Will Publishing Survive?

Book publishing exists at the intersection of art and commerce. In recent years, according to some observers, several factors have combined to make it difficult (some say nearly impossible) for publishers to acquire and sell--at commercially viable levels--difficult yet important writing. The conglomeration of nearly everything, an obsession with the bottom-line and the pressure to reap short-term profits, the near-universal enrollment in the cults of celebrity, sensationalism and gossip, have made it harder for publishers to successfully maintain their traditional commitment to literature and the public discourse. The advent of electronic technologies also threatens to significantly transform traditional means of both production and distribution of books, and perhaps, ultimately, it is feared, reading itself.

Book Review wondered whether publishers, editors, literary agents and booksellers generally agreed with the assumptions of this gloomy view, or did their experience suggest a more optimistic appraisal of book publishing’s present and future. We asked a number of them to share their thoughts with us.

GEORGES BORCHARDT

It is hard to come up with a simple answer to your question. On the one hand, we now have the generally unenlightened and mismanaged conglomerates whose managers are interested in finding more businesses to swallow and not in finding new authors to add to their backlists. On the other hand, the authors who make up the valuable backlists of the firms being swallowed (and ironically the very raison d’e^tre for the swallowing) had a hard time getting published even before conglomerates came into being.

William Faulkner was turned down by the legendary Maxwell Perkins (Scribners); Elie Wiesel was turned down by the original Knopf (Mrs. K herself) who suggested he get published instead “abroad in England, or wherever”; Samuel Beckett was turned down by just about every publisher in New York. Both Wiesel and Beckett were then picked up by small publishers with little capital but good instincts, Hill & Wang and Grove Press respectively; the first of these firms is now part of the Von Holtzbrinck conglomerate; the second, first swallowed up then regurgitated, is now part of the independent Grove Atlantic.

Will the new technologies eliminate publishers altogether? Perhaps, but there were writers for many centuries before the first publishers appeared on the scene, and there will I am sure be writers for many centuries after the publishers disappear (if they actually do). More of a threat to the future of publishing as we know it are the publishers themselves: the “big boys” today all behave like Swiss bankers in the days of Voltaire. The latter said if you see a Swiss banker jump out of the window, jump after him, there must be money out there. They are all jumping a bit faster today than they used to, but perhaps not fast enough to self-destruct altogether.

So put me in the camp of the guardedly optimistic. The French press, incidentally, recently reported the case of the late head of a powerful conglomerate who asked St. Peter for privileges commensurate with his earthly achievements. He was directed to a door from which he returned quite irate: Why had he been sent to hell? We have mergers here too, he was told.

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Georges Borchardt has worked for many years in publishing. The literary agency that bears his name was incorporated in 1967. He represents many authors, including such L.A. writers as T.C. Boyle, John Rechy, Jack Miles and Saul Friedlander.

ANDRE SCHIFFRIN

The process of takeovers in publishing has been going on for many decades. But in the early 1960s, when RCA bought Random House, Bennett Cerf, its then-president, was able to promise himself and his colleagues that Random would continue to publish books that would lose money but that he instinctively knew were important in the long run and unprofitable in the short run. All this has changed dramatically in the last decade as publishing has increasingly become part of large multinational media conglomerates whose profit expectations are based on the money that can be made in television, film and in the press. Eighty percent of American trade publishing is now controlled by five of these firms; 93% of all book sales are now in the hands of the top 20 firms. The new owners are committed to making a 15%-20% profit margin, instead of the 4% or 5% that publishing had accounted for during the rest of the century.

One would have expected the federal anti-trust act to prevent some of these vast conglomerates from forming. If Rupert Murdoch wants to own more than one newspaper in a given town, the anti-trust act is vigorously enforced. But when Germany’s Bertelsmann decides that it will own 40% of American trade publishing, not a single eyebrow goes up in Washington.

Does the change of ownership make all that much of a difference to the rest of us? Authors, who are fully aware of the power of the new conglomerates, have far fewer publishers to which they can submit their manuscripts. (The Authors’ Guild is among the few who protested the increasing centralization of power.) Booksellers too are increasingly in the thrall of a small number of firms on which they depend. Most important, readers are gradually discovering that the choice that used to be theirs has now been strenuously limited by what is available from the large houses. Careful comparison of the catalogs of the major firms--which I did in writing “The Business of Books”--revealed that the major firms’ lists are very far indeed from what those same firms used to publish in the preceding half-century: HarperCollins, Random House and Simon & Schuster were once known for the variety of books they offered, including books of foreign literary translation, philosophy, politics, science and the like. These categories have all but disappeared from the current catalogs, which are focused increasingly on books that will be part of the entertainment industry. The phrase “the free marketplace of ideas” was never intended to ask how many dollars one could get for every new idea. Important books, whether in fiction or nonfiction, asking new questions and posing difficult and subtle issues, are less and less likely to be found on the lists of the larger firms.

Of course, the university presses and the smaller independent publishers, such as The New Press, are doing their best to fill this enormous gap. But our resources are far more limited, our market access infinitely smaller and our ability to fund important long-term work, in whatever form it may eventually appear, practically nonexistent. This is a change that will affect not only readers, but the very intellectual debate that is crucial for a democracy to encourage. The supply of new ideas used to be an essential part of what publishing wanted to do in this and other countries. The main thrust of most publishing houses is now the maximization of profit, marking a perilous change in the way our society will think and debate in the future.

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Andre Schiffrin is the author of “The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read.” Former managing director of Pantheon Books for 30 years, Schiffrin founded The New Press, a nonprofit publisher, in 1990. He has published many authors, including Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky, George Kennan, R.D. Laing, and Gunnar Myrdal.

ROBERT GOTTLIEB

Every few years since I’ve been in publishing (that’s since 1955), we’ve been told that it’s all over. There’s always a new reason: remember “The medium is the message”? Meanwhile, books go rolling along.

