While traditionally seen as a “gentleman’s” profession marked by small, intimate production, intellectual values and high culture (except for some commercial presses), late twentieth century book publishing in America told, once again, the story of corporate mergers within a realm defined by public discourse. The once-artisanal imagery of a preindustrial field has given way to intensive marketing, corporate control, rapid evaluations of success and failure and balance sheets based on subsidiary rights rather than volumes sold or read. Book publishers like Simon & Schuster and The Free Press are part of Viacom, Bantam Doubleday Dell was absorbed by Bertelsmann AG of Germany HarperCollins forms part of the News Corporation and Random House, Knopf, Pantheon, Crown and Ballantine are all under Advance Publication. While the bestsellers published by big houses dominate the marketplace, there are, nonetheless, some independent publishing houses and numerous university presses—publishing can still be done on a relatively cheap scale. To understand American publishing culture one has to recognize its product as well as its economic structure.

Reading was one of the most popular leisure activities in the first half of the twentieth century, and led to the establishment of distinguished publishers like Random House (1925) and Alfred Knopf (1915) beside older houses like Houghton Mifflin. New York City, NY dominated publication, although Philadelphia, Boston and other cities were active centers. This was also an era of important editors who found and guided many of America’s great writers. While sales were important, Random House also supported Modern Library editions that made world and American classics accessible for generations. Bookstores, meanwhile, were elite retreats and nurturing local establishments.

After the Second World War, both the expanding markets fostered by the GI Bill and new families of the baby boom increased the market for textbooks and other sales. This was also the era in which paperbacks—and paperback publishers—provided America with even cheaper reading. By the 1960s, publishers expanded by going public (selling stock in private companies) and merging, a pattern that would intensify thereafter. The danger was overproduction, although the number of publishers allowed both avant-garde and saccharine bestsellers to find their way to market. Yet mergers soon combined paperback and hardback houses, as well as other media companies, changing publishing inexorably into a business driven by deals rather than culture.

But what of the product? Major fiction and social issues/non-fiction attract people’s attention and prestigious book reviews in the New York Times and other serious news publications. Yet, specialized lists and interests that distinguish houses and editors compete with the need for mass sales and links to movies or other media. Publishers need the regular summer blockbuster by Danielle Steele, Tom Clancy or Elmore Leonard, or sleepers like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which stayed on the New York Time’s bestsellers list for years. Prizes like the Pulitzer Prize or the American Book Award confer prestige, but do not necessarily provide the profits that a romance, a successful children’s series or an instant celebrity book will rake in.

In fact, the business produces many types of books. The education book market, for example, now accounts for more than 20 percent of all book sales (over $20 billion annually) in America, dominated by Harcourt General and McGraw-Hill. This also vests power with state officials who may decide on textbooks for large markets like Texas schools.

With increasing affluence, there are many nonfiction “lifestyle” books published on hunting, tennis, cooking and home decorating. In a culture that claims everyone can succeed, more books are published on self-improvement—how to get thin, to have selfesteem, to get rich. Graphic novels, upscale comic books, try to appeal to people who do not read much. Audio books cater to older people and to commuters who spend a great deal of time in their cars. Children and teenagers also create a lucrative market through direct sales, and schools and libraries.

Book publishing then has met an extremely diversified market, but, more and more, books are published only because there is a perceived market, not because of literary and social values. This is especially true in terms of relations with other media, where books have established an ever-closer relationship with movies and, to a lesser extent, television. Bestsellers by authors such as Robin Cook, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, Stephen King and John Grisham seem to go immediately from novels into movies. In turn, novelization publishes books based on successful movies. Celebrity biographies and product linkages (e.g. Star Trek guides) also increase mutual sales. Mergers have intensified these connections—with their diversified holdings, conglomerates want to sell not only the book, but the toy the game, the T-shirt and the music that go along with the book.

The situation is uniquely American in that publishing must compete with other mass media to become lucrative. While Gallimard makes an annual 3 percent profit, and is considered healthy, American publishing houses have a profit target of 12–15 percent.

The big conglomerates envision their publishing arms to be as remunerative as cable television and film. Newhouse bought Random House for $60 million; ten years later it is worth $1 billion. Hence, publishers bet on high advances for famous writers for perceived huge returns, while foreclosing development of unknowns or risky topics.

With publishing concentrating more and more on celebrities, the overheads of publishing houses have also increased. Instead of paying editors the same salaries as university professors, book publishers emulate the lifestyle of their colleagues in Hollywood. More importantly more and more money is spent on promotion and marketing; agents shove aside editors. Sales conferences at Random House can cost up to $1 million. Publishers then see themselves unable to publish a book that will sell less than 20,000 copies to cover an average overhead of $100,000.

Large companies, like News Corporation, are also major players in American politics.

The infamous $4.5 million advance proposed to Newt Gingrich by Rupert Murdoch raised many eyebrows, since the return of such a book could never offset the original payment. Furthermore, as Andre Schiffrin, director of the independent New Press, points out, “Harper, Random House, and Simon & Schuster were once bastions of New Deal liberalism. Yet the current output of US publishing is markedly to the right” (Hazen and Winokur 1997:83). The publishing industries in the 1990s were comfortable saying that their decisions had to be made under market pressure.

Nonetheless, in a market economy where goods need to be sold and deposed regularly books have limited shelf-lives. If they do not sell, they go back to the warehouse and will be recycled as remainders, unloaded at much cheaper prices (instead of being carried as taxable resources). This is also a related issue of the proliferation of giant chain bookstores. Barnes and Noble had 25 percent market share in the first quarter of 1996.

Other big stores like Borders and the online booksellers Amazon.com all concentrate their sales on glossy bestsellers. Publishers also provide “co-op” advertising money to help sell their books, either through bookstore advertising or in-store advertisement placements. Independent book stores are increasingly squeezed out, as played out uncritically in You’ve Got Mail (1999) where Tom Hanks, a corporate type, bought up Meg Ryan’s small children’s bookstore.

Though the picture is bleak for independent book publishers, book stores and readers who sort these books, independent houses like Grove Press, New Directions, Beacon Press, Workman Publishing, New Left Books and the New Press have promoted more innovative publications and alternative agendas. Grove Press, for example, fought censorship in the 1950s, while New Directions fostered attention for authors as diverse as Borges and Djuna Barnes. University presses are still the major sources for scholarly publications that normally do not expect much profit. They are subsidized by universities that traditionally have seen these arms as ground for furthering intellectual debates, even though they too are getting more aware of the bottom line.

Publishing, then, has gone from being an intellectual pursuit with commercial interests to conglomerate businesses in which books are commodities. While American publishers produce tens of thousands of titles, freedom of information and democracy of thought are constrained by the structure of the market, which nonetheless allows cracks of free or alternative expression to surface and, at times, succeed. The prospect of electronic publishing and distribution may radically change this in the next few decades. Yet, the patterns rehearsed here are already familiar from other media, and may predict some of the forms that an electronic economy of culture will take.