Book Business: Publishing:
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REVIEW BY ROGER BISHOP
"Today the book business stands at the edge of a vast transformation, one that promises much opportunity for innovation: much trial, much error, much improvement. Long before another half century passes, the industry as I have know it for the past fifty years will have been altered almost beyond recognition." The writer of those words is Jason Epstein, one of the great editors and probably the most brilliant innovator in the world of books during the last half century. In the 1950s at Doubleday he created Anchor Books, which he describes as "the intellectually oriented series of paperbacks that precipitated what to my surprise became known as the paperback revolution." In the 1960s, he was co-founder of The New York Review of Books, which valued literature and other arts and science and sought good writers who could make the subjects come alive for readers. In the 1980s, he pursued the vision he shared with his friend Edmund Wilson, the eminent man of letters, and created The Library of America, making available in uniform editions authoritative texts of the works of major American writers. A former editorial director at Random House, he has been the editor of such important authors as E. L. Doctorow, Gore Vidal, Jane Jacobs, Norman Mailer and Jean Strouse. In Book Business: Publishing: Past, Present, and Future, Epstein offers a thoughtful and perceptive look at the industry and the challenges it faces. In his view, "book publishing is not a conventional business" and gets into difficulty when it tries to be. He says book publishing "more closely resembles a vocation or an amateur sport in which the primary goal is the activity itself rather than its financial outcome. For owners and editors willing to work for the joy of the task, book publishing in my time has been immensely rewarding. For investors looking for a conventional return, it has been disappointing." The drive to publish books that will become bestsellers has been a continuing concern for publishers. Epstein notes that "Many valuable books -- most, in fact -- are not meant to be bestsellers, and these tend to be slighted in the triage of contemporary publishing and bookselling." It is, however, his impression that more of the valuable titles are being published than in the past and more people are reading them, but "the life expectancy of many valuable books has declined as chain store retailers are forced to seek even higher rates of turnover, and morale in the industry suffers accordingly." Traditionally, major publishers considered their backlists their major asset and chose titles to publish as much for their value through the years as for their immediate sales. With the closing of many independent bookstores, "publishers who for years had cultivated their backlists now found fewer accounts able to stock them." Despite the tensions and strains inevitable as new technologies transform the way books are produced and distributed, Epstein is optimistic about the future of publishing, something he has not always been. The essential work of editing and publicity will not cease. "Nor will bookstores vanish." But things will be different. "Tomorrow's stores will have to be what the Web cannot be: tangible, intimate and local; communal shrines, perhaps with coffee bars offering pleasure and wisdom in the company of others who share one's interests, where the book one wants can always be found and surprises and temptations spring from every shelf." But "bookstores will co-exist hereafter with a vast multi-lingual directory of digitized texts, assembled from a multitude of sources, perhaps 'tagged' for easy reference and distributed electronically." Epstein has seen the "appropriate technology in embryo" and he awaits it "with wonder and trepidation." This book of reflections offers a long-term perspective on publishing and is highly recommended for any reader who wants a behind the scenes look at its subject from a knowledgeable and highly respected participant. Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.
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