I’ve worked at Simon & Schuster when it was privately owned, Random House when it was owned by RCA, Newhouse, and now Bertelsmann. A lot has changed, most of it technical (and much of that for the better), but things remain greatly the same. Conglomerates haven’t stifled individual publishing or the publishing of books of quality--in fact, both fiction and nonfiction of quality tends to sell far better today than comparable books did years ago. Of course the chains and the Intenet intrude on our independence, but the final result for the author is generally far better than it used to be. The notion of unpublished masterpieces has always been a piece of romantic nonsense; all through the publishing world, young (and old) editors and agents are eagerly--even desperately--searching for serious talent. They may make mistakes, but that’s not the fault of conglomerates.

Can anyone really believe that publishers in the past weren’t interested in short- (or long-) term profits? Or that there weren’t celebrity books? (They may have been more discreet, but they were sold on the author’s celebrity.) There are good publishers and there are bad publishers, as there have always been, and the good ones cope with the difficulties and put out books of quality, and sell them. The very golden age that young and middle-aged people are looking back at so romantically was forcefully (and frequently) described to me by Alfred Knopf as “the age of the slobs”--for him, everything after 1939 represented the death of publishing. I thought he was mistaken then, and I think today’s doom-cryers are mistaken too.

I don’t understand electronic publishing and have no real sense of what its place will be. But The Book as we know it has been for so long a passionately loved object--and supreme comfort--that I find it hard to believe it’s going to vanish. We’ve witnessed the threat of the bookclub (starting in the ‘20s), the threat of the paperback, the threat of television, the threat of illiteracy, yet more and more books are being written, published, and read. I’m afraid I think that all this talk is whipped-up media abstraction.

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Robert Gottlieb is former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker. He has worked with many authors, including the late Jessica Mitford and Joseph Heller.

ANDY ROSS

Over the last decade the retail book business has been transformed from a system dominated by independent booksellers to one increasingly controlled by a few large chains and Internet corporations. The corporatization of bookselling has ominous implications for the dissemination of ideas and of great works of literature.

Many of America’s most important literary figures and intellectuals would not have developed a reputation or have found their readers had it not been for the passionate salesmanship and spirit of diversity of independent booksellers. The chain stores are mass merchants. They are very good at promoting highly commercial titles with huge print runs and giant promotional budgets. They are not so good at discovering emerging literary talent and developing an audience for them. Traditionally this job has fallen to independent booksellers. Such contemporary literary and intellectual figures as Barbara Kingsolver, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Robbins, Louise Erdrich, Alice Walker, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut and Noam Chomsky originally had very modest book sales. These writers were not heavily promoted by the chains. They found their audiences through the mediation of independent booksellers.

This principle is not simply an abstraction. In February 1989, the Iranian government announced its fatwa against Salman Rushdie who had just published his brilliant but controversial “The Satanic Verses.” Shortly thereafter, America’s largest chains, including Barnes & Noble, B. Dalton (now owned by Barnes & Noble) and Waldenbooks (now owned by Borders) yanked “The Satanic Verses” from their shelves nationwide. More than 1,500 bookstores stopped selling this book because of a decision by a few corporate executives. The book continued to be available to American readers primarily because of the willingness of independent stores to sell the book, even in the face of considerable danger. Had the Rushdie Affair occurred today, there are huge markets that would not have the book available because independent booksellers no longer exist in many communities.

The culture of independent stores is fundamentally different from the culture of chains. Where the chainstores and the Wall Street-dominated Internet ordering services have sought to monopolize markets, independents have celebrated diversity and multiplicity. Independent stores may be quirky and idiosyncratic. But they are different. Literary values thrive on diversity and are stifled by the mass market.

Most emerging literary voices have very modest sales potential. It is not unusual for these writers to have sales of 10,000 copies or less. Although the chains do carry many of these books, they tend to get lost amid the great pyramids of bestsellers that are the focus of chainstore marketing. Emerging literary works require a quieter and subtler strategy, personal salesmanship and enthusiasm from booksellers committed to works of distinction. They require a distribution system that is heterogeneous and responsive to the differences of local communities. These works of art are an anathema to the mass market that thrives on the cult of celebrity and the fetish of commodities.

In spite of the corporate seizure of bookselling, great literary books are being written. One-dimensional corporate culture cannot kill genius. It is the challenge of our industry to see that genius finds its audience. I urge all people who care about the survival of literature, who cherish diversity and multiplicity, who abhor monopoly power and the domination of the mass market to support their local independent bookseller. I think you will find it a pleasurable as well as a worthy experience.

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Andy Ross is the owner of Cody’s Books, an independent bookstore in Berkeley, Calif., founded in 1956 by Pat and Fred Cody. He is past president of the Northern California Booksellers Association.

ROBERT D. LOOMIS

Frankly, I’m getting a little annoyed at the assumption that it’s now “fairly impossible” to publish difficult yet important writing. It’s true that the commercial aspect of things has increased because the monies involved are now far beyond what anyone could have imagined even 20 years ago. The risks are greater of course, but that’s mainly for the big books where the risk is up front. Last year, Random House published more first novels than ever, and as far as I know we’ve never turned down a book we liked for any of the reasons that are now being bruited about.

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Robert D. Loomis, vice president and executive editor of Random House, has been an editor for four decades, working with such authors as Maya Angelou, Shelby Foote, Pete Dexter, Neil Sheehan and William Styron.

ALBERTO VITALE

I don’t agree with the views on the predicament of publishing at this juncture. It is, and has been for some time, a cliche to say that conglomeration and changes in book production and distribution models have prevented publishers from offering important works of literature.

There will always be room for works of extraordinary merit and value. The commitment of publishers to good writing, whether literary or commercial, remains strong. In my experience, there has never been a work of literary substance that has not found its readers. These important books, like bestsellers, are part of the chemistry of publishing. But bestsellers represent only a very small percentage (2-3%) of the more than 50,000 titles published in the United States every year. The true strength of publishing houses is found in the broad and rich backlist that make up 30%-40% of the books purchased by readers.

Conglomeration has been beneficial to publishing. It has given houses that could grow no more with their own limited resources the ability to thrive within the larger environment of shared services, warehousing, information technology, human resources, and administration, thereby benefiting from economies of scale. Imprints within so-called conglomerates (Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Viking Penguin and the like), here in the United States and abroad, have flourished. They have remained very independent, reflecting the personality of their publishers and editors and producing a wealth of titles.

