A Companion to the History of the Book (74 page)

Perhaps the most accurate account of what has taken place in this highly volatile business is to suggest that it illustrates an inherent polarization: between centralization and decentralization, between consolidation and diversification, between expansion and contraction, between art and business. Whatever else can be said, the growth of an increasingly transnational and global media market, conglomeratization, content, and convergence proved a combination that dramatically, and permanently, changed the face of publishing between 1970 and 2000.

References and Further Reading

Altbach, Philip G. and Hoshino, Edith S. (1997)
International Book Publishing: An Encyclopedia.
London: Fitzroy Dearborn.

Athill, Diana (2000)
Stet: A Memoir.
London: Granta.

Bagdikian, Ben H. (2000)
The Media Monopoly,
6th edn. Boston: Beacon.

Barnet, Richard J. and Cavanagh, John (1994)
Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order.
New York: Simon & Schuster.

de Bellaigue, Eric (2004)
British Book Publishing as a Business since the 1960s.
London: British Library.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1999) “Une révolution conservatrice dans l’édition.”
Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales,
126–7: 3–28.

Epstein, Jason (2001)
Book Business: Publishing, Past, Present, and Future.
New York: Norton.

Feather, John (1991)
A History of British Publishing.
London: Routledge.

Fouché, Pascal (ed.) (1998)
L’Édition Française depuis 1945.
Paris: Cercle de la Librairie.

Greco, Albert (1997)
The Book Publishing Industry.
Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Gründ, Alain (2000) “Opening Remarks.” Given at the 26th Congress of the International Publisher’s Association, Buenos Aires, May 1–4, 2000 (available at
www.ipa-uie.org
).

Held, David, McGrew, Anthony, Goldblatt, David, and Perraton, Jonathan (1999)
Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture.
London: Polity.

Hemmungs Wirtén, Eva (1998)
Global Infatuation: Explorations in Transnational Publishing and Texts.
Uppsala: Uppsala University.

— (2004) No
Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Herman, Edward S. and McChesney, Robert W. (1997)
The Global Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism.
London: Cassell.

Klebanoff, Arthur (2001)
The Agent: Personalities, Politics, and Publishing.
New York: Texere.

Korda, Michael (1999)
Another Life: A Memoir of Other People.
New York: Random House.

Lemieux, Jacques and Saint-Jacques, Denis (1996) “US Best-sellers in French Quebec and English Canada.” In Emile G. Mcanahy and Kenton T. Wilkinson (eds.),
Mass Media and Free Trade: NAFTA and the Cultural Industries,
pp. 279–305. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Mergerstat® Review 2000.
Los Angeles: Mergerstat.

Michon, Jacques and Mollier, Jean-Yves (2001)
Les Mutations du livre et de l’édition dans le monde du XVIIIe siècle à l’an 2000.
Quebec: Les Presses de l’Université Laval.

Milliot, Jim (2001) “The Land of the Giants.”
Publisher’s Weekly,
January 1: 61–3.

Murray, Simone (2004)
Mixed Media: Feminist Presses and Publishing Politics.
London: Pluto.

Nunberg, Geoffrey (ed.) (1996)
The Future of the Book.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Ohmann, Richard (1996)
Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century.
London: Verso.

Radway, Janice (1984)
Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

— (1997) A
Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-class Desire.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Schiffrin, André (2000)
The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read.
London: Verso.

Thal Larsen, Peter (2001) “The Year the Giants Chose to Merge.”
Financial Times,
May 9 (available at
http://specials.ft.com/ft500/may2001/FT319FOVHMC.xhtml
; accessed December 28, 2004).

UNESCO (1999)
Statistical Yearbook 1999.
Paris: UNESCO.

— (2004)
www.unesco.org/culture/xtrans/html_eng/index6.shtml
(accessed December 28, 2004).

Venuti, Lawrence (1995)
The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation.
London: Routledge.

— (1998)
The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference.
London: Routledge.

