Modern Publishing and the Book Industry

Throughout the nineteenth century, the rapid spread of knowledge and literacy as well as the Industrial Revolution spurred the emergence of the middle class. Its demand for books promoted the development of the publishing industry, which capitalized on increased literacy and widespread compulsory education. Many early publishers were mostly interested in finding quality authors and publishing books of importance. But with the growth of advertising and the rise of a market economy in the latter half of the nineteenth century, publishing gradually became more competitive and more concerned with sales.

The Formation of Publishing Houses

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SCRIBNER’S—known more for its magazines in the late nineteenth century than for its books—became the most prestigious literary house of the 1920s and 1930s, publishing F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1925) and Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, 1926). The Granger Collection

The modern book industry developed gradually in the nineteenth century with the formation of the early “prestigious” publishing houses: companies that tried to identify and produce the works of good writers.12 Among the oldest American houses established at the time (all are now part of major media conglomerates) were J. B. Lippincott (1792); Harper & Bros. (1817), which became Harper & Row in 1962 and HarperCollins in 1990; Houghton Mifflin (1832); Little, Brown (1837); G. P. Putnam (1838); Scribner’s (1842); E. P. Dutton (1852); Rand McNally (1856); and Macmillan (1869).

Between 1880 and 1920, as the center of social and economic life shifted from rural farm production to an industrialized urban culture, the demand for books grew. The book industry also helped assimilate European immigrants to the English language and American culture. In fact, 1910 marked a peak year in the number of new titles produced: 13,470, a record that would not be challenged until the 1950s. These changes marked the emergence of the next wave of publishing houses, as entrepreneurs began to better understand the marketing potential of books. These houses included Doubleday & McClure Company (1897), the McGraw-Hill Book Company (1909), Prentice-Hall (1913), Alfred A. Knopf (1915), Simon & Schuster (1924), and Random House (1925).

Despite the growth of the industry in the early twentieth century, book publishing sputtered from 1910 into the 1950s, as profits were adversely affected by the two world wars and the Great Depression. Radio and magazines fared better because they were generally less expensive and could more immediately cover topical issues during times of crisis. But after World War II, the book publishing industry bounced back.

Types of Books

The divisions of the modern book industry come from economic and structural categories developed both by publishers and by trade organizations, such as the Association of American Publishers (AAP), the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), and the American Booksellers Association (ABA). The categories of book publishing that exist today include trade books (both adult and juvenile), professional books, elementary through high school (often called “el-hi”) and college textbooks, mass market paperbacks, religious books, reference books, and university press books. (For sales figures for the book types, see Figure 10.1.)

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FIGURE 10.1 ESTIMATED U.S. BOOK REVENUE, 2013 Data from: Jim Milliot, “Book Sales Dipped in 2013,” Publishers Weekly, June 27, 2014, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/63131-book-sales-dipped-in-2013.html.

Trade Books

One of the most lucrative parts of the industry, trade books include hardbound and paperback books aimed at general readers and sold at commercial retail outlets. The industry distinguishes among adult trade, juvenile trade, and comics and graphic novels. Adult trade books include hardbound and paperback fiction; current nonfiction and biographies; literary classics; books on hobbies, art, and travel; popular science, technology, and computer publications; self-help books; and cookbooks. (Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, first published in 1950, has sold more than twenty-two million hardcover copies.)

Juvenile book categories range from preschool picture books to young-adult or young-reader books, such as Dr. Seuss books, the Lemony Snicket series, the Fear Street series, and the Harry Potter series. In fact, the Harry Potter series alone provided an enormous boost to the industry, helping create record-breaking first-press runs: 10.8 million for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005), and 12 million for the final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (2007).

Since 2003, the book industry has also been tracking sales of comics and graphic novels (long-form stories with frame-by-frame drawings and dialogue, bound like books). As with the similar Japanese manga books, graphic novels appeal to both youths and adults, as well as males and females. Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978) is generally credited as the first graphic novel (and called itself so on its cover). Since that time, interest in graphic novels has grown, and in 2006, their sales surpassed comic books. Given their strong stories and visual nature, many comics and graphic novels, including X-Men, The Dark Knight, Watchmen, and Captain America, have inspired movies. But graphic novels aren’t only about warriors and superheroes. Maira Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty and Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? are both acclaimed graphic novels, but their characters are regular mortals in real settings (see “Case Study: Comic Books: Alternative Themes, but Superheroes Prevail” on pages 352–353).

