Fifteen years ago, Barnes & Noble revolutionized book-selling with the creation of its superstores, of which there are now more than 600 nationwide. Customers, even those in Gotham City, were agog! Soaring spaces, couches, coffee, confections at the checkout counter. You can lie on the floor, troll 100,000 titles, drink a latte… how good does life get? (Granted, superstores were modeled on leading independent stores like The Tattered Cover in Denver. And why not?)

Unfortunately, magnificent as the stores are, the total sale of books in the US continues its decade-long stagnation. Something had to give, and smaller independent bookstores started to drop like flies. This situation went public with the release of Warner Brothers’ picture “You’ve Got Mail” in which Tom Hanks played some version of L,S, or E, and the ever adorable Meg Ryan personified the beleaguered bookstore owner, who then sleeps with the enemy.

For a decade, the horizon for independent stores was increasingly dark, but over the last few years, a new day seems to be dawning. Strangely enough, this has at first blush nothing to do with the publishing industry itself. Rather, melting ice caps, mad cow’s disease, fatal pharmaceuticals, predation by box stores, have curiously combined to create a growing revolution in social attitudes.

Back to the Sixties, to the whole earth catalogue to “The Greening of America.” It now appears that “small,” “independent,” “sustainable,” “LOCAL” are becoming watchwords of a increasingly worried citizenry looking for a more stable and safer world for themselves and especially their children and grandchildren. As the amazing CEO of Stonybrook farms, Gary Hirschberg (Hirschberg charmingly means “cherry mountain” in German) pointed out in his solution-rich presentation about our environmental problems at the winter conference of the American Bookseller Association (independent stores) last week in Louisville, KY (gasp, breathe)… 2050 is here! Our kids and grandkids are going to be there, and we have both the responsibility and the means to make sure the earth returns to being happy and habitable half way through this century.

And, according to Avin Domnitz, CEO of the ABA, this presents an enormous opportunity for independent bookstores to be leaders in their communities! To gather together the local drug store, hardware store, grocery, et. al. into a unified voice for a civil and sustainable way of life. Avin was equally great, a spontaneous speech redolent of the campaign trail, which had listeners at the edge of their seats.

Posted by: Jim Lichtenberg

As book publishing, especially trade book publishing, has become absorbed into larger media companies, and as the pressures of digital technology continue to mount, publishers find themselves looking to other media to understand vulnerability and to gain insights.

In creating their digital warehouse last year, HarperCollins looked to “sister” companies like newspapers and magazines for guidance in the process. But one of the fixations of the publishing industry over the last decade, especially publishing associations, has been the record industry. Year after year at the AAP’s Annual Meetings, Napster and its ilk provided the fascination of a train wreck, until that offending company was wrestled to the ground by lawyers. The health of copyright was/is, purportedly in grave danger, if, god forbid, a P2P file sharing system that has bedeviled the record industry were to raise its head in book publishing. And the flames were fanned by the crowing of the RIAA that the reason for the declining success of their companies is that CD sales have been undercut for years by the “illegal” availability of music for free.

Oh, really? Then how do we explain this phenomenon, reported on January 10 in the NY Times?

In a twist for the music industry’s digital revolution, “In Rainbows,” the new Radiohead album that attracted wide attention when it was made available three months ago as a digital download for whatever price fans chose to pay, ranked as the top-selling album in the country this week after the CD version hit record shops and other retailers.

Several things come to mind. All large media companies are afflicted by lawyers… who individually may be great people. I remember being in a meeting where the lawyers were crafting language for book contracts that would give them not only electronic rights to an authors work, but rights to “whatever medium may be created in the future.” Nice, guys. Fortunately, we don’t seem as afflicted as the record industry, with the suits now crying in their beer after living for decades off the fat of rock and roll.

I would suggest that the book industry cast its eyes inwards. People love to be entertained. There is an infinite market for good works of all kinds. Understand your customers. Improve your processes. Do a better job of finding writers and nurturing them. Do your homework and go to bed at a reasonable hour. We’ll all be ok.

Posted by: Jim Lichtenberg

The transformation of publishing from finding and nurturing authors for the long term, to acquiring the most ready-to-go, commercially-promising packages that the budget allows, happened several decades ago.

So we’re used to it, right? We know what is, and what to expect from, a “NY Times Bestseller” (which is not the same as the NY Times bestseller lists).

