A Companion to the History of the Book (73 page)

The importance of publishing in monetary terms borders on the insignificant, yet the symbolic capital at stake was and is substantial. The impact of this trade reaches therefore far beyond what its relatively modest contribution to the media conglomerates and other transnational corporations suggests, and we must rather search for the reason behind the continued importance of print properties elsewhere. Albert Greco’s point that “the U.S. book industry was the prestigious keystone of the entire mass communications industry, primarily for the ‘content’ it generated” is therefore an interesting one to consider (Greco 1997: 45).

Content

A privileged word in the language of the media conglomerates is
content.
Content ownership was a major incentive behind the conglomeratization and concentration in media and publishing. But few things are as prone to politics as statistics. While some say that the title output has never been so impressive, growing by 256 percent in the United States between 1960 and 1989 (Greco 1997: 54), others disagree and point out that since a handful of companies now controls the market, this is only a smoke-screen argument, since it hides the fact that true publishing clout of the kind only available to the media conglomerates is necessary in order to sell and display a publisher’s books in chain bookstores that “are now able to demand almost whatever terms they wish from the major publishers, who are pressed to pay large amounts of co-op advertising money if they want their books to be placed prominently in the stores” (Schiffrin 2000: 124). Be that as it may, a common observation is that the market tended to become increasingly polarized. It was also characterized by the emergence of the “brand” authors at the beginning of the 1970s, many of whom were women – Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, and Shirley Conran come to mind. These authors not only tapped into a new market but could also command advances and advertising budgets that marked a new era in publishing.

In his survey of the symbolic boundaries marked out in French and American publishing, Daniel Weber noted that French publishers were more prone to “justify a desire to launch a bestseller as a means of subsidizing a more difficult or experimental work” than their American counterparts (Weber 2000: 128). In general, the American publishers Weber interviewed were largely utilitarian in their approach to literature, relying on the market to determine what constituted a good book. The French interviewees, on the other hand, were more sensitive to the possible effects of recent publishing trends, such as conglomeratization, and expressed concern for the possible fate of French literature and language in the wake of importation and translations (Weber 2000: 141). The concern of the French editors can, of course, be attributed to many things, among them the desire to appear to be an alternative to mass-market mainstream publishing and to the specter of “Americanization.”

While it is practically impossible to capture the range of content made available by book publishing, one can at least observe that is it mostly written and published in English. According to UNESCO (2004), almost 50 percent of all translations are made from English into various languages, but only 6 per cent of all translations are into English. Merely 2.96 percent of the books published in the US in 1990 were translations; in Britain, the number was 2.4 percent for the same year (Venuti 1995: 12). In 1994, 1,418 of the 51,863 books published in the US, or 2.74 percent, were translations (Venuti 1998: 160). Between 1968 and 1992, only 2 percent of the books on
Publisher’s Weekly
annual list of bestsellers came from non-English language authors (Lemieux and Saint-Jacques 1996: 285). A comparison of book translations in the so-called SIACS (States in Advanced Capitalist Societies) – France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, UK, and the United States – between 1983 and 1985, substantiate these findings. English is the language from which most translations occur. This tendency to dominate is corroborated by the reciprocally minimal ratio of translations going the other way (Held et al. 1999: 346). This subject is further discussed by Claire Squires in chapter 30 of this volume.

According to one of the very few sources we have on the global production of books,
The UNESCO Statistical Yearbook 1999,
most countries have a negative trade balance when it comes to the import/export of print culture and, if we accept these numbers at their face value, then we can conclude that – with a few notable exceptions – the entire world engages in the importation of textual material that the UK and the US exports. However, we need to interpret these statistics with some care. We can almost certainly discern tendencies of exclusion, whereby entire continents such as Africa display negative trade balances over time, whereas the US and the UK consistently display positive trade balances (UNESCO 1999: iv. 134–50). However, most accounts of the advantages and disadvantages of being an “importer” as opposed to being an “exporter” are far too sweeping in their generalizations. For instance, cultural movements of this sort are not simple, and their benefits and drawbacks can rarely be found only on one side.

While the global economy thrives on increasingly complex flows which no longer can be explained by a straightforward connection between language and nation-state -and several of the most powerful transnational media corporations today are non-US based and non-US owned – most TMCs are still building their empires on the English language: in research, in entertainment, in literature. In order to reach a global audience for an author writing in a “minor” language, translation first into English is absolutely necessary If all we needed in order to prove linguistic power were numbers, then Chinese would appear to do well. As it is, English remains the vernacular of the world.

Convergence

If one of the major motives behind conglomeratization was the accumulation and control of that valuable asset “content,” then it was a consolidation in two dimensions: vertical – the mergers and acquisitions of publishing houses according to the principles discussed previously – but also, and perhaps even more importantly, horizontal, ensuring the same kind of control over all possible distribution channels used in order to distribute the content in question. And this is the point at which the third element enters the picture – the component
of convergence –
the possibility of drawing on a number of new technologies in order to exploit their potential to the fullest: on telecommunications, cable, and the Internet. By the end of this period, convergence suggested not only that the traditional functions of telephones, television sets, and personal computers were about to merge, but also that this represented the erasure of traditional boundaries between media forms, and the commingling of diverse platforms in media, telecommunications, and software. This was a development that promised to bring together the compounded assets achieved by years of consolidation in a hitherto unprecedented manner.

