Ever since Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold fifteen thousand copies in fifteen days back in 1852 (and three million total copies prior to the Civil War), many American publishers have stalked the best-seller, or blockbuster (just like in the movie business). While most authors are professional writers, the book industry also reaches out to famous media figures, who may pen a best-selling book (Tina Fey, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Clinton) or a commercial failure (Whoopi Goldberg, Jay Leno). Other ways publishers attempt to ensure popular success include acquiring the rights to license popular film and television programs or experimenting with formats like audio books and e-books. In addition to selling new books, other industry issues include the preservation of older books and the history of banned books and censorship.

Influences of Television and Film

There are two major facets in the relationship among books, television, and film: how TV can help sell books and how books serve as ideas for TV shows and movies. Through TV exposure, books by or about talk-show hosts, actors, and politicians such as Stephen Colbert, Julie Andrews, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton sell millions of copies—enormous sales in a business where 100,000 in sales constitutes remarkable success. In national polls conducted from the 1980s through today, nearly 30 percent of respondents said they had read a book after seeing the story or a promotion on television.

One of the most influential forces in promoting books on TV was Oprah Winfrey. Even before the development of Oprah’s Book Club in 1996, Oprah’s afternoon talk show had become a major power broker in selling books. In 1993, for example, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize recipient Elie Wiesel appeared on Oprah. Afterward, his 1960 memoir, Night, which had been issued as a Bantam paperback in 1982, returned to the best-seller lists. In 1996, novelist Toni Morrison’s nineteen-year-old book Song of Solomon became a paperback best-seller after Morrison appeared on Oprah. In 1998, after Winfrey brought Morrison’s Beloved to movie screens, the book version was back on the best-seller lists. Each Oprah’s Book Club selection became an immediate best-seller, generating tremendous excitement within the book industry. The Oprah Winfrey Show ended in 2011.

The film industry gets many of its story ideas from books (more than 1,450 feature-length movie adaptations in the United States since 1980), which results in enormous movie-rights revenues for the book industry and its authors.16 Robert M. Edsel’s The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (2009), Veronica Roth’s Divergent (2011), and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars (2012), for instance, became Hollywood motion pictures in 2014. The most profitable movie successes for the book industry in recent years emerged from fantasy works. J. K. Rowling’s best-selling Harry Potter books have become hugely popular movies, as has Peter Jackson’s film trilogy of J. R. R. Tolkien’s enduringly popular The Lord of the Rings (first published in the 1950s). The Twilight movie series has created a huge surge in sales of Stephenie Meyer’s four-book saga, a success repeated by Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy. Books have also inspired popular television programs, including Game of Thrones and Boardwalk Empire on HBO, Dexter on Showtime, and Pretty Little Liars on ABC Family. In each case, the television shows boosted the sales of the original books, too. Journalist H. G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (1990), chronicling the story of a West Texas high school football team, inspired a 2004 film and then a 2006–2011 television series. The movie and television versions then spawned special editions of the book and frequent reprintings as the book became a classic sports account.

Audio Books

Another major development in publishing has been the merger of sound recording with publishing. Audio books generally feature actors or authors reading entire works or abridged versions of popular fiction and nonfiction trade books. Indispensable to many sightless readers and older readers whose vision is diminished, audio books are also popular among regular readers who do a lot of commuter driving or who want to listen to a book at home while doing something else—like exercising. The number of audio books borrowed from libraries soared in the 1990s and early 2000s, and small bookstore chains developed to cater to the audio book niche. Audio books are now readily available on the Internet for downloading to iPods and other portable devices. Amazon owns Audible, the largest provider of audio books.

Convergence: Books in the Digital Age

In 1971, Michael Hart, a student computer operator at the University of Illinois, typed up the text of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, and thus the idea of the e-book—a digital book read on a computer or a digital reading device—was born. Hart soon founded Project Gutenberg, which now offers more than forty thousand public domain books (older texts with expired copyrights) for free at www.gutenberg.org. Yet the idea of commercial e-books—putting copyrighted books like current best-sellers in digital form—took a lot longer to gain traction.

Print Books Move Online

Early portable reading devices from RCA and Sony in the 1990s were criticized for being too heavy, too expensive, or too difficult to read, while their e-book titles were scarce and had little cost advantage over full-price hardcover books. It is no surprise that these e-readers and e-books didn’t catch on. Then, in 2007, Amazon, the largest online bookseller, developed an e-reader (the Kindle) and an e-book store that seemed inspired by Apple’s music industry–changing iPod and iTunes. The first Kindle had an easy-on-the-eyes electronic paper display, held more than two hundred books, and did something no other device could do before: wirelessly download e-books from Amazon’s online bookstore. Moreover, most Kindle e-books sold for $9.99, less than half the price of most new hardcovers. This time, e-books caught on quickly, and Amazon couldn’t make Kindles fast enough to keep up with demand.

