition breeds, if not inferiority, at least timidity...
...148 pp...
...Still, as a paperback publisher, Weybright was something of a genius...
...At the same time, Government subsidy of education began to spill over into book publishing, through the National Defense Education Act and other measures...
...But in 1960, NAL was sold to the burgeoning Times-Mirror Company of Los Angeles...
...The book has more than twenty chapters, each written by a specialist in a particular area...
...He deserves an A-minus for this brief, brisk, informative survey of the schoolbook business...
...6.75...
...326 pp...
...Victor Weybright tells a different, somewhat sadder story in The Making of a Publisher...
...in the last two years, Publishers' Weekly has recorded more than fifty mergers and acquisitions in book publishing...
...In the last few years, not only RCA and CBS, but also IBM, Xerox, Raytheon, General Electric, and Time, Inc., have begun multi-million dollar forays into educational publishing...
...In this light, Weybright's final, bitter warning takes on some air of prophecy: "The totalitarian combination of a mechanistic parent company with an insensitive business type in a publishing house subsidiary spells the doom of creativity, of increasing profits, and of the spirit which attracts the finest authors and scholars...
...One may be tempted to despair for the future of serious fiction in the insensitive, business-oriented publishing industry of a dreaded tomorrow, but it appears that a growing amount of serious non-fiction will find a happy home in university presses...
...Just as the book merchandiser has already begun to play a larger role in trade publishing, the technologist will undoubtedly loom larger on the educational horizon...
...The heyday of the undercapitalized publishing entrepreneur is over...
...Occasionally, a publisher —a really good publisher, that is—will put out a book purely because it merits publication, even though he expects to lose money on it...
...However, when technology reaches the point at which textbooks, computers, and audio-visual devices are integrated into "multi-media learning programs"—and that seems to be the thrust of much current research—will the center of gravity shift to a half-dozen or so corporate offices...
...Will there be any more small, independent publishers left...
...The resulting blandness often can be matched only on your television screen...
Vol. 32 • March 1968 • No. 3
