978-1319058517 Chapter 10

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The History of Books from Papyrus to Paperbacks

Trade Books.

Chapter 10

Books and the Power of Print

In this chapter, we consider the long and significant relationship between books and culture. We will:

• Trace the history of books, from Egyptian papyrus to downloadable e-books

• Examine the development of the printing press and investigate the rise of the book industry, from early

publishers in Europe and colonial America to the development of publishing houses in the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries

• Review the various types of books and explore recent trends in the industry—including audio books,

the convergence of books onto online platforms, and book digitization

• Consider the economic forces facing the book industry as a whole, from the growth of bookstore chains

to pricing struggles in the digital age

• Explore how books play a pivotal role in our culture by influencing everything from educational

curricula to popular movies

Preview Story: Young-adult books are now leading the book industry’s best-seller lists. Of the six print

books to sell more than one million copies in the United States in 2014, four of them were young-adult

books. And YA authors, like John Green (The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns) enjoy celebrity status as

pop culture icons.

A. The Development of Manuscript Culture.

B. The Innovations of Block Printing and Movable Type.

C. The Gutenberg Revolution: The Invention of the Printing Press.

D. The Birth of Publishing in the United States.

II.

Modern Publishing and the Book Industry

A. The Formation of Publishing Houses.

B. Types of Books.

2. Professional Books.

3. Textbooks.

4. Religious Books.

5. University Press Books.

III.

Trends and Issues in Book Publishing

A. Influences of Television and Film.

B. Audio Books.

C. Convergence: Books in the Digital Age.

1. Print Books Move Online.

2. The Future of E-Books.

D. Preserving and Digitizing Books.

E. Censorship and Banned Books.

IV.

The Organization and Ownership of the Book Industry

A. Ownership Patterns.

B. The Structure of Book Publishing.

C. Selling Books: Brick-and-Mortar Stores, Clubs, and Mail Order.

D. Selling Books Online.

E. Alternative Voices.

Books and the Future of Democracy

Case Study: Comic Books: Alternative Themes, but Superheroes Prevail

Global Village: Buenos Aires, the World’s Bookstore Capital

Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Banned Books and “Family Values”

Digital Job Outlook: Media Professionals Speak about Jobs in the Publishing Industry

LECTURE IDEAS

I. The History of Books from Papyrus to Paperbacks

• Explain the social and historical transformations caused by the book as the first mass medium.

Discuss why ruling elites feared widespread literacy after books became a mass medium.

• We might need to reevaluate the prominence we give to Gutenberg. A physicist and a scholar of rare

books from Princeton University have begun to rewrite the role Gutenberg played in the movable-

type revolution. They contend that whereas Gutenberg was the first person to mass-produce Bibles

and other materials, he may not have invented the metal-mold method of printing but instead may

have used a cruder sand-casting method. This method involved making sand molds and then pouring

lead alloy into them to create letters. The sand molds had to be remade for every single letter, making

printing extremely labor-intensive, with not every letter looking exactly the same. By studying the

slightly varied shapes of letters in Gutenberg’s earliest printed manuscripts, the physicist and scholar

were able to determine that movable metal molds came about twenty years later. (See Peter Spencer,

“Scholars Press for Printing Clues,” Princeton Weekly Bulletin, February 12, 2001.)

More facts about Gutenberg:

• Gutenberg may have used sand casting to make the molds for his mirrors (and then translated

that method to printing).

• Around 1450, Gutenberg began printing copies of papal indulgences, a Latin grammar book,

and a poem predicting the end of the Roman Empire.

• He invented an oil-based ink.

• Around 1455, he perfected his printing system to produce a Latin Bible (the Gutenberg Bible),

making about 180 copies.

• The Gutenberg Bible remains one of the oldest surviving printed books; one copy is on display

in the Scheide Library at Princeton University.

II. Modern Publishing and the Book Industry

• Chart the formation of the early publishing houses (e.g., Houghton Mifflin; Little, Brown; G. P.

Putnam), and explain how they’ve evolved into holdings of present media conglomerates.

• Discuss the book categories (e.g., trade, professional, textbooks) in the publishing industry.

• Trade books have a rich and diverse presence in youth culture.

