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An Autopsy of the Book Business – The Daily Beast
“Meanwhile, through today’s gloom we may discern a spectacularly bright future in which the rewards to writers and readers and even to publishers will be unprecedented as world-wide multilingual backlists expand online in a cultural revolution orders of magnitude greater than Gutenberg’s world-changing technology generated five centuries ago.”
An Autopsy of the Book Business – The Daily Beast
Una bellissima “autopsia” dell’industria editoriale:
“By the mid 1970s the great downtown bookstores had begun to disappear as their customers migrated from city to suburb where population density was too thin to support major backlist retailers. Soon people shopped in deconstructed department stores, their former departments now individual specialty shops, where bookstores paid the same rent for the same limited space as the shoe store next door and needed the same quick turnover of inventories that sold themselves: books by celebrities and branded bestselling authors. By the eighties, publishers’ backlists were in steep decline as thousands of titles disappeared, dumped into the huge so-called orphanage of titles, no longer in print but still in copyright, whose owners can no longer be identified.
The steep decline in publishers’ backlists turned the industry upside down. Now publishers were obliged to pursue seasonal ephemera for which agents, putting their commercially viable titles up for auction, exacted unrealistic guarantees such as this seasons’ multimillion dollar guarantee to the multibillionaire Warren Buffett with his ready access to television, his folksy manner, and his hollow memoir—his true but neglected subject being greed, which has not lived up to expectations. Such disappointments are now commonplace and devastating. Publishers having lost control of their industry to commercially attractive authors and their agents are now not only their unhappy servants, but servants obliged to pay their masters for the privilege of serving them: an absurd and untenable situation.”
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