Uh-oh. While if:book slept, the publishing industry was cast into a tumult from which it’s unlikely to soon recover. Having weathered an increasingly turbulent economic downturn, the industry’s already rickety business models look all the more enervated. The headlines are glum.
Thus far, magazines and newspapers have sustained most of the damage. The Christian Science Monitor announced in late October that it’s shuttering its print iteration; effective in April, the paper’s weekday editions will appear exclusively online. Glossy conglomerates like Time Inc., American Express and Condé Nast have cut hundreds of jobs and folded their lesser brands. (They’ve also canceled their holiday parties.) Even the venerable Times — whose web presence has been valiantly, if exhaustingly, experimental — reported significant decreases in both total and ad revenues for the month of October.
Meanwhile, Playgirl‘s final print issue hit newsstands on 18 November.
Book publishers, too, have suffered. Hoping to occlude further losses, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt opted to halt all acquisitions. Atlas & Co., a notable independent publisher of nonfiction, has postponed its spring ’09 lineup, and Doubleday is in the midst of layoffs. With a consortium of authors and publishers, Google signed a deal to digitize millions of copyrighted, out-of-print books. The publishers’ settlement? $125 million — a drop in the bucket for Google, whose traffic will benefit tremendously from the agreement. Which side got the better bargain?
Amidst such dire circumstances as these, advice is coming from all sides. Lee Abrams, the so-called “Chief Innovation Officer” of the flagging Tribune Co., advocates revolutionary vigilance, by which he means falling in line with the corporate structure. Yesterday, he admonished every Tribune employee in an email littered with solecisms. Its rhetoric is painfully hawkish:
Revolutions are about “we”. The leaders need to engage EVERYone. And EVERYone needs to engage the cause. You are either WITH the revolution or AGAINST it. You will either be embraced by the company and win or the company will beat you. No middle ground. If you are IN–cool–Bear down for battle. If you are OUT—Cool–Good luck with your future. Just figure out where you want to be… Middle ground wastes EVERONES time.
But there’s sounder and simpler counsel. As far as the printed page is concerned, Authors Guild board member James Gleick exhorted publishers in a Times op-ed piece yesterday:
Forget about cost-cutting and the mass market. Don’t aim for instant blockbuster successes. You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered. Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.
I don’t mean to be glib; it’s not as if a better business acumen could have prevented the hard truths of this recession, nor is it true that other media have somehow escaped unscathed. Furthermore, the straits of the aforementioned companies in no way suggest a pandemic of layoffs and failures — Hachette, after all, is giving its employees a bonus this year.
Publishers, though, have been notoriously intractable in seeing the threats to their livelihood, even as the music and movie industries have fallen on calamitous times. And yet a stumbling block may prove to be a stepping stone, as the saying goes. If, as predicted, the economy continues to falter, publishing will be forced to abandon its languishing strategies and innovate. Such innovations might well require an acknowledgment that there’s more to life than ink on paper. The long-term result, with any luck, will be more books, better books, and an overdue recognition of how broadly “book” can be defined.
The writing, it seems, is now on the wall — and that’s likely the only place it will appear in print.
ADDENDUM: But wait! There’s more! Among others, Mediabistro.com reported today on what is being known as “Black Wednesday” in book publishing. A brief survey of the destruction? A Random House memo told of the company’s imminent restructuring, sparking fear of ineluctable layoffs; Simon & Schuster scrapped thirty-five employees; Penguin declared that no upper-echelon personnel would receive raises in 2009, and that it could not guarantee job security in that forthcoming annum; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt continued to scale back, faced with the resignation of its publisher and more firings. Black Wednesday, indeed.