• The Harry Potter books are the most popular children’s book series ever written, with more

than 400 million copies of the books sold. Two-thirds of all American children have read at least

one Harry Potter novel. Harry Potter books have been translated into more languages than any other

book except the Bible.

• Picture books such as Goodnight, Moon and The Poky Little Puppy have sales numbers close to

those of the Harry Potter books. The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Eric Carle) has sold more than 35

million copies.

• Only J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy has both a significant adult and young adult

readership, although both The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) and The Chronicles of

Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis) have sold more than 100 million

copies.

• Many books, including Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies, are now read primarily by

adolescents but were originally meant for adults. Similarly, Robin Hood, Aesop’s Fables, Mother

Goose, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Robinson Crusoe, and The Three Musketeers are now considered

children’s classics, but they, too, were meant for adults.

• The first “children’s book” was a dour 1641 Puritan tract, Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes, that

doled out “heavy-handed morals about the importance of revering god and obeying parents.”

death, and family dysfunction. A good example is Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy

Blume. (By the 1990s, these books were deemed to be too preachy and fell out of favor.)

III. Trends and Issues in Book Publishing

• The television and film industries have encroached on the publishing industry in a variety of ways.

• Studios tend to look more favorably on film ideas based on novels or magazine articles than on

original screenplays because the studios believe that such manuscripts are more fully developed and

have more believable characters.

• Some industry trackers believe that the publishing industry is acting increasingly like Hollywood

and spending lavish sums of money on projects that fail.

• Agents for novelists are going straight to Hollywood instead of to publishing houses. The idea is

to generate interest and buzz on the West Coast and then procure a larger advance from publishers in

New York. Before this trend, studios called on publishers and bought screen rights directly from

them.

• Literary scouts from Hollywood are now threatening literary agents by getting hold of

unauthorized copies of manuscripts in their fervent search for new properties.

• A good book, it turns out, is a great way to attract talent in the film and television industries.

• Oprah’s Book Club sent happy shock waves through the publishing industry from the late 1990s

through 2011. Publishers called it the “Oprah Effect”: a certain talk-show host selects a book for

discussion and asks viewers to read it; then hundreds of thousands of people buy the book. The idea

behind the book club is a grassroots phenomenon of the past few decades: the rise of reading

independent bookstores, and personal home libraries.

• Discuss how e-books are revitalizing the publishing industry, and explore the ways in which they can

continue to do so with changing technology.

As the e-book demand grows by leaps and bounds, so does the competition for devices on which to

read e-books. It seems that every few months a new producer enters the market or existing players

come out with new features, so the list of popular items and features can change rapidly.

• Consumers can choose from: small, dedicated e-readers like the Amazon Kindle, Sony Reader

IV. The Organization and Ownership of the Book Industry

• Consolidation in the book publishing industry began with mergers in 1960, when Random House

bought Knopf (along with Vintage Paperbacks), Beginner Books, and Pantheon. Six years later,

RCA bought Random House, and in 1980, S. I. Newhouse (with his younger brother, Donald)

bought Random House and put it under Advance Publications. Advance Publications sold Random

House to Bertelsmann in 1998. In October 2012, Bertelsmann announced that Random House

would merge with Penguin, and on July 1, 2013, the merger was completed, officially becoming

Penguin Random House. That left book publishing with an oligopoly of five big publishers:

Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster. (As

conglomerates go, Bertelsmann is rare because it does not have a movie-studio connection. With

books and print remaining at the foundation of the company’s assets, editors at Bertelsmann are not

continuously under pressure to develop books with movie tie-ins and other cross-promotional

pushes.)

• The more powerful the media mogul, it seems, the more likely that any book about that person,

unless it’s a positive portrayal, will be suppressed. A 1994 biography of S. I. Newhouse by Thomas

Maier, called Newhouse, was, in the author’s words, “a parable on American power” and a

meticulously researched account of the Newhouse monopoly and his rise to dominance, including

an analysis of a tax-evasion trial, various newspaper monopolies, power grabbing, ruthless firings,

and legendary secrecy. No matter how absorbing the book, however, Maier could find no one to

publish it. St. Martin’s Press (which is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers and a sister company of

Bedford/St. Martin’s, the publisher of Media & Culture) finally decided to give it a go but had

difficulty selling it. Not one newspaper or magazine in New York reviewed or mentioned the book,

and Maier found himself blacklisted. The book would have disappeared completely if a publishing

house in Colorado (far away from New York) hadn’t printed it in paperback.

