Saturday, February 18, 2012

Why Book Publishing Can Survive Digital Age: Echoes

Gold Medal Books from Fawcett Publications
Source: bookscans.com
Word on the street is that the publishing industry is under attack by technology. Amazon.com Inc. has launched a bare-knuckled assault against independent bookstores. Print-on-demand firms make it possible for anyone to get his work on the market, and thus threaten to render agents and editors obsolete. And with e-books priced so low, how can authors and booksellers earn a decent living?
Yet the publishing industry has a long history of weathering these sorts of challenges, and its past offers some optimism for the future.
In the 1920s, drug, grocery and department stores gave booksellers fits by offering popular titles at cut-rate prices. An old industry yarn tells the story of a flapper looking to buy lipstick. She walks into a bookstore and excuses herself when she realizes she had made a mistake. "I'm sorry," she says, "I thought this was a drugstore, I saw books in the window.''
Also problematic was the Book of the Month Club, a distribution company founded in 1926 that sold inexpensive hardcover versions of popular books through mail order. Within 10 years of its founding, the club had almost 200,000 members. Ten years later, there were more than 50 imitator clubs in North America with more than 3 million participants.
And, of course, there was the ultimate competitor to bookstores: public libraries. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, communities across the U.S. funded the construction of facilities where books could be had for free, albeit only on loan.
Then came the "paperback revolution." According to Publishers Weekly, word spread at the 1939 American Booksellers Convention that "some reckless publisher" was going to bring out a series of paperback reprints of popular novels to be sold for only a quarter a piece. The industry was equal measures aghast at the nerve of such a plan -- American readers had proved notoriously resistant to paperbacks -- and terrified that it might succeed. Major publishers fretted that, if the books proved popular, the reprints would kill hardcover sales of the featured titles. Most booksellers refused to stock the series, unwilling to compete with their existing inventories of full-priced books.
Full encouraging story at Bloomberg.

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