Professional Books

The counterpart to professional trade magazines, professional books target various occupational groups and are not intended for the general consumer market. This area of publishing capitalizes on the growth of professional specialization that has characterized the job market, particularly since the 1960s. Traditionally, the industry has subdivided professional books into the areas of law, business, medicine, and technical-scientific works, with books in other professional areas accounting for a very small segment. These books are sold through mail order, the Internet, or sales representatives knowledgeable about the subject areas.

Textbooks

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WHEN THE TEXAS STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION voted to take its social studies curriculum in a more conservative direction in 2010, other states expressed concern that their textbooks would be affected by this controversial decision. However, publishers said they would not be creating a “one-size-fits-all” product, since customizing textbooks for different markets has become increasingly easier in recent years. © Superstock/age footstock

The most widely read secular book in U.S. history was The Eclectic Reader, an elementary-level reading textbook first written by William Holmes McGuffey, a Presbyterian minister and college professor. From 1836 to 1920, more than 100 million copies of this text were sold. Through stories, poems, and illustrations, The Eclectic Reader taught nineteenth-century schoolchildren to spell and read simultaneously—and to respect the nation’s political and economic systems. Ever since the publication of the McGuffey reader (as it is often nicknamed), textbooks have served a nation intent on improving literacy rates and public education. Elementary school textbooks found a solid market niche in the nineteenth century, while college textbooks boomed in the 1950s, when the GI Bill enabled hundreds of thousands of working- and middle-class men returning from World War II to attend college. The demand for textbooks further accelerated in the 1960s as opportunities for women and minorities expanded. Textbooks are divided into elementary through high school (el-hi) texts, college texts, and vocational texts.

In about half of the states, local school districts determine which el-hi textbooks are appropriate for their students. In the other half of the states, including Texas and California—the two largest states—statewide adoption policies determine which texts can be used. If individual schools choose to use books other than those mandated, they are not reimbursed by the state for their purchases. Many teachers and publishers have argued that such sweeping authority undermines the autonomy of individual schools and local school districts, which have varied educational needs and problems. In addition, many have complained that the statewide system in Texas and California enables these two states to determine the content of all el-hi textbooks sold in the nation because publishers are forced to appeal to the content demands of these states. However, the two states do not always agree on what should be covered. In 2010, the Texas State Board of Education adopted more conservative interpretations of social history in its curriculum, while the California State Board of Education called for more coverage of minorities’ contributions in U.S. history. The disagreement pulled textbook publishers in opposite directions. The solution, which is becoming increasingly easier to implement, involves customizing electronic textbooks according to state standards.

Unlike el-hi texts, which are subsidized by various states and school districts, college texts are paid for by individual students (and parents) and are sold primarily through college bookstores. The increasing cost of textbooks, the markup on used books, and the profit margins of local college bookstores (which in many cases face no on-campus competition) have caused disputes on most college campuses. A 2011–12 survey indicated that each college student spent an annual average of $420 on required course texts, including $296 on new textbooks and $124 on used ones.13 (See Figure 10.2.)

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FIGURE 10.2 WHERE THE NEW TEXTBOOK DOLLAR GOES* Data from: © 2013 by the National Association of College Stores, www.nacs.org/research/industrystatistics.aspx. *College store numbers are averages and reflect the most current data gathered by the National Association of College Stores.

As an alternative, some enterprising students have developed Web sites to trade, resell, and rent textbooks. Other students have turned to online purchasing, either through e-commerce sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and eBay, or through college textbook sellers like eCampus.com and textbooks.com, or through book renters like Chegg.