• Bookjobs.com is a Web site launched by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) in 2003.

Directed at college-age people, the Web site is part of a campaign to increase diversity within the

book industry and also to entice college-age students to consider a potential career in book

publishing. Besides giving lots of information on the publishing industry, Bookjobs.com lists

available jobs and internships from every major book publisher in the United States. According to

the AAP press release when the site opened, “AAP will target colleges with diverse student

populations as well as demanding academic standards to increase awareness of book publishing as

a viable career choice for students in a range of academic disciplines, from finance to literature, to

graphic design, to business.”

V. Books and the Future of Democracy

• Discuss the ways books have been important to the spread of ideas, including but not limited to

democracy. Explore the ways in which ownership convergence and technological convergence might

change the way those ideas are spread.

• One often thinks of magazines and newspapers as the muckraking platforms of the twentieth

century, but let’s not forget about the impact of muckraking in book form. Here are some classic

muckraking books that have stimulated both debate and social change. Many of these titles started

as magazine or newspaper pieces and then evolved into books.

• History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida M. Tarbell (1904). This 815-page classic of

investigative journalism helped pave the way for the Supreme Court to break up the giant Standard

Oil Company.

• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (1906). Carefully reported yet written as a novel, this book

business-friendly Eisenhower era was a cultural milestone, marking a new interest in questioning

authority.

• The Other America by Michael Harrington (1962). This monumental study of poverty helped

pave the way for the Great Society programs.

• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962). Originally a New Yorker report, this book on herbicides

and pesticides helped launch modern environmentalism.

• My Lai 4 by Seymour Hersh (1970). Hersh’s story of the infamous massacre appeared first in the

New York Times, ratcheting up pressure to end the war in Vietnam.

• All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (1974). Watergate, the cover-up,

and President Nixon’s fall as reported in the Washington Post.

• A Promise of Justice by David Protess and Rob Warden (1998). This book freed four innocent

men, struck a blow against the death penalty, and offered what investigative guru Steve Weinberg

calls a “superb account of how to detect a potential wrongful conviction.”

• Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (2000). This best-seller connected the dots between bad

nutrition, exploited workers, and the car culture.

(Adapted from Kenneth Klee, “Modern Muckrakers,” Book Magazine, September/October 2001, pp.

46–51)

• According to a study from Central Connecticut State University, the top ten most literate cities in

the United States in 2014 were the following:

1. Minneapolis, Minnesota

2. Washington, D.C.

3. Seattle, Washington

4. St. Paul, Minnesota

5. Atlanta, Georgia

6. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

7. Denver, Colorado

8. San Francisco, California

9. Boston, Massachusetts

10. St. Louis, Missouri

(See http://hosted.ccsu.edu/app/?news=1119&data.)

• People in the Pacific Coast states buy more books than anyone else. They make up 15 percent of

the U.S. population but buy 19 percent of books sold.

• What are the three most important factors that influence book buying in the United States?

1. An appealing dust jacket, which influences 20 percent of all book purchases

2.Price

3. A glowing book review

MEDIA LITERACY DISCUSSIONS AND EXERCISES

THE COST OF COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS

This think-pair-share exercise focuses on the publishing and sales of college and university textbooks.

1. Think. On your own, write down:

• How much money you spent this semester on textbooks and the cost of each book

• How much money you got back if you returned any books last semester

• What your choices are for purchasing textbooks

2. Pair. With a partner, discuss your observations, and consider these questions: Which types of

books seem most expensive? Why do they cost so much? What do you typically do with textbooks

at the end of a semester—keep them or sell them—and why? Who do you think is responsible for

pricing books? Who do you think reaps the most profit from textbooks?

(Consider showing the graphic, “Where the New Textbook Dollar Goes,” which is available at:

https://www.nacs.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=avjJ9Z83RzU%3D&tabid=167&mid=581.)

3. Share. As a class, consider the college textbook publishing business. If a particular book is more

expensive than others, are you more or less likely to buy it? Should professors tie lectures closely

to the texts, or should the required reading be done independently by the student? What are some of

the factors in the production and distribution of textbooks that account for their cost? Do students

prefer digital or paper textbooks? Why?

