BETWEEN THE LINES

Book Talk by Joe

The Value of Choice

There are over 150,000 books published in the United States each year, according to the American Booksellers Association. That number, by itself implies that we book readers have an enormous amount of choice in the books available to us.

However, if we focus on only those books that are distributed nationally, and eliminate textbooks, that number drops significantly, to only a few thousand titles. That still seems like a pretty big choice, but only if you, the individual reader, reads across a broad spectrum of genres and authors.
For most of us, the choice of new books to buy and read continues to narrow each year. There are several trends and circumstances that can help explain what is going on.

First, there are only six major publishing houses left in the United States (Ran-dom House, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Holtzbrinck and Hatchett Book Group), and only two of those (HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster) are domestically owned. And although each of the six has several imprints within it, all are cogs in the wheels of much larger business conglomerates. This is a higher concentration of business than even exists in the oil business.

Second, for the most part, each of these six publishers would rather sell 1 million copies of 50 books than 25,000 copies of 2,000 books. They all would love to publish just a handful of blockbusters. That business plan, if successful, can only mean less choice for us book readers.

Third, the large chain bookstores and the large discount big box stores have quite a bit of say in what books are published by the big six publishers. Barnes & Noble, Borders, Costco, Sam’s Club and others are consulted on what books they would be willing to stock, and even what the cover should look like, before many of these books are published. Some books are not published, even though they might have met the publishers’ criteria for publication, because they cannot also satisfy the “Costco” test – will Costco guarantee to buy a certain number of copies of the book.

Yes, we still have a lot of choices, but the trends in the publishing industry do not bode well. Hopefully, some or all of the publishing acquisitions and mergers will eventually unwind, and publishers will return to the business of publishing books for everyone instead of trying to win the blockbuster lottery.

In the meantime, fight for more choices – expand your reading horizons and look for authors you’ve never heard of, published by presses you’ve never heard of. There’s a whole lot of good stuff to read that never makes it to the NYT bestseller list. Don’t miss out because of big business.