While profitability has always been a necessary measure of success, we all agree that profitability in publishing has not been comparable to that of other industries. Publishing is a constant roll of the dice, a gamble. Fortunately, after many years, technology has given publishing a new lease on life. The Gutenberg era and its methods of book distribution are now being supplemented and complemented with the new digital technology. E-books, a representation of the printed page in digital form on a reader, hand-held device, laptop or computer screen, are an empowering technology with far-reaching capabilities. For the first time, there is another medium that offers infinite possibilities and the means to disseminate intellectual property to an almost infinite audience.

The economics of this new technology, once adopted by the reading public, could be very attractive, with none of the inefficiencies connected with cutting trees, making pulp, distributing copies to bookstores and warehouses, and the expenses of damage, loss and returns (which are sometimes more than 40%). The distribution of e-books is easy, direct, without boundaries, and forever, and the price to consumers should be extraordinarily attractive (at $5-$7, instead of $20-$30). This technology may also allow the development of new independent publishers who will not have to support the overheads of warehouses, sales forces, production departments, and the like, in order to survive. The reading public will enjoy an array of new titles as we have never seen before from a variety of e-publishers, old and new.

This clearly does not suggest that traditional publishing or books as we know them today will disappear. The role and function of publishers and editors will continue to be crucial. The challenges will be much greater and demanding. It is my strong belief that paper books will continue to exist with e-books as far into the future as we can imagine. As e-books are used increasingly in education from kindergarten through graduate school and beyond, their acceptance will grow stronger among the continually growing reading public. It behooves publishers to digitize their backlist and frontlist with a sense of urgency, so they can be prepared when e-book technology explodes and hits critical mass. They should also look at the opportunity to enhance e-books with music, graphics, video, dictionaries, annotations, and more, thereby creating greater value (and potentially higher price points) for the ever more sophisticated and demanding consumer.

Those publishers who seize the potential of this medium will certainly thrive. Those who remain indifferent or hesitant will be left behind. E-books are an unprecedented prospect for publishing worldwide, and an extraordinary powerful additional new profitable way to publish, as well as to reach and satisfy the readers of the world.

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Alberto Vitale, former head of Bantam Doubleday Dell and former chief executive officer of Random House, Inc., is chairman of the International eBook Award Foundation.

JASON EPSTEIN

The disappearance of all but a few independent bookstores that maintain and service large, complex backlists and their replacement by book chains whose budgets require rapid turnover of promotional titles have turned the publishing world upside down: Publishers whose aim had once been the accumulation of capital in the form of deep backlists are now forced by an overconcentrated retail marketplace to risk their capital on books of the moment, a source of tension within the industry.

New technologies foreshadow a solution to this dilemma. It is now possible to digitize, catalog, store and deliver electronically virtually any book or other document ever written so that readers at their computers or similar devices can download and browse items of interest from a potentially vast multilingual catalog. Relatively inexpensive, fully automatic machines are now in development which can receive files ordered from this catalog and print at random locations throughout the world, at your neighborhood Kinko’s or at the headwaters of the Ganges--entirely automatic ATM machines for books.

The implications of these technologies are revolutionary. Readers everywhere will have access to all but limitless material and authors will have unprecedented access to readers. The publishing function will be greatly simplified and limited largely to editorial, publicity, design and web site management, as well as the financial support of work in progress. Authors will have their own web sites linked to sites of related interest so that in time authors will have their own web networks linking them to an ever-expanding audience of interested readers. Readers will pay less for books printed on demand and authors will receive a larger share of the proceeds. I believe that books printed on demand will for the foreseeable future prove more attractive than books downloaded on electronic screens, though many categories of reference books--dictionaries, almanacs, atlases and similar compendia--which are obsolete upon publication, need not be published in book form, but made available electronically by subscription.

This transformation will not occur overnight and will not suddenly abolish conventional publishing or bookselling, but powerful new technologies are usually irresistible. Though I prefer things to remain as they are, this is impossible. Therefore, publishers should greet the electronic future with hope and skill and try to preserve within it the values of the past.

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Jason Epstein is the author of “Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future.” Founder of Anchor Books in 1952, Epstein is a co-founder of The New York Review of Books, creator of Library of America, and was for many years editorial director of Random House. He has edited many writers, including Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow, Gore Vidal, Paul Kennedy and Jane Jacobs.

JONATHAN GALASSI

ROGER W. STRAUS JR.

We’re not among the doom-and-gloomers about the current publishing situation. While it’s true that books have lost some of their cultural centrality in the age of media overstimulation, nothing has affected the vitality, or the saleability, of serious writing--which we would hazard is at an all-time high. E-books, we believe, simply represent an alternative format that will not--anytime soon--unseat the primacy of the very efficient, attractive and beloved tool that is the printed and bound book. And print-on-demand technology means that the unfindable backlist title will soon be history (just as online bookselling has been wonderful for slower-moving titles that aren’t often easily findable even in the largest stores). Sometime soon, too, instant, on-the-spot production of books will help cut down the waste factor (overstock, returns, shipping in and out) that does so much to diminish publishers’ profits.

What we do think is problematic is the tendency for convergence in media, which leads to feast-or-famine: A few high-concept things get the lion’s share of the attention, while others just as worthy, or more so, go virtually unnoticed. And it’s not books but their writers who get promoted--which is fine if you’re mediagenic, but otherwise very problematic. We also think the related condensation and dumbing-down of the diversified lists they offer, as well as in book review media is unfortunate and shortsighted.

But it’s pointless to bemoan the status quo; what we need to do is work as agiley and cannily as we can with the situation as given to get across the many exciting and provocative and challenging works that continue to be written--and widely read. Reading offers genuine relief from information-overload. We see it happening constantly--in the subways, in the parks, on the beaches--and the variety and complexity of what’s being devoured is truly heartening. At Farrar, Straus & Giroux, we continue to find it’s possible to offer a new novelist or short story writer (Akhil Sharma, Lois-Ann Yamanaka), or a splendid prose stylist (Philip Gourevitch, Jonathan Rosen), a powerful new poetic voice (Carl Phillips, Brenda Shaughnessy) or a book in translation by a major figure (Peter Nadas, Adam Zagajewski) and achieve some surprising results. Despite the problems, from our vantage point there is, if anything, greater opportunity today than ever before to reach the constant and enduring cadre of serious readers.