Mass Market Paperbacks

Unlike the larger-size trade paperbacks, which are sold mostly in bookstores, mass market paperbacks are sold on racks in drugstores, supermarkets, and airports as well as in bookstores. Contemporary mass market paperbacks are often the work of blockbuster authors such as Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Patricia Cornwell, and John Grisham and are typically released in the low-cost (under $10) format months after publication of the hardcover version. But mass market paperbacks have experienced declining sales in recent years and now account for less than 6 percent of the book market, as e-books have become the preferred format for low-cost, portable reading.

Paperbacks became popular in the 1870s, mostly with middle- and working-class readers. This phenomenon sparked fear and outrage among those in the professional and educated classes, many of whom thought that reading cheap westerns and crime novels might ruin civilization. Some of the earliest paperbacks ripped off foreign writers, who were unprotected by copyright law and did not receive royalties for the books they sold in the United States. This changed with the International Copyright Law of 1891, which mandated that any work by any author could not be reproduced without the author’s permission.

The popularity of paperbacks hit a major peak in 1939 with the establishment of Pocket Books by Robert de Graff. Revolutionizing the paperback industry, Pocket Books lowered the standard book price of fifty or seventy-five cents to twenty-five cents. To accomplish this, de Graff cut bookstore discounts from 30 to 20 percent, the book distributor’s share fell from 46 to 36 percent of the cover price, and author royalty rates went from 10 to 4 percent. In its first three weeks, Pocket Books sold 100,000 books in New York City alone. Among its first titles was Wake Up and Live by Dorothea Brande, a 1936 best-seller on self-improvement that ignited an early wave of self-help books. Pocket Books also published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie; Enough Rope, a collection of poems by Dorothy Parker; and Five Great Tragedies by Shakespeare. Pocket Books’ success spawned a series of imitators, including Dell, Fawcett, and Bantam Books.14

A major innovation of mass market paperback publishers was the instant book, a marketing strategy that involved publishing a topical book quickly after a major event occurred. Pocket Books produced the first instant book, Franklin Delano Roosevelt: A Memorial, six days after FDR’s death in 1945. Similar to made-for-TV movies and television programs that capitalize on contemporary events, instant books enabled the industry to better compete with newspapers and magazines. Such books, however, like their TV counterparts, have been accused of circulating shoddy writing, exploiting tragedies, and avoiding in-depth analysis and historical perspective. Instant books have also made government reports into best-sellers. In 1964, Bantam published The Report of the Warren Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy. After receiving the 385,000-word report on a Friday afternoon, Bantam staffers immediately began editing the Warren Report, and the book was produced within a week, ultimately selling over 1.6 million copies. Today, instant books continue to capitalize on contemporary events, including the inauguration of Barack Obama in 2009, the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in 2011, and Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

CASE STUDY

Comic Books: Alternative Themes, but Superheroes Prevail

by Mark C. Rogers

At the precarious edge of the book industry are comic books, which are sometimes called graphic novels or simply comix. Comics have long integrated print and visual culture, and they are perhaps the medium most open to independent producers—anyone with a pencil and access to a photocopier can produce mini-comics. Nevertheless, two companies—Marvel and DC—have dominated the commercial industry for more than thirty years, publishing the routine superhero stories that have been so marketable.

Comics are relatively young, first appearing in their present format in the 1920s in Japan and in the 1930s in the United States. They began as simple reprints of newspaper comic strips, but by the mid-1930s, most comic books featured original material. Comics have always been published in a variety of genres, but their signature contribution to American culture has been the superhero. In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman for DC comics. Bob Kane’s Batman character arrived the following year. In 1941, Marvel Comics introduced Captain America to fight Nazis, and except for a brief period in the 1950s, the superhero genre has dominated the history of comics.

After World War II, comic books moved away from superheroes and began experimenting with other genres, most notably crime and horror (e.g., Tales from the Crypt). With the end of the war, the reading public was ready for more moral ambiguity than was possible in the simple good-versus-evil world of the superhero. Comics became increasingly graphic and lurid as they tried to compete with other mass media, especially television and mass market paperbacks.

In the early 1950s, the popularity of crime and horror comics led to a moral panic about their effects on society. Fredric Wertham, a prominent psychiatrist, campaigned against them, claiming they led to juvenile delinquency. Wertham was joined by many religious and parent groups, and Senate hearings were held on the issue. In October 1954, the Comics Magazine Association of America adopted a code of acceptable conduct for publishers of comic books. One of the most restrictive examples of industry self-censorship in mass media history, the code kept the government from legislating its own code or restricting the sale of comic books to minors.