(You might want to refer to National Association of College Stores research, which shows student

preferences for print textbooks dropping from approximately 75 percent in 2010 and 2011 to only

40 percent in 2015. See http://www.nacs.org/research/studentwatchfindings.aspx.)

BOOKS AND YOU

Pre-Exercise Question: What have been the most important books in your life, and why?

This Critical Process exercise is designed to re-evaluate the significance of books in people’s lives,

especially in an era of electronic media. It is a variation of the think-pair-share discussion strategy

explained in the Teaching Philosophy section in the beginning of this manual. Divide the class into teams

of two or three. Give students two to three minutes to think independently about the questions, five to ten

minutes to share their experiences with their teams, and about fifteen minutes to compare and discuss the

issues with the entire class.

1. Description. Consider the books that have made a difference in your life. What kind of books are

they (e.g., novels, reference books, religious books, children’s books, comic books)? How did you

access these books? Were they already in your home? Did you go to the library? Did you get them

as gifts, or did you buy them at a bookstore? What were your early experiences with school

libraries, public libraries, and bookstores? What role do books currently play in your life? Have you

kept many of the books that are important to you? Why or why not?

2. Analysis. Does your group or class share certain patterns of experience around your favorite books?

Are these patterns related to your age at the time, your gender, where you live, or the way you were

raised to think about books?

3. Interpretation. Consider your book experiences in relation to the decade in which you started

reading and the other media and activities battling for your attention. Did you generally have

negative or positive experiences connected to books and reading? Do you have certain coming-of-

age experiences connected to books? Why or why not?

4. Evaluation. After considering your book experiences, what do you think is the role of books in an

age of electronic media?

5. Engagement. Create an annotated list of the class’s favorite books, and pass it around. Steer students

to the college library’s reading room.

BOOK READING

Answer each of the following questions in a few sentences or short paragraph(s):

1. Do you read books outside the school setting? If so, what books do you tend to read, and why? (If

you don’t read books, reflect on why you choose not to.)

2. Think about reading as a practice. When do you read (time of day/time of year)? Where do you

read? (In what types of locations/environments/situations do you pick up a book?) If you don’t read

books regularly, can you pinpoint at what point you stopped reading? (Do you ever want to pick up

a book now but just don’t get around to it?) What type of reader are you? (Do you read many books

at once? Do you read sporadically?)

3. What influences (or what would influence) you to read a particular book?

4. In your opinion, what do books offer that TV or movies don’t? What place do books have in our

fast-paced, visual culture?

—Developed by Karen Pitcher, University of Iowa

BANNED BOOKS

Have students read or browse the following articles and Web sites and then discuss how the First

Amendment applies to access to books:

• “Slaughterhouse-Five ban should make school board blush”

http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/slaughterhouse-five-ban-should-make-school-board-blush/

• Banned & Challenged Books: http://www.ala.org/bbooks

and

http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/51787/Banned-Books-Week-Celebrating-30-Years-of-

Liberating-Literature/#vars!date=2012-07-15_07:34:50!

• Banned Books Week (usually in late September): http://www.bannedbooksweek.org

• “Teaching Huck Finn: A Letter to Friends’ Central School:” http://ncac.org/incident/teaching-

huck-finn-a-letter-to-friends-central-school

• Banned & Challenged Comics: http://cbldf.org/banned-comic/banned-challenged-comics

HOW DO YOU FIND OUT ABOUT BOOKS?

This Critical Process exercise examines how people discover books.

Pre-Exercise Questions: Every year, the book industry publishes more than 100,000 titles in North

America. Some could be life changing, inspiring, or unbelievably fascinating, but you might never

know about them because somehow the book industry failed to reach you. How do you discover books?

And if you knew about more great reading material, would you read more often?

1. Description. Interview ten of your friends about their relationship with books. Ask them (1)

whether they read books at all, and why or why not; (2) how they choose the books they read; (3) what

books were transformative for them and whether they would read more books if they knew about

recommended titles; and (4) if viewing a particular movie or TV show has transformed them as much

as a book has.

2. Analysis. What important patterns emerge? For example, how many of your participants said they

choose their books by “word of mouth”? How many browse the shelves of libraries or bookstores,

actively seek out books on the Internet by reading recommended listings (perhaps on Amazon),

participate in a book club or reading group, or never read books at all? Discuss the most significant

patterns.