Jonathan Galassi and Roger W. Straus Jr. direct Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc., a subsidiary since 1996 of Verlagsgrupp Georg von Holtzbrinck of Stuttgart, Germany, owners also of St. Martin’s, Picador and Henry Holt and Co. Galassi has worked as an editor at several publishers, including Houghton Mifflin and Random House, before coming to Farrar Straus in 1986. Straus founded the firm in 1946 and remains its head. He has published many writers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, John McPhee, Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes.

DOUGLAS MESSERLI

On difficult days--and in the world of small press literary publishing there are many such days--it does indeed appear that the quality of publishing has greatly diminished, that the financial capabilities of presses publishing serious literary work have been substantially reduced, and that the audience itself for such writing has decreased, in part because--increasingly fed on writing with simplistic and cliched characters and action--it has come to expect less and to reject any work that is even somewhat complex. There is no doubt that it is not easy to publish the kind of literature to which my imprints, Sun and Moon Press and Green Integer, are committed.

On better days, I quickly realize, however, that this is not the whole story. This year I have been working on a book covering the fiction of 2000, and for that volume I have kept abreast of most of the works of fiction published throughout the year by American and British publishers. The American (and British) fiction has been quite disappointing, with the most notable works by older and well-established writers: Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, the late Joseph Heller, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal. These few books received the vast majority of review attention, with an only slightly younger group of authors (Frederick Barthelme, Russell Banks, T.C. Boyle, Ha Jin, Olson, Jane Smiley, William T. Vollmann and Joy Williams) receiving the remaining review attention. Only one of these authors, Toby Olson, was published by a smaller press; and not one of these authors could truly be described as writing innovative work or being representative of writing that could have new meaning for younger readers. The few works that might be described as challenging the genre (Dennis Barone’s “Temple of the Rat,” R.M. Berry’s “Dictionary of Modern Anguish,” or Jane Unrue’s “The House,” for example)--all works published by smaller presses--received very little, if any, critical attention; and none of these, unfortunately, could be described as a great work of literature.

On the other hand, the commercial book industry--which is often seen as having abandoned literary translation--published last year more than 40 books from other languages, including works by major and lesser known international authors who anyone interested in contemporary writing would have to acknowledge: Gao Xingjian (Chinese), Inger Christensen (Danish), Arthur Japin (Dutch), Helga Ruebsammen (Dutch), Mohsin Hamid (Pakistani), Roger Martin du Gard (French), Gunter Grass (German), Peter Handke (Austrian), George Konrad (Hungarian), Simona Vinci (Italian), Haruki Murakami (Japanese), Antoni Libera (Polish), Antonio Lobo Antunes (Portuguese), Jose Saramago (Portuguese), Victor Pelevin (Russian), Reinaldo Arenas (Cuban), Eliseo Alberto (Cuban), Carlos Fuentes (Mexican) and Torgny Lindgren (Swedish)--to name just a few.

Smaller literary and university presses (City Lights, New Directions, Welcome Rain, University of Nebraska Press, Northwestern University Press, Catbird, Columbia University Press, my own Green Integer and others) also published outstanding translations by such authors as Balthasar Porcel (Catalan), Daniela Fischerova (Czech), Jachym Topol (Czech), Brigette Aubert (Belgian), Eric Chevillard (French), Raymond Queneau (French), Maryse Conde (Guadeloupean), W.G. Sebald (German), Ingo Schulze (German), Robert Walser (Swiss), S.Y. Agnon (Israeli), Massimo Bontempelli (Italian), Shusaku Endo (Japanese), Jens Bjrneboe (Norwegian), Julio Cortazar (Argentinian), Javier Marias (Spanish), Antonio Jose Ponte (Cuban) and Jaiyer Masud (Indian, writing in Urdu). And this list represents only a portion of such publications.

Were such a wide diversity of brilliant work written in English, we would certainly be forced to recognize that British and American fiction is undergoing a literary revolution and we would be shocked to have anyone suggest there was trouble in the publishing industry.

Moreover, smaller and university presses have often become very clever in their publishing strategies, taking advantage of the very weaknesses in the commercial portion of the industry. For example, my own Green Integer press has bought the rights and published a number of works that larger houses could not afford to keep in print, and these same titles--such as Robert Bresson’s “Notes on the Cinematograher,” Henri Bergson’s “Laughter” and Jose Donoso’s “Hell Has No Limits”--represent some of our very best sellers. Younger presses such as Exact Change and Dalkey Archive Press, while publishing some original titles, have survived by reprinting titles that in previous decades were simply lost to readers. One could say that we have never been in a better time to rediscover our literary heritage.

Finally, it is hard to ignore the fact that the commercial presses’ almost complete abandonment of poetry has had a kind of positive effect on the genre. Recognizing that they have little or no chance of being published by larger (and sometimes even smaller) publishers, some poets have banded together to create small publishing enterprises issuing work of their own and friends. The sales of many of these books have been as strong as those by more established publishers of new or experimental work. And, indeed, many have argued as I have that American poetry (as opposed to American fiction) has never been more exciting, with more diversity of forms and authors.

In short, it is the best of times and the worst of times in literary publishing. One would be a fool to be utterly optimistic about the future of serious literature in this country; but in our search for answers to the problems we see, we must look beyond our worst fears and the simplistic observations on which they are founded.

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Douglas Messerli founded Sun the and Moon Press in 1978, the largest independent literary book publisher in Los Angeles with more than 350 titles in print, including works by Aeschylus, Thomas Hardy, Knut Hamsun, F.T. Marinetti, Louis Ferdinand Celine and Djuna Barnes, as well as L.A. writers such as Martha Ronk, John Steppling and Fanny Howe.