A rock critic in my ill-spent youth (East Village Other to NY Times), I am now grooving on the spate of new books about rock icons like Dylan, Clapton, and even Patty Boyd, a beautiful young Brit, born of a dysfunctional family, who grew up to be a model and wife of George Harrison and then Eric Clapton. Wonderful Tonight by Ms. Boyd, is actually a whole lot better than Clapton’s Eric, which is an interminable set of acknowledgments of all the cool people he knew. (hence my title.) However, at a crucial point in Patty’s account of her break-up with George she describes the tension as being the same as “a chop stick about to come apart. Something had to give,” she writes.

Help! Did an editor ever read this? Not that Patty should be treated like Raymond Carver, but shouldn’t someone have asked for a better metaphor?

Of course, it is completely unfair to tar all editors with this brush. And I recommend, if you can, being a fly on the wall at an editorial meeting. It’s a fascinating dynamic to watch.

But, it does beg the question: what is a publisher? A few years ago, Peter Jovanovich, scion of Jovanich Publishers, told me that a publishing house is “a bank with an editorial department attached.” After all publishers haven’t printed, manufactured, distributed or sold books for nigh on to a long time. And if they are no longer really editing them, then what are they? Just a bank?

Enter the Internet, which is changing the equation quite fundamentally. As other publishing blogs have been feverishly discussing, and as I will attempt to demonstrate at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference next month in NYC, bringing content to customers is essentially a “service” in which an increasingly customized and customizable product (often self-published by the author) is embedded.

Two examples of the dawn of this service function are author sites, for example:
http://www.harpercollins.com/author/index.aspx?authorID=17367 and http://www.oreilly.com/authors/

But then Tim O’Reilly foresaw this direction in a 1995 paper.  

Which just goes to show that things that appear to be suddenly “right on the brink of change,” were probably there for a while. They were just hard to see.

Posted by: Jim Lichtenberg

Reading is a technology, Like any technology, its life span is a function of its usefulness. Usefulness however is one of those things that change over time. How many of you can wield a sword or ride a horse… both staples of the educated person (usually male) only a couple of centuries ago?

The inscribing of symbolic representations of language on stones, papyrus, vellum paper, or a screen, has proved useful -- and with the printing press explosively diffused among human beings -- over the last 6,000 years since the Summarians created an alphabet and inscribed it on their famous mud tablets. However, it’s not the only way to go. 3,000 years ago, in Athens and other Greek cities around the Mediterranean, the philosophical pillars of the western world were set in place through a primarily oral tradition. Students (usually male) learned through dialogue (as in Plato’s), and through learning by heart the musical rhyming poems of Homer, and an avid public awaited the plays of Sophocles, et. al.

And if recent scholarship is to be believed, this was not the dawn of history. The history of homo sapiens stretches back many tens of thousands of years. According to these professors, there is no ‘pre-history.’ It ‘s all history, all the time. So reading is a relative new comer.

Yet once again, as if to celebrate the year’s conclusion, comes the now familiar article about the death of reading: “The science of reading and it’s decline,” by Caleb Crain, The New Yorker, December 24&31, 2007, citing an impressive range of apparently scientific statistics about the sad decline of reading among Americans of all ages.

Trying to keep a technology alive as its utility fades is sentimental at best. Don’t get me wrong. I am immersively involved with dozens of books and articles, and web pages every month. Reading is the primary way I interact with the world. But, I am not wringing my hands.

Reading, I believe, is not the issue here. Reading is a surrogate, a stand-in for the question of “culture.” The question really being asked: is our culture being debased (like coins) because of the decline in reading? Are we becoming a nation of dummies, political imbeciles, and brutes as indicated by the decline of reading? Unfortunately, those traits are part of human nature for all of its tens of thousands of years.

I think the real issue is the following: if, or as, reading declines, what other technologies will take its place for helping human being understand themselves and the world around them (or whatever’s left of it)? Maybe the theatre will be reborn. Maybe, along with Queen Elizabeth II’s Xmas message, Youtube will develop into the equivalent of the classic (pre-reading) Greek Plays, Maybe the technology of motion pictures will become so inexpensive and diffused that there will be 150,000 new movies a year. Maybe once the ravages of climate change stabilize, we’ll go back to cave painting. Stay tuned. It will be interesting.