The code had both immediate and long-term effects on comics. In the short run, the number of comics sold in the United States declined sharply. Comic books lost many of their adult readers because the code confined comics’ topics to those suitable for children. Consequently, comics have rarely been taken seriously as a mass medium or as an art form; they remain stigmatized as the lowest of low culture—a sort of literature for the subliterate.

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Photo illustration by Mario Tama/Getty Images

In the 1960s, Marvel and DC led the way as superhero comics regained their dominance. This period also gave rise to underground comics, which featured more explicit sexual, violent, and drug themes—for example, R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural and Bill Griffith’s Zippy the Pinhead. These alternative comics, like underground newspapers, originated in the 1960s counterculture and challenged the major institutions of the time. Instead of relying on newsstand sales, underground comics were sold through record stores, at alternative bookstores, and in a growing number of comic-book specialty shops.

In the 1970s, responding in part to the challenge of the underground form, “legitimate” comics began to increase the political content and relevance of their story lines. In 1974, a new method of distributing comics—direct sales—developed, catering to the increasing number of comic-book stores. This direct-sales method involved selling comics on a nonreturnable basis but with a higher discount than was available to newsstand distributors, who bought comics only on the condition that they could return unsold copies. The percentage of comics sold through specialty shops increased gradually, and by the early 1990s, more than 80 percent of all comics were sold through direct sales.

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Book Cover, Copyright © 1986 by Art Spiegelman from MAUS I: A Survivor’s Tale/My Father Bleeds History by Art Spiegelman. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

The shift from newsstand to direct sales enabled comics to once again approach adult themes and also created an explosion in the number of comics available and in the number of companies publishing comics. Comic books peaked in 1993, generating more than $850 million in sales. That year, the industry sold about 45 million comic books per month, but it then began a steady decline that led Marvel to declare bankruptcy in the late 1990s. After comic-book sales fell to $250 million in 2000 and Marvel reorganized, the industry rebounded. Today, the industry releases 70 to 80 million comics a year. Marvel and DC control more than 70 percent of comic-book sales, but challengers like Image, Dark Horse, and IDW plus another 150 small firms keep the industry vital by providing innovation and identifying new talent.

Meanwhile, the two largest firms focus on the commercial synergies of particular characters or superheroes. DC, for example, is owned by Time Warner, which has used the DC characters, especially Superman and Batman, to build successful film and television properties through its Warner Brothers division. Marvel, which was bought by Disney in 2009, also got into the act with film versions of The Avengers made by their in-house studios and series like X-Men licensed to outside studios.

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© 20th Century Fox Film Corp. All rights reserved/Everett Collection

Comics, however, are again about more than just superheroes. In 1992, comics’ flexibility was demonstrated in Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman, cofounder and editor of Raw (an alternative magazine for comics and graphic art). The first comic-style book to win a Pulitzer Prize, Spiegelman’s two-book fable merged print and visual styles to recount his complex relationship with his father, a Holocaust survivor.

Today, there are few divisions among traditional books and graphic novels. In 2012–13, Seven Stories Press released a three-volume book, The Graphic Canon: The World’s Great Literature as Comics and Visuals. The acclaimed collection uses 130 illustrators to reinterpret nearly 190 classic texts, from the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, to twentieth-century works like Wild at Heart by Barry Gifford.

As other writers and artists continue to adapt the form to both fictional and nonfictional stories, comics endure as part of popular and alternative culture.

Mark C. Rogers teaches communication at Walsh University. He writes about television and the comic-book industry.

Religious Books

The best-selling book of all time is the Bible, in all its diverse versions. Over the years, the success of Bible sales has created a large industry for religious books. After World War II, sales of religious books soared. Historians attribute the sales boom to economic growth and a nation seeking peace and security while facing the threat of “godless communism” and the Soviet Union.15 By the 1960s, though, the scene had changed dramatically. The impact of the Civil Rights struggle, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and the youth rebellion against authority led to declines in formal church membership. Not surprisingly, sales of some types of religious books dropped as well. To compete, many religious-book publishers extended their offerings to include serious secular titles on such topics as war and peace, race, poverty, gender, and civic responsibility.