Weber, Daniel (2000) “Culture or Commerce? Symbolic Boundaries in French and American Book Publishing.” In Michèle Lamont and Laurent Thévenot (eds.),
Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology: Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States,
pp. 127–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Whiteside, Thomas (1980)
The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing.
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

30

The Global Market 1970–2000: Consumers

Claire Squires

The chronological period covered by this chapter is one that saw “the most substantial change in the structure of general trade publishing and bookselling since publishing and bookselling first began to differentiate themselves from each other [during the eighteenth century]” (Willison 2001: 574). This change is documented in the companion chapter to this one (chapter 29), in which Eva Hemmungs Wirtén discusses the conglomeratization and globalization of the worldwide publishing industry since 1970. In the realm of production, publishing saw an enormous upheaval, transforming the industries – or at least those of Western Europe and North America – from small and middle-sized, independently run businesses to global, multimedia conglomerates. But what impact has this had on consumers of books?

Reading, as Robert Darnton famously writes in “What is the History of Books?,” “remains the most difficult stage to study in the circuit that books follow” (Darnton 1990b: 122), and the attempt to trace a very recent history of readers in the global market can present as many problems as that of more distant periods. There is, first, the question of the correspondence between the terms “reader” and “consumer.” If a reader can read without having bought (by borrowing or stealing), and a consumer can buy without reading (buying on behalf of others or leaving the purchase languishing on a pile of unread books), how can patterns of consumption and reading be understood and meaningfully analyzed? Secondly, there is the issue of the extent to which the realms of both readership and consumption can actually be charted. What information is available to researchers studying the near-contemporary? What mix of quantitative and qualitative data is available, and how does this influence prevalent analyses of the global market?

These broader theoretical and methodological questions of how we can know about patterns of consumption are addressed toward the end of the chapter. There are severe limitations on the extent of current knowledge about very recent consumer activity, and these are forceful reminders of Darnton’s dictum. As recently as 2005, the UK trade journal
The Bookseller
remarked in an editorial that “Publishers are stuck in the Stone Ages when it comes to customer data: beyond vague ideas that reading increases with age, class and education, they have little or no idea who their customers are, where they live, or what their tastes may be”
(The Bookseller
2005: 32). However, this chapter also sets out to explore, as best it can, and in the short space available to it, some prevailing themes and trends in the very recent history of global book consumption.

The Global Market

From 1970 onward, then, via mergers and acquisitions, the ownership of publishing companies became increasingly globalized. Alongside this development, there was a considerable display of cultural anxiety from commentators on the publishing industry, who feared that conglomeratization and globalization would cause (indeed, had already caused) a homogenization of content and with it the hegemony of the English language, market censorship, and restrictions in access to the market masquerading as free trade (see, for example, Bagdikian 1983; Schiffrin 2000). Such critiques did not bode well for the consumer, and echoed Steven Connor’s argument that the greatest challenge to publishers in this period, from the perspective of a postmodernist cultural politics, was the “preservation of diversity” (Connor 1996: 23).

Are these negative analyses of the global publishing market justified? Elsewhere, I have argued the need for a greater degree of both quantitative data and interpretive analysis in order to assess this question, and the end of this chapter returns to methodological issues with regard to recent publishing history (Squires 2004). Nonetheless, this chapter now addresses evidence for the plurality (or otherwise) of output in a globalized marketplace, and the impact of this for the consumer.

The licensing of foreign and translation rights in overseas markets is one indicator of the worldwide nature of publishing output. Bestsellers, such as J. K. Rowling’s series of
Harry Potter
books, Umberto Eco’s literary-philosophical novels, John Grisham’s courtroom thrillers, and Stephen King’s gothic horrors, to name but a few global publishing phenomena in this period, are translated and published throughout the world, sold in multiple territories and consumed by an international readership. Although, on the one hand, this might seem to promote a positive internationalism, on the other, this scenario is a potentially troubling one, and a result of the conglomeratization and globalization of recent publishing history. As Miha Kovač comments, this can potentially lead to the “‘standardization]’ of world book production” via a control over the market operated by major companies, “thereby opening the gates to ‘McDonaldization’ of the world book business” (Kovač 2002: 44). The thrust of this argument is a standard anti-globalization one, applied specifically to publishing and its output.