JAMES ATLAS

Nostalgia is a dangerous emotion: Dwelling on a past we never knew encourages us to avert our eyes from the future. Sure, the old-fashioned world of books--the high-minded literary culture, the independent bookstores with “character,” the eccentric publishers in their quaint brownstone offices--is a charming fairy tale. But is that the way things really were? My sense, as a reader and writer of biographies about literary figures who came of age in the postwar era, is that it was a lot harder to get published in those days than it is now. And just how anemic is our literary culture? It’s a heartening experience to read The New York Review of Books, for instance. Consider the ads that adorn a recent issue: a biography of Marguerite Duras published by the University of Chicago Press; Christopher Hibbert’s “Italian Cities,” published by the Folio Society; a memoir entitled “Jew Boy” by Alan Kaufman, published by Fromm International. And consider the books reviewed: a selection of essays by the late Lionel Trilling from Farrar, Straus & Giroux; two hefty volumes of unpublished writings by Walter Benjamin; previously untranslated works by the Italian writer Giovanni Verga from three different publishers. Are there really worthy books that aren’t seeing the light of day?

Admittedly, there’s a downside to the current scene: The chains have done a certain amount of damage. It’s a disgrace that there isn’t a single bookstore in all of New York City like the old Eighth Street Bookstore or Shakespeare & Company, nothing to rival the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., or the Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vt. But to roam the corridors of Barnes & Noble is to encounter a robust array of titles that simply weren’t available to the public a decade ago. The way I see it, conglomeratization--oy, what a word!--has created opportunity for new publishers, new voices, new forms. The Internet will prove a terrific tool for the kind of targeted marketing disdained by traditional publishers. Where else can you find such a wealth of specialized audiences for your titles? As for electronic technology, why not see it as just another delivery system, another means for getting books out to readers--or consumers, if you will?

When I first got into the publishing business, I was stunned by the lack of market research into who was buying what. Books were labored over, beautifully produced, only to be sent out into the world like a message in a bottle: If it washes up on a beach, fine; if it sinks, also fine. In a review of Jason Epstein’s brave summation of the state of publishing, “Book Business,” in The New Republic, Larry McMurtry laments the situation of readers “who crave literature as much as ever, and are increasingly poorly served by the marketing culture that controls many publishing houses now.” What we need is to exploit that marketing culture: I’m convinced that high-end literary publishers are only reaching a tenth of their potential readers. That public--hungry for education, for enlightenment, for truth--is there. Our job is to find them.

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James Atlas, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review and The New York Times Magazine, is founding editor of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives series. He is also a novelist and biographer of Delmore Schwarz and, most recently, of Saul Bellow.

BARBARA MEADE

As a bookseller, I work at the intersection of art and commerce. As an independent bookseller, I am able to make my own decisions about the respective weights I will allocate to each activity. In the environment in which I sell books, this is not the norm. The chains and Amazon, whose shareholder owners look primarily toward maximizing profit, are primarily driven by commerce; their product is only incidentally art. My mission is to disseminate art; as a secondary activity, I must do so in a way that allows me to pay the costs of putting a book into a buyer’s hands.

In today’s retail environment, the costs of putting what I think is a worthwhile book into the reader’s hands are constantly escalating. Since independent booksellers do not participate in publishers’ “renting” display space in bookstores for titles that are commercially important to their bottom-line, we absorb the full cost of displaying less mass-appeal titles in our prime space. Our marketing costs are huge. From my perspective, publishers’ advertising budgets are primarily directed toward marketing what is going to sell anyway. “Sell more of what’s selling” is the operational rule. That leaves the independent bookseller the expensive task of trying to sell more of what deserves to sell but is not of obvious star quality. To accomplish this, we are increasingly dependent on the most prominent book reviews, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times. Recently, for example, the Washington Post Book World’s front page was completely filled with a review of a new Bing Crosby biography, and I thought to myself that among the many complex reasons why I am a bookseller, none of them is to sell a Hollywood celebrity biography. I wish I could regard these book reviews as my partners in selling my shelfloads of books that have far more value. The reason I can’t is that they have their shareholder-owners too, who quarterly study their financial statements for signs of increased profit. They also have their advertisers, who pay huge sums, justified by large attractive circulation figures, to promote their more commercial titles.

All this commercial activity leaves me feeling somewhat isolated as an independent bookseller. In this huge networked process in which I deliver the written word to the bookbuyer, it is only the three of us, the writer, the reader and the bookseller who define value in terms of content and not in dollars. The good news is that after many difficult years, independent bookselling is alive and well. There are many palpable signs that our insistence that publishers provide us with content, alongside the massive amounts of entertainment, is still heard. The best return I get on my investment in bookselling is the ability to select and sell modest amounts of the disquieting literature that challenges the minds and mores of our reading establishment.

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Barbara Meade is co-owner of the independent Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C., which Publishers Weekly named 1999 Bookseller of the Year.

GEORGE GIBSON

“Difficult yet important writing” is prose that may or may not entertain, but invariably challenges one to think. I am an optimist and believe it’s a wonderful time to be a publisher. Perhaps this comes from having worked mostly for smaller, independent publishers without the burden of corporate expectation; but I don’t think my feelings would be much different had I worked for big houses. My optimism comes from readers, technology and the book as we know it, and authors. Books have always been read by a small part of the population; if anything, the percentage that buys, say, three or more books in a year has grown in the last 25 years, not shrunk. Are as many challenging books being published and are they selling as many copies as they used to? Exact measurement in this business is difficult, but two pieces of evidence suggest a positive answer to both questions: The bestseller lists are just as full of surprising and thought-provoking books today as in the past (witness Adam Gopnik’s “Paris to the Moon” or Joseph Ellis’ “Founding Brothers”); and a recent survey by the Authors’ Guild found, unexpectedly, that the state of midlist publishing (which would contain most “difficult yet important books”) in America is quite solid. This in turn suggests that the appetite of American readers remains wide, which is the greatest assurance that challenging books will be published.

The only way to significantly expand the audience for books is to create more readers, and technology has the potential to do that. Why isn’t it just as, or even more, plausible that if computers spread learning, they will lead kids back to books, and some to challenging books--kids who in prior generations did not become readers because of a bad classroom experience? The book is a kind of perfect technology, remarkably similar in form and function as it was when the Irish monks were saving civilization. Of how many other objects (the wheel, perhaps) can we make that claim? If anything, technology makes printed and challenging books more accessible.

Finally, I am optimistic because more people write books today than ever before. The act of writing, as it has always been, is an act of faith, and if the numbers of the faithful are growing, the intellectual health of publishing is ultimately in good hands. Internal pressures may have forced publishers to think in short-term, mass-market terms; external factors insist they keep a broader view.

