Future of Books Isn’t Written in Stone

Put 400 members of the book world in a big room, let them talk about their troubled business, and what do you get? Much ado about everything--and nothing to suggest that the troubles will go away any time soon.

On a balmy night this week, the New Yorker magazine convened a symposium at the New York Public Library in Manhattan and posed the question: Does publishing matter anymore? Chaired by writer Ken Auletta, the panel included three publishers, an author and the head of the nation’s largest book chain.

“This must be a publishing event,” gushed one editor, marveling at the crowd buzzing with industry chatter. “It’s a room full of people talking about books they haven’t read.”

Tina Brown, editor of the New Yorker, tried to launch the evening on a positive note, suggesting that the book world is still healthy despite some recent financial turbulence. But she couldn’t quite dispel the underlying sense of gloom and doom in the audience, which included publishing CEOs, authors, agents, editors, publicists, critics and booksellers.

It was hard, after all, to ignore the large sign hanging behind the panel: “Publishing: Dead or Alive?”

Brown quipped that, given the approaching Jewish holidays, some might think the panel was “sitting shiva” (mourning) over the publishing world. “But it’s not me expressing doubt. It’s various spokespeople in [the book] industry, a caravansary of portly men with sandwich boards proclaiming ‘The End Is Nigh.’ ”

In fairness, the book world has reason to be concerned. Sales of adult hardcover books have slumped two years in a row, and the number of books returned unsold to publishers has reached record levels. But if those in the audience thought the New Yorker panel might shed light on this trend, they were disappointed.

Instead, the experts did what the publishing world loves to do when the going gets tough: They pointed fingers at each other, they swore fealty to the higher callings of their craft, and they showed little or no understanding of the larger social forces that are transforming American reading habits.

“I didn’t hear anything new, I didn’t hear any complaints about publishing that I haven’t heard for 25 years,” Alberto Vitale, CEO of Random House Inc., said with a sigh after the debate. “It’s as if these people live inside a bubble.”

Outside the bubble, he said, the world is changing. Booksellers and publishers face more competition than ever from competing entertainment media and the Internet. Americans are harried as never before. They work longer hours; they sleep less. Who has time to read long novels when you’re exhausted by 9 p.m.?

“Nobody talked about this,” Vitale said. “But they have to, if we ever want to bring real change to this industry.”

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Like blind men describing an elephant, the panelists spoke mainly about their own, immediate experiences. Author Cynthia Ozick said publishers are less receptive to literary fiction or nonfiction because of pressures to find the next blockbuster.

She read a letter that a friend received recently from an agent, saying it would be impossible to publish her novel in the current financial climate. What has happened to America’s literary culture and the world of quality books? Ozick asked.

“I didn’t know a book had to go through something they call ‘P and L,’ ” she said, referring to the industry practice of doing a profit and loss forecast for a book before publishers acquire it. “I’m a writer,” Ozick said. “I thought ‘P and L’ stood for ‘profundity of life,’ ‘pursuit of love.’ ”

Michael Naumann, president and CEO of Henry Holt and Co., said publishing houses are not to blame. He pointed to the large chains--such as Barnes & Noble and Borders--which he said have refused to share the financial burdens of modern publishing.

“Bookstore shelf space grew 1,000% between 1985 and 1995,” Naumann said. “But sales have only grown 4%. All of the shelves were filled with books and I know this . . . because they all came back to me.”

Indeed, in a business practice unique to publishing, bookstores can return all unsold books for 100% credit. If too many copies of a title are sent back, Naumann said, publishers risk a financial bath that can wipe out any modest profits.

“Returns are killing them, publishers say,” added Auletta. “So why don’t large stores share the risk?”

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Don’t point the finger at me, answered Leonard Riggio, CEO of Barnes & Noble. The fault, he said, lies with inefficient publishers.

“When customers come into the stores, they’re exposed to the books you publish,” he said. “And they vote by virtue of what they buy. When books don’t sell, they [publishers] blame the chains. But why not look at the origin of the question, which is that the customers have rejected these books?

“Blaming the chains is a smoke screen. You’re not taking responsibility for the fact we may have the wrong book, or you issued too many copies, or that you begged the store to carry more copies than we thought was right.”

There was more flak for Riggio: Big chains have destroyed smaller, independent bookstores. Large stores care only about celebrity bestsellers.

“I don’t know why there’s such a sense of doom in the business,” answered the bookseller, who gamely held his own throughout the evening. Adult hardcover sales may be temporarily down, he said, but overall, “people are buying more books than they ever have. There were 50,000 books published 10 years ago, and there were more than 60,000 books published this year.”

Besides, he said, New York’s insular book world “doesn’t know what’s going on in the heartland . . . in Oregon, in Utah. It’s not just celebrity books. . . . The public today is buying across a bigger spread of books than anyone wants to admit.”

Just ask Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove / Atlantic. His small publishing firm is riding high with “Cold Mountain,” by Charles Frazier, a critically acclaimed work and the nation’s best-selling fiction book. After 20 years in the business, Entrekin finally has a hit. But he’s still uneasy.

Given the large conglomerates that own publishing houses, he said, there is pressure to “commodify” books and authors. The book world used to let new titles percolate on the market for several months, to grow by word of mouth and find readers.

Nowadays, Entrekin suggested, there is a burning impatience to find the next big hit, to pigeonhole authors and books in easy categories. The large corporations that control American publishing care more about product than prose, he said.

“It’s getting much harder to publish serious nonfiction,” Entrekin said. “The financial return isn’t that great.”

Not true, said Phyllis Grann, president of Penguin Putnam Inc. For years, she noted, publishers have subsidized worthy fiction and nonfiction titles from the profits of more successful books.

Books can be profitable, Grann suggested, yet they rarely generate the double-digit profit levels that some corporations expect. If a quality title sells “only” 25,000 copies, she explained, publishers can still turn a respectable profit--but not if they paid too much of an advance to the writer.

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Speaking of advances, said panel members, what about the high-powered literary agents who have pushed the cost of acquiring books higher, all in the name of getting their 15% piece of the action? That, in turn, puts pressure on publishers to print enough copies to get their money back, even if the market isn’t so promising. Aren’t agents to blame for this?

And what about smaller bookstores, asked an audience member. Why was only Riggio speaking for booksellers on the panel? “If you can put together a panel on the future of publishing without the independent bookstore owner’s perspective, than publishing already has one foot in the grave,” said Richard Howarth, a bookseller from Oxford, Miss.

And so it went, until dinner and drinks beckoned the crowd upstairs. American publishing might be in trouble but, the audience seemed to agree, it would live to see another day.

Meanwhile, a sense of humor couldn’t hurt.

Publishing is an “impossible business,” Brown said, “and it might best be summed up by a cartoon in the New Yorker of 1994,” in which a publisher talks frankly to an author:

“Mr. Herman,” he says, “you made me laugh and you made me cry. But you didn’t make me money.”