Publishers Rewriting How Business Is Done

News of the book business in recent weeks has offered a few chills.

Hit by heavy returns of unsold books, Addison Wesley Longman announced plans to cut nine staff positions and limit the company’s output to parenting, business and other nonfiction areas in which it has been most successful. No more history, for example.

HarperCollins decided to fold the much-respected Basic Books, which has published intellectual and public-policy titles by Sigmund Freud, Stephen Carter, Amitai Etzioni and other thinkers, into the parent company. This development was followed by reports in the past week that HarperCollins, which announced a loss of $7 million in the fiscal quarter that ended March 31, has become the latest major house in recent years to kill a number of books that it had signed up and planned to publish. Of the more than 100 contracts canceled, most were for books long overdue from the authors, a HarperCollins spokeswoman said, and 36 involved books for which enthusiasm had waned.

“I wish the publishing industry was more buoyant these days, but it is not,” Anthea Disney, president and chief executive officer of HarperCollins, said in a statement released Sunday. “Therefore we have decided to deal with reality by trimming our lists--mainly by buying in a more focused and disciplined way, and secondarily by canceling titles we did not think we could publish well.”

Although some authors and agents view these events as further evidence that bean-counting Huns are breaking down the church door, others point out that book publishers, like magazine editors and movie studios, periodically have thinned their inventories and the culture somehow manages to survive. Indeed, a Wall Street Journal editorial bid good riddance to a few of the books that HarperCollins, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., has scuttled--one would show celebrities at home with their pets--and went on to question why many other books make it to store shelves at all.

Jonathan Yardley, the Washington Post columnist (and an author himself), also reacted without horror to the HarperCollins story (put on Page 1 by the New York Times), writing that the real problem with publishing is that it’s “an inefficient, antediluvian business. It publishes too many books, too many of which are bad, too few of which have any discernible market, almost all of which end up being published inattentively.” According to Yardley, the business “needs a swift kick in the derriere, and if it’s Rupert Murdoch who does the kicking, so be it.”

Meanwhile, into this unsettled environment the publisher Peter Osnos comes riding--not as a savior, but as an entrepreneur with an innovative plan to publish quality nonfiction at less financial risk.

Osnos, a former foreign correspondent with the Washington Post, went on to work at Random House more than 12 years, the last five as publisher of its Times Books division, where his authors included former President Carter, the late House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr., Russian President Boris Yeltsin and President Clinton. After resigning from the company in September, he announced the establishment of PublicAffairs, a press that will specialize in books by journalists, historians and social critics--books that may be expected to sell only 10,000 or 12,000 copies, a relative trifle.

Among Osnos’ first acquisitions are a biography of William Kunstler, the late defense attorney, to be written by Robert Katz; a book by Andrew Shapiro, a contributing editor of the Nation, chronicling government regulation of electronic media and what it may mean to the Internet; and an examination of American foreign policy by Michael Mandelbaum, a leading critic of NATO expansion based at Johns Hopkins University.

“I’m proceeding not despite what is happening in book publishing today, but because of what’s happening,” Osnos said. “I’ve felt for a long time that the way we publish books needs to be rethought. It doesn’t work the way it once did and should.”

PublicAffairs, which will publish 25 to 30 books a year, is not a strictly philanthropic venture. Its largest investor is Perseus Capital, part of the Washington-based Perseus Investment Co., which has interests in various information and media firms. Among them is a 3-year-old literary house, Counterpoint Press, which lists Perseus head Frank Pearl as its publisher.

Besides Pearl, who made his money in the 1980s by teaming with former Treasury Secretary William E. Simon in leveraged buyouts, and Osnos himself, the investors in PublicAffairs also include ABC News anchor Peter Jennings, former C-SPAN chairman Robert Rosencrans and Eli Segal, president of the newly formed Welfare to Work Partnership.

Blue Goes to Extremes: Blue is scheduled to go on sale Tuesday. The new magazine, which calls itself the “Journal of the New Traveler,” takes readers to the contaminated environs of Chernobyl, on a reindeer safari in Norway (with writer Tama Janowitz) and to some of the planet’s surfing heavens. To be published six times yearly, from offices in New York, Blue features the every-which-way graphic design of David Carson, whose earlier groundbreaking work on Ray Gun magazine is displayed in the new “Ray Gun: Out of Control,” a $45 art book from Simon & Schuster Editions.

Blue follows a path to exotic climes cut by Escape, a 3-year-old quarterly based in Santa Monica, which bills itself as “The Global Guide for the Adventurous Traveler.”

Afterwords: People en Espanol, which published the first of three test issues last fall, will become a monthly starting next year. The publisher of the Spanish-language edition of People magazine will be Lisa Quiroz, who most recently has been general manager of Time For Kids. . . .

The New York Times announced this week that op-ed columnists Russell Baker, 71, and Anthony Lewis, 70, have signed new contracts. As of this week, Baker’s column will appear every Tuesday (not twice a week); Lewis’ will appear once a week beginning next year.

* Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His e-mail address is paul.colford@newsday.com. His column is published Thursdays.