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George Gibson is president of Walker and Company, an independent publishing house responsible for such bestselling books as Dava Sobel’s “Longitude.”

AARON ASHER

Ten Commandments for Publishers:

THOU SHALT NOT:

1) lust after celebrity “authors” and pay them royalty advances that will never earn out, let alone lead to profits;

2) diminish editors in favor of your marketers;

3) publish meretricious books (like the one by the tenured Harvard psychology professor who in all seriousness proclaims that large numbers of Americans have been abducted and sexually abused by aliens from outer space);

4) bribe the bookstore chains to purchase and promote huge quantities of such books;

5) deny appropriate promotion and publicity to all but your would-be “blockbusters”;

6) rid yourselves of writers whose justly admired books have not yet sold well;

7) lack respect for language;

8) honor those who lack respect for it;

9) acquire manuscripts only because they might sell;

10) reject manuscripts only because they might not.

FAT CHANCE!

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Aaron Asher worked for 37 years as an editor and publisher at several major New York publishing houses. He has worked with numerous writers, including Milan Kundera.

ASHBEL GREEN

For many years I’ve thought that the chief obstacle to the publishing of literature in this country has been the decline of serious reading. This phenomenon preceded the waning of the small bookstore, but certainly the loss of so many independent outlets has exacerbated the situation. One can guess at the root causes of the problem--trendy academic fashions, less rigor in high school and college curricula, the influence of television and film that concentrate on personality and sound bites, et cetera.

Americans have also turned inward in their interests--it is rare, for example, that a book dealing with international relations attracts a large number of readers. Fewer translations from other languages are being published. Political books succeed if they involve personalities more than issues. The experimental novel is an uncommon event.

Publishers have always offered a mix of literature and entertainment, so it’s not as if a biography of a Hollywood star or a splashy historical novel represents a new vogue. Serious publishing will not disappear--trade paperback lists are essentially built on literature. But unless you’re assigned a book in school, no one can dictate what you should read. Without invoking the heavy hand of Big Brother, we need to find ways to persuade Americans of the pleasures and benefits of serious reading.

But the book is a remarkable survivor. It has endured despite doomsayers who predicted it would be superannuated by films, radio, television, CDs and now electronic instruments. From Tom Paine’s “Common Sense” to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” books of ideas have moved this nation to better times, and one has to believe they will continue to make contributions to society.

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Ashbel Green has been an editor at Alfred A. Knopf since 1964. He has edited many authors, including Thomas Powers, Strobe Talbott, Joseph Ellis and the late Andrei Sakharov.

DANIEL HALPERN

The highways of art and commerce have, more often than not, been parallel byways--maintaining a kind of standoffish relationship, engaged only when the one finds the other useful. So it’s never been easy to initiate the publishing of “serious noncommercial literature,” because you first have to be capable of identifying it, then willing to stand behind it, even when people don’t initially get it, and somehow maintain a commitment to books of lasting value that will more likely than not never achieve the kind of sales that make business folk smile. But many of us went into publishing committed to the idea that our job was to find books that would be read generation after generation and to figure out a way to effect this job description.

Why this particular vocation? Aside from long-distance driving and eating alone, there’s no better venue for a meeting with one’s soul than reading--I’m watching as I write this my 7-year-old daughter Lily, who has been able to read on and off screen since she was 3, curled up on the couch, a blanket over her nearing-adolescence-legs, her cat Coco curled under a free arm, devouring a Nancy Drew mystery. Reading is a celebration of solitude, where the only other consciousness that can intercede upon the moment is the author’s.

I also believe that what ensures the longevity of books as we have known them is, in part, the physical fact of the written object, that is, the book; in the end, it may be the sensual aspect of the book that helps ensure its survival. Reading is a physical thing--the handling of a book, the accrued coffee stains, notes placed with passion in the margin, perhaps a few messages at the back rediscovered 20 years later, the pleasurable annoyance of losing one’s place. It’s about the way we remember a particular book--a green cover, a burgundy spine, an illustration buried in a 500-page novel, outstanding lines underscored--the pages we’ve traveled with, the paperbacks of our past. Books contain scents, detritus--stains that are proof of our living through their pages, of being there! We need the artifact of literature, the body of the book that we’ve avidly opened, revealing what it has to offer--yes, it is sexual. It’s about touching, the feel of paper, the texture of the page as the story turns and spins and unwinds. It’s unimaginable giving up books--walls without the titles we’ve been enraptured by peering back at us from their colored spines as we carry out the routines we call our lives. Would you live in a house with rooms without books?

I don’t imagine books are going to disappear in my daughter’s lifetime; evolution is sometimes slow. The actual book is going to hold its own, even in a world with competition. Remember, it was only a few years ago that CD-Roms were going to turn books into an endangered species. Who’s a fossil now?

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Daniel Halpern is founder and editor of Antaeus and The Ecco Press, now an imprint of HarperCollins.

DANIEL SIMON

To the extent that the corporate publishing sector has committed itself to “the cults of celebrity, sensationalism and gossip,” it has placed itself in a very precarious position. On the other hand, where publishers have found the character to commit themselves to better books, whether at independent houses such as Seven Stories or at imprints within larger houses, such as Metropolitan Books at Henry Holt and Company, the result has been a strengthening of our core businesses, backlists and fruitful relationships. Authors must know that they are bringing new meaning into the world, not just sales of product. Smart people who work at publishing houses need to feel that they are contributing their good efforts toward a meaningful result. And readers have a right to expect that when they pick up a book they are coming to join what has been a true creation process.

We live among our own mythologies as surely as did the Greeks and Romans. Our gods are just as benevolent, or as dangerous, and certainly as mischievous, as theirs were. But these gods of the marketplace should be treated respectfully, not worshipfully.

The funny thing about the kind of subservience to the marketplace you describe in your statement is that it is characterized not so much by arrogance as by a sense of helplessness: Underneath the myth that “crap sells” is the even scarier thought that in the current corporatized publishing climate too many people in positions of power don’t feel that they necessarily know what a good book is. In part, this is because there has been a shift away from the traditional editorial and sales leadership of publishing houses toward very pure corporate and marketing philosophies, a change from an idiosyncratic business model to one that is less idiosyncratic.

