Preface

Introduction

Part I The Business

1. From Family Enterprise to Global Conglomerate "With the dawn of the computer age, the reading of books was thought to become like the riding of horses, an elegant and nostalgic pastime of a privileged elite." In fact, book sales have boomed in the past 40 years. The former senior vice president of McGraw-Hill outlines the reasons why and the dramatic changes in the industry that the explosion has wrought.

Dan Lacy

2. For Books, Another Brave New World Peering into the future is a traumatic undertaking for lovers of books, such as the former president of Macmillan Publishing and Simon & Schuster, who says he prefers the way things were in the '40s. "Sometime in the next century," he observes, "we will be in a world without books, victim of the latest technological evolution in publishing. But not without writers and readers."

Jeremiah Kaplan

Part II The Players

3. Symposium: Twelve Visions We asked 12 publishing industry observers and players to outline their views on the state of the industry and where it is heading. Perhaps not surprisingly, their responses converged around those age-old obsessions--money, technology, the quality of literature and scholarship--and revealed a certain nostalgic protectiveness toward the field.

Charles Barber

4. Decline? What Decline? Despite some recent claims to the contrary, books and book publishing are not sliding into schlock, argues a young Random House editor. "If there is any shortage," he writes, "it's in quality readers, not quality books."

Jonathan Karp

5. A Voice from the Heartland--Alive and Well, Thank You "Financial problems, John?" So responded the author's publishing colleagues when he announced he was moving his New York publishing interests to Kansas City. The president of Universal Press Syndicate and chairman of Andrews and McMeel Publishing explains why, power lunches at Elaine's aside, it was the smartest career move he ever made.

John P. McMeel

6. Literary Power Brokers Come of Age The year 1993 marked the 100th anniversary of literary agenting in the United States. Once dismissed as "parasitic upstarts," agents now hold the center of the author-publisher relationship, as an industry scholar describes.

Thomas L. Bonn

7. Traveling the Rocky Road to Readers The tricks of the trade in getting published may be less complex than beginning authors fear, says the managing director of a New York author consulting firm. "No fame. No glitz. No agent. The pattern is far more common than most people think."

Judith Appelbaum

8. Censorship--The Enemy Is Us Attempts at censorship are nothing new, but the threats are greater today than ever, says the former president of the North Carolina Library Association. "What is almost worse...is that librarians, educaters and publishers themselves contribute to the process of censorship out of intimidation."

Gene D. Lanier

9. The Cultural Ecology of Book Reviewing An apocalyptic view is that book reviews will die out as owners of magazines and newspapers see them as unprofitable. An editor at W.W. Norton (and self-described book review "junkie") fears for the future of books and culture in a market-driven society. "To newspaper and magazine executives, I say: Support excellence in book reviewing in every way you can, for you might not like the culture you get if you don't."

Gerald Howard

10. A Walking Tour of Manhattan's Independent Bookstores "No city can have enough bookstores, but New York City, the national capital of writing, publishing, reviewing and bookselling, has almost enough." The author, a Greenwich Village poet, takes a nostalgic tour through some of Manhattan's most venerable and beloved book havens.

Norman MacAfee

Part III The Impact

11. Extra! Extra! The Sad Story Books as News "In the good old days people knew the value of books," complains the author, literary critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Not anymore, if the amount and quality of attention they receive from newspapers are any indication. Why does the press ignore books? Jealousy, insecurity, myopia and archaic news values.

Carlin Romano

12. Accountability When Books Make News Every year, one or two books come out with revelations so strident that they become front-page news, even though most newspapers would reject such stories from less respectable sources. "The book author has become the modern equivalent of the lonely pamphleteer," writes a journalism scholar and press critic.

Philip Meyer

13. Why Can't Mr. President Write? "For all their obvious literary aspirations and ardor for libraries bearing their names, modern-day American presidents are to the written word what Soviet leaders were to architecture." The director of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University reviews the history of presidential writing and concludes that what literary lights did exist are well in the distant past.

John Maxwell Hamilton

14. Books Make the Difference Books can change people's lives. And they have, write former journalism educators who interviewed 1,400 Americans on that question. "Books are like vitamins," Clare Boothe Luce told them. "When you walk into a library, you tend to pick the intellectual or emotional vitamins you need."

Gordon

Patricia Sabine

Part IV Books

15. The "Book" on Books--Mammon and the Muses Books and book publishing generally have excaped much critical scrutiny. Recently, however, that has changed as scholars and industry insiders examine the inevitable conflicts that occur when culture and commerce collide. As a scholar of publishing discusses, publishing has arrived at a major intersection, with the high rollers planning to widen Commerce Avenue to six lanes, bulldozing Culture Lane. "There goes the neighborhood."

Beth Luey

16. Books by the Number A survey of some key statistics of the industry and a sampling of best sellers over the years.

Charles Barber

For Further Reading

Index