Posted by: Jim Lichtenberg

When I was a kid in high school in the mid-1960s, one of my favorite books was A Sense of Where You Are, John McPhee’s 1965 account of the college basketball career of Princeton all-American and later New York Knick and US Senator, Bill Bradley. If distant memory serves, McPhee got his evocative title from Bradley himself, who coined it in demonstrating that success in basketball derived from an informed appreciation of one’s place on the court—from “a sense of where you are.” While no advice could have helped me in my frustrated pursuits on the basketball court, the phrase “a sense of where you are” resonates so clearly in my experience as an editor that it has never left me, even as I recognize it in the work of today’s great editors. 

 

In my end of our business, scholarly publishing, having “a sense of where you are” in perceiving where your field is going is what excites an editor’s imagination. That is, your success as an editor is predicated on having a clear sense of where your field is moving —be it religion, economics, or physics—and working backwards from that horizon to imagine what the next great books will be. “A sense of where you are” in the milieu of ideas inspires you, the editor, to ask, “what will the next truly great philosophy list look like, and what do I have to do to publish such a list. Which authors will I have to attract? What kinds of books will I have to develop, and in what combination?  What are readers—scholars and students here and abroad—interested in? What does the field need and how will such a list shape its frontier and its connections to other fields?”   

 

Scholarly publishers help to spur the course of intellectual progress by publishing various kinds of books—the tools of our trade:  Research monographs, the building blocks of knowledge in most fields; academic trade books, statements that provoke big questions about controversial issues within and across fields; treatises, systematic explorations of big subjects by major figures that galvanize entire intellectual discourses; and reference books, works that consolidate and memorialize knowledge in their fields.

 

While each of these genres is essential to a great scholarly list, of the four, the treatise provides editors their most delicious publishing opportunity because editors can often exercise an active hand in conceptualizing this kind of book and because it so generously rewards the editor’s sense of his or her field. Signing the big treatise is sometimes a function of blessed serendipity—being in the right place at the right time with the right author—but at a deeper level, such books can result from the planful imaginings of editors.  That is, astute and informed editors draw on a sense of what kinds of major, synthesizing works their fields need and actively look for such titles. 

 

Treatises can, and do, make singularly impressive contributions to learning. Think of the effect of E. H. Gombrich’s canonical Art and Ideas on the field of art, or Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions on comparative religion, or Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory on literary studies, or Hans Morgenthau’s Politics Among Nations on international relations. Provocative and path-breaking texts of this kind have for generations helped draw and redraw the map of scholarly knowledge—and can mark the careers of their editors.     

 

An excellent example of this kind of publishing can be found in the work of my colleague Brigitta van Rheinberg, Editor-in-Chief and History Editor of Princeton University Press. A few years back, Brigitta began thinking about the evolving trend toward global history, and started to discern the opportunity to engage this trend with a new set of books on master themes in global history. Beginning by signing a broadly contextualized historical book on racism, Brigitta followed through by signing global histories of empire and of famine, and is now working with prospective authors on similarly significant themes.

 

Brigitta works with a sense of where the field of history is going, a conception of how to embrace the themes that unify comparative and historical research, an understanding for how certain books would enhance the intellectual infrastructure of the field, an appreciation of the broad cross-national readership engage the themes addressed in these books, and a network of outstanding historian authors whose command of the relevant subjects enables them to tell the big story.

 

While it would be easy to consider the publication of these books simply as a string of thematic histories, that misses the point. Developing the idea for these books rewarded Brigitta’s sophisticated knowledge of the direction of her field, her understanding of the market, and her appetite for thinking big. For Brigitta, as for all good editors, “a sense of where you are” is the necessary ingredient in achieving major signings such as these. 

 

Bill Bradley would understand.  Ever the student of his game, Bradley offers an instuctive model to us for ours.  I recall stories of Bradley practicing his jump shot by methodically moving from under the basket outward, breaking down his hook shot into distinct parts, and deliberately pounding the last dribble of the ball before releasing his jumper to gain greater control over his shot. This mania for method may seem silly in a game as seemingly fluid and improvisational as basketball, but that’s not the point.  By self-consciously becoming a student of the game, Bill Bradley found ways to expand and refine his repertoire and improve his already awesome athletic gifts.

 

The lesson for scholarly editors is clear. To animate one’s publishing, it is vital to develop a sense of where you are in the flow of your field. That sense will produce a clearer understanding of the trajectory of your list, and will reveal new and exciting publishing possibilities.   

Posted by: Peter Dougherty