Kovač questions the opening assumption of his own article, however, via an analysis of recent changes in two small Central European publishing cultures, those of Slovenia and Hungary. This analysis is based on a comparison of the proportion of translations within total book output in different European countries, a proportion which demonstrates “significant differences” from country to country (2002: 49). However:

there is a striking similarity in the nature of these translations: the majority of them are English. In countries such as Germany, for example, around 15 percent of total book output is translations. In France, translations represent around 10 percent of the total book output. In Italy, similar to Hungary or Slovenia, translations represent between one-third and one-quarter of the total book output. In all these countries, those originally in English represent between 60–80 percent of the translations. On the other hand, in 1990, only 2.4 percent of the total British output of books was translations; in the United States it amounted to 2.96 percent. (Kovač 2002: 51)

Despite regional variations within Europe, Kovač concludes that in the 1990s, “the flow of translations from the United Kingdom and United States to European countries was between five and fifteen times greater than the flow of translations from European countries to the UK and USA,” meaning that “almost 50 percent of all translations in the world are made from English into various languages, but only six percent of all translations are made into English” (Kovač 2002: 49–50). This is the situation that led the book-translation researcher Lawrence Venuti to criticize the Anglo-Saxon book business as “imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home” (Venuti 1995: 17; cited in Kovač 2002: 50).

Such quantitative analysis would seem to suggest the global hegemony of Anglo-Saxon culture and its conduit, the English language. However, the impact on both production and consumption, Kovač claims, is more ambiguous (2002: 50). For Anglo-Saxon producers – the writers and their literary agents, and the primary US or UK publisher (even if owned by a non-US or UK conglomerate) – this is good economic news. The evidence suggests that their products are both successfully reaching global markets and competing extremely effectively in home markets. For consumers, however, the picture is arguably reversed. Typically, UK and US audiences, unless they read in foreign languages and make the effort to acquire foreign-language editions, have a very limited access to texts created beyond their own cultures. The book consumers of European nations outside the UK have access to a much wider range of cultural reference, even if a majority of the work translated into their own languages is derived from original English-language publications. If the top figure of 80 percent of the translations from English is assumed, this still leaves, based on Kovač’s figures, 2 percent of total book output into French, 3 percent into German, and between 5 and 6 percent into Italian, Hungarian, and Slovene, translated from languages other than English. In other words, European nations typically have access to a large number of books translated from English, but also a percentage from other languages that is at least equivalent to, and often more than, that to which British and American readers typically have access.

In this analysis, it is the British and American readers who are culturally impoverished, while their publishing industries derive financial benefit from foreign and translation rights. There is here a marked distinction between the impact of globalization on producers and consumers. The impact of globalization on consumers in non-English-speaking markets is, however, arguably not attractive either. US- and UK-originated

texts can and do exert pressure in national marketplaces, bringing them into competition with locally produced materials. What is the impact for consumers, then, of a preponderance of English-language originated texts in a local market? Is the only interpretation of the global publishing market one of “McDonaldization?”