Only a few decades ago, the prevailing myth among publishing types was that they always knew a good book when they saw one. As all the famous stories of manuscripts that received dozens of rejection slips before going on to greatness show, they didn’t always know. Today, people feel passionately confused, and in a way that’s better. There’s more openness now, even if it has yet to lead in enlightened directions.

The historian Howard Zinn teaches us that sweeping historical changes rarely announce themselves beforehand. With that in mind, I’ll bet that the change that is coming will be largely positive.

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aniel Simon presides over Seven Stories Press, an independent publishing house in New York, whose recent books include “Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcomandante Marcos.”

BETSY LERNER

Whenever people suggest that the sky is falling or that corporations are the bad guys, I immediately feel suspicious. There is more access and opportunity than ever before. I don’t have the statistics at the ready, but they all prove this to be true. There are more books being published, more publishing opportunities and venues, et cetera. And, it goes without saying, there is more crap. But who’s to say what’s crap? The Los Angeles Times? The New York Times? Many of my most revered artists were shunned in their lifetime. I hope someone shuns me.

As for my own appraisal as an agent, it’s optimistic: Every few months I read a manuscript that makes me sit up and act right. I think that’s a pretty good rate. And usually I can find a home for such a book.

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Betsy Lerner is an agent with The Gernert Company and author of “The Forest For the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers.” She has worked as an editor at Houghton Mifflin, Ballantine, Simon & Schuster, as well as Doubleday where she was executive editor.

HAROLD EVANS

As Dr. Johnson said on hearing that England was doomed, “There is a lot of ruin in a country.” I feel the same way about the mourners shuffling impatiently outside the sickroom of publishing, more so about apocalyptic predictions of the death of reading. It isn’t going to happen. Print on paper is magical for many reasons, for its authority, its ease, its accessibility, its durability, et cetera, and so is photography. If this sounds Panglossian, let me admit to anxieties about all the negatives you mention. It depends on the leadership at the top of publishing. The danger is when some bright spark at the head of a large trade operation gets the idea that each and every book must make a profit. It isn’t going to happen. And trying to make it happen would be the blow to civilization that you predict. In any good publishing house, it is recognized, though it needs reemphasizing, that it is the viability of the whole list, the whole house, over time that matters. I recall as president of Random House asking for the bottom-line figures on 12 of our books that had been nominated by the librarians of America as the best in the year. We lost several hundred thousand dollars on them. Then I asked the same question of 29 Random House titles on The New York Times’ “Notable Books of the Year” list. The losses doubled. But two books on the list made several million dollars’ profit. They more than paid for the quality loss leaders. In the end, since those quality books are still being read, still being sold, they will pay for themselves--probably in profit as well as esteem. Of course, publishing needs more energy in marketing and distribution, more creativity--to make the books known--and I rejoice in the prospects of quicker reprinting, electronic printing, more exposure for the good and the great. Put me down as a worried optimist. And as the author of “The American Century”--just out in paperback! Why miss a chance to reach more people?

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Harold Evans, former president of Random House, was editor in London of The Sunday Times for 14 years where he established the investigative journalism which uncovered the Kim Philby scandal and focused worldwide attention on the plight of the victims of thalidomide. He is the author of several books, including “The American Century.”

ROBERT WEIL

As a young editor, I was once admonished by the publisher of the company I had just starting working for. It occurred at a marketing meeting where I was describing a book that I planned to publish as “literary.” I had always been led to believe that such a word was a compliment, but the publisher informed me that such a term was negative, that no one read literary books, and that I had already sentenced the book to a dismal fate from which there could be no reprieve. In the end, the book did just fine, but the experience underscored the enormous hurdles that an editor confronts in publishing books that might stand the test of time.

In fact, one of the most glaring misconceptions that saddles the American publishing industry today is the nomenclature that separates “literary” from “commercial” books. Like the corporate executives who guide the movie business, too many publishing heads concentrate their financial resources on so-called commercial properties--thrillers, celebrity books, how-to guides--at the expense of quality fiction and nonfiction. Yet my experience as a book editor for 22 years has largely shown that this path may be far less profitable than its alternative.

When dealing with matters of aesthetic taste or artistic creation, no management consultant, marketer or corporate honcho can accurately predict what might ignite the word-of-mouth momentum that propels a book onto the bestseller charts. And with the vast diminution of the traditional role of the editor, sales and marketing executives have increasingly come to believe that they can harnass the growth of book consumption, perhaps as reliably as Starkist or Bumble Bee can chart tuna consumption. But books cannot be confused with cans of tuna, and the errant belief that literary taste can be homogenized to appeal to the lowest common denominator can only exacerbate the perilous financial condition of so many publishing houses.

Just as independent films produced by serious filmakers have earned profits beyond their initial expectations, so too have supposedly “small,” eloquently written books by intellectuals (as nasty a term as “liberals” these days), literary novelists or scientists, for both big and small companies alike. Consider the success of such unlikely bestsellers as “The Perfect Storm,” “Longitude” and “The Red Tent”--books that were all bought with modest advances and launched with middling print runs. The fact that eloquently written, original books can still, despite all obstacles, spring onto the bestseller lists, reflects the unique power of the writer to say something profound, the vision of an editor, and the inextinguishable demand of the public for works of enduring quality.

Ironically, I do not feel that we have diverged that far from the 19th century when “properties” written by “literary” writers, like Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, were who run American publishing houses, we must once and for all banish the errant notion that “commercial books” are, in fact, the only path to commercial success.

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Robert Weil is executive editor of W.W. Norton, an independent employee-owned publishing house. Among the authors he has worked with are Roger Shattuck, Peter Gay, John Bayley, Robert Conquest and the late Henry Roth.

DAVID BLACK

While the changes in this business have forced everyone who works in it to make adjustments, there has been no loss of the love for a good story. Readers want to gain something from the books they curl up with; they want their investment of time to go beyond entertainment. They want to take something away from their experience. Books need to be substance disguised as product. Books need to reach out to readers, to teach them, to provide entertainment within the structure of a strong narrative, especially in the world of nonfiction.

