THE LAST WORD
The provincialism of the book trade press
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LOGOS 18/1 ©2007 LOGOS
The Last Word
For more than fifty years I have been a follower of, and an occasional contributor to, Publishers Weekly in the US and The Bookseller in the UK — and have given similar respect to The Bookseller’s challenger, Publishing News, since it was founded in 1979.
Like most of the industry they served in the 1950s, the first two journals were then familyowned — Publishers Weekly by the Melcher family (of Bowker) and The Bookseller by the Whitaker family. Both of their histories went back to the 19th century. Both were quiet monopolies. Books were announced rather than advertised. They both attained the position of being trade oracles. Publishers believed themselves to be the most valuable constituents of the two journals, with booksellers forming a second stratum. However, both journals were making significant income from libraries through Books in Print and other bibliographic publications.
In the second half of the 20th century there came to these journals, as to their publisher patrons, the corporate age. Corporations love quiet monopolies (though they seldom say so publicly) and believe that if they can acquire such companies they can make them more profitable. So the heirs of old companies are persuaded to sell out. Bowker went first to Xerox, and later to Reed. Whitaker went finally to the Dutch conglomerate VNU (now rebranded as http://www.nielsen.com/). Neither of these corporations is much interested in book publishing. But they do know how to publish business- to-business magazines. Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller (as well as Publishing News) are now models of glossy design, with liberal use of colour. News columns concern mainly personalities and company finances. “Product” is described in author interviews and feature articles.
In brief, all the weaknesses of the fuddy-duddy 1950s have been corrected. Except one. These journals are still essentially local sheets. This would be understandable if they were serving local markets defined by language — as do Boersenblatt in German or Livres Hebdo in French — or by geography like Australia (Australian Publisher and Bookseller) or Canada (Quill and Quire).
But Publishers Weekly and The Bookseller are the major professional periodicals of a world industry. It was understandable that they overlapped very little fifty years ago. To the international reader with a global view today, local news is no longer the heart of the matter. In the Whitaker days, David of that ilk used to say: “We are a parish magazine.” He is still right. Exports are a kind of bonus. Students of the fortunes of the book who confined their reading to these journals would assume there is nothing of significance going on in Asia, Africa or Latin America.
In the five issues of Publishers Weekly from mid-January to mid-February 2007, only a halfpage was devoted to the UK, one page to Canada and three to other countries. In The Bookseller over the same period, just over one page was devoted to the US and six pages to other countries. This fragmentary coverage, averaging a page per issue, does not reflect the world reach of English-language publishing; nor the fact that the US is the UK’s largest export customer and the UK the US’s second largest after Canada; nor the fact that ownership of publishing today is said to be multinational.
The Bookseller shows more consciousness of the rest of the world than does PW by designating one page per issue “International”. It consists of snippets from freelance correspondents in Europe and the US. PW’s long-time American-in-Paris correspondent, Herb Lottman, has not been replaced and its occasional international supplements — all adbased, the copy written to describe the publishing houses in the regions covered — seem to have faded away.
The only occasions which stimulate spurts of international coverage are the book fairs, principally Frankfurt, London and the US’s BookExpo (the latter two with the same owner as PW’s), where the journals themselves exhibit and produce daily newssheets.
Although corporate publishers subscribe to the concept that book publishing in English is a world business, in practice, once rights are sold, even within a corporation, American books become British and British books become American; and local imprints, no matter who owns them, aim their publicity at their home markets, and the trade journals reflect this.
Yet these journals are also no doubt uneasy about the fact that trade publishing, the highprofile sector of the publishing industry, is being challenged by the Internet and eroded by the boundary-less marketing of the Amazons and Googles.
By contrast, the world market for specialist books and journals, a large part of which is now digitized, is served by specialist journals such as Booklist published by American Library Association, and by established periodicals like Scholarly Publishing, STM Newsletters, Serials, Against the Grain, Publishing Research Quarterly, etc. Specialist journals such as these have loyal supporters. In them the reader is king. Published both online and in print, they have little or no advertising.
In essence, the issue is not national vs international; it’s reader-based vs ad-based. Thinly disguised ad-generating vehicles naturally reflect the intent of the advertisers in the readers’ columns. Whatever the reason, when the world’s trade journals drop through my letterbox these days, the old tingle of anticipation is missing. I think my fifty-year affair is fading. I know what you’re thinking. But you’re wrong. I’m the one who is moving with the times.
Gordon Graham