The year 2000, a significant year in terms of mergers, saw two major, well-publicized deals with a clear impact on the global media market: the acquisition of Time Warner by America Online, and the arrival of Vivendi Universal. On December 8, 2000, Vivendi (the result of the 1998 merger between Compagnie Generale des Eaux and Havas, one of the largest publishing groups in France) announced its merger with Seagram (owner of, among other things, the Universal Music Group and Universal Studios and ranked twenty-third among the world’s one hundred largest transnational corporations in the
World Investment Report 2000)
and Canal+ (one of Europe’s largest pay television providers) to produce Vivendi Universal.

As with media, telecommunications were also becoming global, through alliances and cross-national mergers, partnerships and acquisitions. Even more than in the former area, deregulation was central to the expansion of telecommunications. Increased global cultural flows, digitization, the importance of information, and, above all, the critical breakthrough of the Internet into millions of homes, created market euphoria within the media conglomerates. Even publishers’ backlists, once guarded as valuable property but rather ignored in the pursuit of the next bestseller, now seemed to offer an opportunity for revival. In his book
The Agent: Personalities, Politics, and Publishing
(2001), Arthur Klebanoff, one of the founders of the electronic press Rosetta Books, tells of his experience of trying to secure electronic rights to books by Kurt Vonnegut, something that caused the original publisher, Random House, to take Rosetta Books to court, arguing that these rights were included in the original contracts, an argument the court rejected. The material and immaterial repercussions of e-books, a new kind of “book” that few publishers knew what to make of, were very real in Klebanoff’s world:

Delivery to the consumer by almost instantaneous download; a reading experience limited only by the pace of new technology, with the appliances and software packages which make it work; easily adjusted fount size for those who prefer larger type; search engines that find words in context, anywhere throughout a book, instantly; dictionaries that define and even pronounce a highlighted word; on-screen note taking and highlighting, used to collect and summarize information for writing papers; and a storage capability equal to forty books in a single handheld device, with compression technologies coming to market which will multiply that amount by ten. (Klebanoff 2001: 7–8)

The promise of a golden technological future may have triggered the AOL–Time Warner and Vivendi mergers, but both conglomerates fell on hard times in 2002. The combination of a brutal stock-market backlash and the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in 2001 swiftly turned a technological dream into a nightmare. Shares plummeted and heads began to roll. Throughout the summer of 2002, it became clear that the grand edifice that the media moguls had built was nothing more than a house of cards. Bigger had not meant better, and very little, if anything, of the hopes of synergy and convergence had been realized in an economy that showed no signs of recovery. The days of the media-shopping spree were over, at least for the time being. As 2002 drew to a close, nobody was heard promoting convergence, the Internet hype was long gone, and more conservative executives stepped in to replace those that had been associated with the dot.com era, and selling instead of buying became a favored corporate activity.

Conclusion

The story of publishing during the three final decades of the twentieth-century is easily read as a tragedy that, in a way, has altered (for the worse) the business of books. However, an alternative view could claim that publishing before conglomeratization was a backward, inefficient, and even at times an unprofessional business (Whiteside 1980: 13–14), which was in dire need of modernization.

It was a trade not only marked by bursts of eccentricity, but also by a distinct gender bias and equally apparent class distinctions that operated to increase rather than reduce the differences between highbrow and lowbrow. But perhaps more than anything, the story of how publishing became part of the media conglomerates is a
male
story. Perpetuating a nostalgic longing for a mythical time when publishing was a profession for gentlemen is a stratagem that increases in strength as the market pressures from consolidation and concentration transform the global media landscape.

During this period, women became part of publishing and the book business to an unprecedented degree, and they made their mark as publishers, editors, writers, and readers, perhaps most visibly within the mass-market domain of paperbacks and bestsellers. The history of their impact on the events I have described still remains to be written. “All publishing was run by many badly-paid women and a few much better paid men: an imbalance that women were, of course, aware of, but which they seemed to take for granted”, writes Diana Athill, long-time editor (and partner) at André Deutsch in her book
Stet: A Memoir
(2000). An exception to the lack of documentation on the role of women in publishing, Athill’s fifty-year career as editor represents a firsthand experience of how publishing once was allowed to operate according to charmingly idiosyncratic rules but then became just one cog in the media machine that in the end is just there to enhance the total value of the parent conglomerate. Today, books are by and large expected to meet much higher profit margins. Since it is equally desirable that they perform well individually rather that in the context of a complete publishing program, internal subsidization and long-term investments are no longer considered part of a viable publishing strategy.

Where once there was a publishing house relentlessly searching for quality or a bookshop with an owner passionate to promote a good read, now stretches the desertlike corporate spaces of major multinational media conglomerates whose understanding and appreciation of books and reading is close to nil. In fact, this is no doubt an oversimplified account of the current state of affairs, if for no other reason than that it assumes too much, both of the present
and
of the past.

In trying to summarize these developments, one finds, perhaps inevitably, both pros and cons. Despite the fact that they made independent booksellers go out of business, the arrival of the multi-stores Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Waterstones have helped to create a new form of public space. The technological advances of print-on-demand and e-books might solve permanently the problem of keeping seldom-asked-for titles available. However, looked at from another perspective, this technological wonderland can be counterproductive, hindering public accessibility to a wide range of literature by celebrating a market dedicated to a mass audience. However, the mushrooming of transnational media conglomerates have not been an obstacle to the simultaneous growth of small and specialized publishers which can be both successful and quality-conscious, and the Internet holds the potential for fostering new, niche presses. The mergers and acquisitions will no doubt continue, just as assuredly as the players and corporations involved will have different names.