Throughout this period of change, the publication of fundamentalist and evangelical literature remained steady. It then expanded rapidly during the 1980s, when the Republican Party began making political overtures to conservative groups and prominent TV evangelists. After a record year in 2004 (twenty-one thousand new titles), there has been a slight decline in the religious-book category. However, it continues to be an important part of the book industry, especially during turbulent social times.

Reference Books

Another major division of the book industry—reference books—includes dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, almanacs, and a number of substantial volumes directly related to particular professions or trades, such as legal casebooks and medical manuals.

The two most common reference books are encyclopedias and dictionaries. The idea of developing encyclopedic writings to document the extent of human knowledge is attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. The Roman citizen Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) wrote the oldest reference work still in existence, Historia Naturalis, detailing thousands of facts about animals, minerals, and plants. But it wasn’t until the early eighteenth century that the compilers of encyclopedias began organizing articles in alphabetical order and relying on specialists to contribute essays in their areas of interest. Between 1751 and 1771, a group of French scholars produced the first multiple-volume set of encyclopedias.

The oldest English-language encyclopedia still in operation, Encyclopaedia Britannica, was first published in Scotland in 1768. U.S. encyclopedias followed, including Encyclopedia Americana (1829), The World Book Encyclopedia (1917), and Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia (1922). Encyclopaedia Britannica produced its first U.S. edition in 1908. This best-selling encyclopedia’s sales dwindled in the 1990s due to competition from electronic encyclopedias (like Microsoft’s Encarta), and it went digital, too. Encyclopaedia Britannica and The World Book Encyclopedia (which still produces a printed set) are now the leading digital encyclopedias, although even they struggle today as young researchers increasingly rely on search engines such as Google or online resources like Wikipedia to find information (though many critics consider these sources inferior in quality).

Dictionaries have also accounted for a large portion of reference sales. The earliest dictionaries were produced by ancient scholars attempting to document specialized and rare words. During the manuscript period in the Middle Ages, however, European scribes and monks began creating glossaries and dictionaries to help people understand Latin. In 1604, a British schoolmaster prepared the first English dictionary. In 1755, Samuel Johnson produced the Dictionary of the English Language. Describing rather than prescribing word usage, Johnson was among the first to understand that language changes—that words and usage cannot be fixed for all time. In the United States in 1828, Noah Webster, using Johnson’s work as a model, published the American Dictionary of the English Language, differentiating between British and American usages and simplifying spelling (for example, colour became color and musick became music). As with encyclopedias, dictionaries have moved mostly to online formats since the 1990s, and they struggle to compete with free online or built-in word-processing software dictionaries.

University Press Books

The smallest division in the book industry is the nonprofit university press, which publishes scholarly works for small groups of readers interested in intellectually specialized areas, such as literary theory and criticism, history of art movements, contemporary philosophy, and the like. Professors often try to secure book contracts from reputable university presses to increase their chances for tenure, a lifetime teaching contract. Some university presses are very small, producing as few as ten titles a year. The largest—Oxford University Press—publishes more than six thousand titles a year and has offices in fifty countries. One of the oldest and most prestigious presses in the United States is Harvard University Press, formally founded in 1913 but claiming roots that go back to 1640, when Stephen Daye published the first colonial book in a small shop located behind the house of Harvard’s president.

University presses have not traditionally faced pressure to produce commercially viable books, preferring to encourage books about highly specialized topics by innovative thinkers. In fact, most university presses routinely lose money and are subsidized by their university. Even when they publish more commercially accessible titles, the lack of large marketing budgets prevents such books from reaching mass audiences. While large commercial trade houses are often criticized for publishing only blockbuster books, university presses often suffer the opposite criticism—that they produce mostly obscure books that only a handful of scholars read. To offset costs and increase revenue, some presses are trying to form alliances with commercial houses to help promote and produce academic books that have wider appeal.