Amazon has continued to refine its e-reader, and in 2011 it introduced the Kindle Fire, a color touchscreen tablet with Web browsing, access to all the media on Amazon, and the Amazon Appstore. The Kindle devices are the best-selling products ever on Amazon. Of course, the Kindle is no longer the only portable reading device on the market. Apps have transformed the iPod Touch, the iPhone, and other smartphones into e-readers. In 2010, Apple introduced the iPad, a color touchscreen tablet that quickly outsold the Kindle. The immediate initial success of the iPad (introduced at a starting price of $499 and up), which sold three million units in less than three months, spurred other e-readers to drop their prices below $200. Like Amazon’s Kindle Fire, other devices have mimicked the iPad by adding color, e-mail, and an app store.

By 2013, e-books accounted for 38 percent of adult fiction sales in the United States (in terms of revenue). Projections indicate that e-books will surpass the print book market by 2017.17 As the market grows rapidly, several companies are vying to be the biggest seller of e-books. Apple’s iBook Store serves the iPad, iPod, and iPhone exclusively. Amazon and Barnes & Noble sell e-books for their readers but also have apps for other devices so that, for example, an iPad user could buy e-books from their stores. Google started an e-book store (now Google Play) that enables customers to access its cloud-based e-books anywhere via any device, a feature added by Amazon and Apple.

The Future of E-Books

E-books are demonstrating how digital technology can help the oldest mass medium adapt and survive. Distributors, publishers, and bookstores also use digital technology to print books on demand, reviving books that would otherwise go out of print and avoiding the inconveniences of carrying unsold books. But perhaps the most exciting part of e-books is their potential for reimagining what a book can be. Computers or tablet touchscreens such as an iPad can host e-books with embedded video, hyperlinks, and dynamic content, enabling, for example, a professor to reorganize, add, or delete content of an e-textbook to tailor it to the needs of a specific class. Children’s books may also never be the same. An Alice in Wonderland e-book developed for the iPad uses the device’s motion and touchscreen technologies to make “the pop-up book of the 21st-century.” Such developments are changing the reading experience: “Users don’t just flip the ‘pages’ of the e-book—they’re meant to shake it, turn it, twist it, jiggle it, and watch the characters and settings in the book react.”18 E-books have also made the distribution of long-form journalism and novellas easier with products like the inexpensive Kindle Singles.

Preserving and Digitizing Books

Another recent trend in the book industry involves the preservation of older books, especially those from the nineteenth century printed on acid-based paper, which gradually deteriorates. At the turn of the twentieth century, research initiated by libraries concerned with losing valuable older collections provided evidence that acid-based paper would eventually turn brittle and self-destruct. The paper industry, however, did not respond, so in the 1970s, leading libraries began developing techniques to halt any further deterioration (although this process could not restore books to their original state). Finally, by the early 1990s, motivated almost entirely by economics rather than by the cultural value of books, the paper industry began producing acid-free paper. Libraries and book conservationists, however, still focused attention on older, at-risk books. Some institutions began photocopying original books onto acid-free paper and made the copies available to the public. Libraries then stored the originals, which were treated to halt further wear.

Another way to preserve books is through digital imaging. The most extensive digitization project, Google Books, which began in 2004, features partnerships with the New York Public Library and about twenty major university research libraries—including Harvard, Michigan, Oxford, and Stanford—to scan millions of books and make them available online. The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers initially sued Google for digitizing copyrighted books without permission. Google argued that displaying only a limited portion of the books was legal under fair-use rules. After years of legal battles, a U.S. Court of Appeals sided with Google’s fair-use arguments in 2013 and dismissed the lawsuit. The Authors Guild vowed to appeal the decision. An alternative group, dissatisfied by Google Books’ restriction of its scanned book content from use by other commercial search services, started a nonprofit service in 2007. The Internet Archive’s Open Library works with the Boston Public Library, several university libraries, Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo! to digitize millions of books with expired copyrights and make them freely available at openlibrary.org. In 2008, another group of universities formed the HathiTrust Digital Library to further archive and share digital collections. In 2010, these nonprofit archives joined other libraries to create the Digital Public Library of America.

Censorship and Banned Books

Over time, the wide circulation of books gave many ordinary people the same opportunities to learn that were once available to only a privileged few. However, as societies discovered the power associated with knowledge and the printed word, books were subjected to a variety of censors. Imposed by various rulers and groups intent on maintaining their authority, the censorship of books often prevented people from learning about the rituals and moral standards of other cultures. Political censors sought to banish “dangerous” books that promoted radical ideas or challenged conventional authority. In various parts of the world, some versions of the Bible, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1989) have all been banned at one time or another. In fact, one of the triumphs of the Internet is that it allows the digital passage of banned books into nations where printed versions have been outlawed. (For more on banned books, see “Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Banned Books and ‘Family Values’” on page 360.)

Each year, the American Library Association (ALA) compiles a list of the most challenged books in the United States. Unlike an enforced ban, a book challenge is a formal request to have a book removed from a public or school library’s collection. Common reasons for challenges include sexually explicit passages, offensive language, occult themes, violence, homosexual themes, promotion of a religious viewpoint, nudity, and racism. (The ALA defends the right of libraries to offer material with a wide range of views and does not support removing material on the basis of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.) Some of the most challenged books of the past decade include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou, Forever by Judy Blume, the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, and the Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey (see Figure 10.3).