Globalized Content and the Consumer

In her work on Harlequin Enterprises, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén explores this question from the perspective of the alteration of texts through translation, a process she terms “transediting” (Wirtén 1998, 2001). Although Harlequin’s headquarters is actually in Canada (rather than the US or UK), its publication program, which reaches six continents and operates in twenty-four languages, could well be considered as “a prime example of ’Americanization’ ” or globalization determined by “bad mass culture” (2001: 569). While noting that cultural production is dominated by writers from anglophone countries, but that cultural reception extends to nations from which writers are not derived (for example, Sweden, Russia, Italy, or China), Wirtén goes on to describe the process of “transediting,” which places a different perspective on patterns of global production (2001: 569). The process is one whereby translators and editors effectively rewrite texts via “internalized values” which are expressed in the course of “transediting” for different local markets (2001: 571). This process is “a systematic adaptation that sometimes result[s] in the construction of a totally new text”; “transediting” is therefore “a mode of rewriting, creating something new, or [even] blatant interfering and tampering with the text” (2001: 570). Harlequin texts are therefore both globalized and localized: a practical example of
“glocalization.”
To a greater or a lesser degree, this process always takes place when translated texts are produced, in terms of their selection, translation, and editing.

But what is the impact on consumers of globalized and/or glocalized production? For a children’s book critic such as Jack Zipes, the global publishing success constituted by the millions of consumers of the
Harry Potter
series, to take a prime example, is troubling. Zipes attacks
Harry Potter
on several fronts, but his most swingeing criticism is reserved for the way in which the books have been turned into global commodities that privilege a particular worldview. Zipes sees the series as intrinsically bound up in global capitalism, writing that: “Phenomena such as the Harry Potter books are driven by commodity consumption that at the same time sets the parameters of reading and aesthetic taste” (Zipes 2002: 172). The complaint he makes is that this taste is a homogenizing one, which makes Harry – who is male, white, middle class, and English-speaking – a universal hero.
Harry Potter
and similar global commodities are, to Zipes, examples of cultural imperialism.

Are all global products – and the consumption of them – to be condemned? An anti-globalization stance such as this might well miss the finer nuances of actual reading practices. Discussing television – another cultural medium in which anxieties about the impact of globalization are rife –John Tomlinson comments that critics readily condemn

the global distribution of US television soap operas, such as
Dallas,
with “scant regard to the way in which the audience may read the text” (Tomlinson 2000: 307). He argues instead for an assessment of empirical studies of people watching and interpreting televisual texts within different cultural contexts, which pays attention to the “negotiations” audiences make with the text (Tomlinson 2000: 310). Several claims could be made for the “negotiations” made with the
Harry Potter
texts by different groups around the world, if such attention is applied to global publishing phenomena.

An initial reinterpretation of
Harry Potter
is made by publishers for their own markets through their choice of cover designs, each of which subtly or blatantly reinterpret the series. Even within national markets such reinterpretations are made: Bloomsbury, the UK publisher
of Harry Potter,
famously publishes children’s and adults’ editions of the books with the same text but different cover designs. Further negotiations also occur even before books reach consumers. Each foreign-language edition is, necessarily, translated, and hence is open to the vagaries of the translation process. This is a process whose analysis, as Wirtén states, is only open to scholars with both a high degree of linguistic ability and access to archival materials in the form of translation and editorial drafts, which understandably – if regrettably – limits study and dissemination in this area (Wirtén 2001: 573). This also, it could be argued, maintains a hegemonic concentration on Anglo-Saxon versions, with scholarship following the culturally imperialistic lines of English-language publication. Studies of the translations of
Harry Potter
do nevertheless already exist, with published scholarly articles on the transition of the text from UK to US English (Nel 2002), and into French, German, and Spanish (Jentsch 2002). The linguistic competence required to construct the latter study, however, confirms Wirtén’s point.

In some geographical sectors, book piracy is rife, and so publishers illegally present alternative editions to consumers. In China, for example, in the hiatus between the publication of the fourth and fifth books in the
Harry Potter
series, a completely fake “fifth” book appeared, with a title roughly translated as
Harry Potter and Leopard Walk up to Dragon.
The book claimed to have been written by Rowling and to have been translated by the translators of the official books (B
BC
News 2002). Indeed, a radical interpretation of copyright and the control it exerts over textual production would say that it is a form of market censorship, with piracy representing a “true” free market unshackled by legislative restrictions (Jansen 2001).