Everyone who works in the book business wants to make a contribution, wants to change the way that readers view the world. Nearly 12 years ago, Alex Kotlowitz approached me with the concept of writing a book about two young boys growing up in a public housing project in Chicago. Their lives, he explained, would be a prism through which readers would learn about urban America, a potentially difficult subject to attract a large audience and yet, readers flocked to “There Are No Children Here.” The story Alex told about the two young boys represented the hope we all have for children. Alex brought readers into Lafayette and Pharoah River’s world. We cared for them; we learned from them; we wanted to spend time with them. Lafayette and Pharoah opened our collective eyes to an element of society which people had been afraid to explore. Regardless of how publishing has changed, children represent the dreams we have for a better future. This spring, Marc Parent will publish a book called “Believing It All: What My Children Taught Me About Trout Fishing, Jelly Toast, and Life.” It relates the lessons he learned from his two young boys, Casey and Owen, ages 2 and 4, and makes us realize that life’s greatest teachers (and entertainers) are our youth. The stories of Casey and Owen force us to pause for a moment and encourage us to remember the wonders of a child’s early years. Like “There Are No Children Here,” this book succeeds because the tales are so poignant and so powerful that readers can’t help but be transported.

The bottom line is that people read to be entertained and to learn. Those of us who work in this business have a responsibility to develop books, to represent works that accomplish both of those goals. The love of a good story will never diminish.

There is an eloquence to the written word that transmits a message with more meaning and intimacy than any other medium. It is my job to search out those tales, and the writers capable of telling them passionately and powerfully. Those books and those writers will always have a place in American society regardless of the changes that have come to the corporate world that publishing has become.

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David Black represents many authors, including Mitch Albom, Alex Kotlowitz and Melissa Fay Greene, through his firm, the David Black Literary Agency.

PETER MAYER

From the vantage point of a smaller publisher like ours, competing in the large marketplace, defined as it is by four or five very large publishers, I could say that our requirements, largely, are to track serious books with appeal for a sufficiently large readership to keep us going. The assumptions stated in your provocative question do state the situation. There are different problems at both ends of the spectrum based on publisher size. We--and other small publishers--seem to have enough profile and means to acquire books of quality. The talent certainly is there. The challenge is how to publicize them. Small publishers are caught between the dominant presence and marketing strength of large publishers (although large publishers certainly don’t market books they publish very differently from smaller publishers, and only on a small number of titles) and the large retailers, to which access is limited. There is no fault here; it is a circumstance of life. But it makes our work difficult and we use ingenuity more than cash or large-size printings. Perhaps it is no bad thing to publish books which have small disadvantages economically but respectable advantages based on dedicated sales representatives, independent booksellers, occasional breakthroughs in the bookstore chains, book reviews and word of mouth.

We sometimes have been able to surprise people by producing glorious visual books like Barbara Cady’s “Icons” and Milton Glaser’s “Art Is Work,” balancing those works and capital-intensive projects with innovative reissues of forgotten authors such as Charles Portis, Walter Brooks (the “Freddy” books), Kurban Said’s “Ali and Nino,” and authors like Andre Schwarz-Bart, John Cowper Powys and Mervyn Peake. This is, of course, in addition to the main thrust of our publishing in the areas of new quality fiction and nonfiction.

The problem for larger publishers emerges from the size of their operations, the economic profile of their owners, with expectations of returns on capital invested based on other industries. This leads necessarily, if understandably, to an emphasis on books with the greatest likelihood to break out into very large numbers indeed. That requirement is borne home subtly and directly by management on editorial staffs, so that it becomes quite clear careers are best made by driving toward those books which best fill the required bill.

Smaller and less obvious books, however, actually can do well, i.e. make the required profit margins, but these books so often are passed up because they have a cap on their potential. In other words, the best profitability for a company with smaller books is achieved by publishing more and more of these smaller books, requiring ever larger staff and facilities. Larger infrastructure is not the mantra of our time, at least in relationship to income. This leads one to think that while there is an obvious role for larger companies, the American literary landscape would take a hit if smaller companies could not thrive. I have always thought that the larger companies could take more chances on smaller books, but perhaps for The Overlook Press it’s a good thing that this isn’t the game plan of the majors.

As for electronic development, smaller publishers share the fear and hopes of larger companies about a dimly perceived future; but in my view smaller companies need not spend too much time worrying about these developments. The rules are going to be made by the great and powerful in some intersection of the development of technology and the interest of consumers. Most smaller publishers will simply follow the leader in this area. By no means do I foresee gloom and doom; consumer patterns generally trail technology. Ink on paper has a high readability quotient and the changes will not be across the broad spectrum of all that is available in the world of print, but only in those areas in which technology produces truly massive advantages over the current formats. It could be that the main thrust for a very long time will be in technical, educational, professional and informational areas, rather than in the mainstream of trade publishing. Small publishers will continue to do well with formats friendly to readers.

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Peter Mayer, former chief executive officer of Penguin Putnam, is president and publisher of The Overlook Press, an independent house.

COLIN ROBINSON

As publisher of Andre Schiffrin’s “The Business of Books,” his recent philippic on the state of book publishing today, I’ve been surprised and delighted by the reception accorded to it. Judging from reviewers’ comments and bookstore sales, Schiffrin has struck a chord.

I’m both pessimistic and optimistic. I’m not at all convinced, as other contributors to the debate evidently are, that electronic publishing offers a way out of the mess we are in. The new media are certainly revolutionizing the traditional functions of book publishers. Production and distribution costs will drastically diminish, making available an enormous diversity of texts. But the issue has never been just one of availability: the choices people make in deciding what to read are at least as important as what they have to choose from. Indeed, the wider the range of material on offer, the greater the possibility that readers, perplexed and confused by vastly expanding options, will retreat to what is safe and familiar, and that’s always been stock in trade for the conglomerates. The functions of acquiring rights and marketing are not disappearing with the advent of new media, in fact they are likely to grow in importance. In these areas, also the most lucrative. In order, however, to shift the consciousness of so many large corporations, with the financial resources to pay big advances and the hefty promotion budgets required to get them back, will retain their traditional advantage. It may be comforting for practitioners in their golden years to think that the Internet will return us to a time when publishing houses were organized like families and authors slept on the editor’s office couch. But electronic publishing could just as easily exacerbate the consolid