3. Interpretation. What can you glean from this information? Is it difficult to learn about book titles

you’d be interested in reading? Why do some people read more than others?

4. Evaluation. Do you think the publishing industry is doing a good job educating U.S. citizens about

books? How does publicity for books compare with other mass media products (films, television,

recordings)? What are the advantages and disadvantages of publicizing a book? Discuss.

5. Engagement. One of the best places to find out about past and present titles is the Barnes & Noble

Review, available at http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review. Here you can access titles and reviews

by subject, store recommendations, award winners, great new writers (and its archive), various best-

seller lists, and so on. You may also want to start reading the New York Times Book Review

(http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html) or the London Review of Books

(http://www.lrb.co.uk). Choose some titles. Start a book club. Read.

THE BIG BOOK BUSINESS

Pre-Exercise Question: What are some recent books that are connected to other media content or media

personalities? Think of all the possibilities across many media, including television, film, radio,

newspapers, comics, and the recording industry.

This Critical Process exercise analyzes the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between book

publishing and the media business, and it begins with the weekly best-seller lists in the New York Times

Book Review. You can also check http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/overview.html.

1. Description. Check the current best-seller and paperback best-seller lists, and make a list of the

titles. Students can work in groups that will analyze several fiction or nonfiction titles or as

individuals responsible for just one or a few titles.

2. Analysis. Determine the parent corporation of the book: Is it a multinational media conglomerate or

an independent? Some of the largest conglomerates are Bertelsmann SE (Random House,

Ballantine Bantam Dell, Doubleday, Anchor, Delacorte, Broadway Books, Penguin, etc.), News

Corp. (HarperCollins, William Morrow, Avon, Amistad, etc.), Pearson PLC (Viking, Dutton,

Pearson, Razorbill, etc.), Hachette Livre (Little, Brown and Company; Grand Central Publishing;

Orbit), CBS (Simon & Schuster, Scribner, Touchstone, Free Press, Pocket Books, etc.), and

Macmillan (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Hill & Wang; Bedford/St. Martin’s; Henry Holt; etc.).

3. Interpretation. Search LexisNexis, the National Newspaper Index, or other sources for news

articles about these books, their authors, the ways in which the books were promoted, and the sales

estimates for the books. (Some useful Web sites are http://www.publishersweekly.com and

http://www.bookwire.com.) Research the history of the book’s content. Is the book connected to a

known entity, such as a current movie, comic strip, magazine article, or television show? In regard

to synergy, are these other media versions of the same content produced by subsidiaries of the same

company? Were subsidiaries also used for reviews or promotion of the book (e.g., a Wall Street

Journal magazine review of a HarperCollins book)? Did the subsidiary connection seem impartial

or excessively promotional?

4. Evaluation. Finally, evaluate the role of big publishing in the book industry. Is it good to bring

book ideas and stories to a wider audience through the synergy of big companies? Is there a

sufficient variety of genres and ideas in the best-seller lists, or—perhaps owing to business

pressures—is there too much of the same thing?

5. Engagement. Check out local independent bookstores and online book sites such as IndieBound

(http://www.indiebound.org) to keep tabs on what is popular outside the mainstream.

Option: This exercise can also be an individual research assignment, using current or past New York

Times best-seller lists.

TRACKING RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN THE BOOK PUBLISHING INDUSTRY: A

SEMESTER-LONG CRITICAL PROCESS EXERCISE AND PAPER

In this exercise students discover the most recent developments in the industry, and they become familiar

with industry trade sources. The paper they produce is due in sections, which correspond with the steps in

the Critical Process.

1. Description. Read industry trade sources to get a sense of the main issues affecting the book

publishing industry. Look at the Web sites of industry trade associations and professional societies.

(Links to Web sites of some industry trade sources are given in the Classroom Media Sources below.)

Take notes on topics that have multiple stories or mentions in the current year. What issues or

developments in the industry have received a lot of recent attention, discussion, or commentary in

industry sources? (Focus only on information from the current year—and only from trade sources.)

Write a one-page synopsis of the information you found about current topics in the industry. Cite your

sources properly.

2. Analysis. Look for one development or pattern that has received significant attention on trade sites

and from trade journalists in the current year. Choose one specific trend, and write one or two pages

with details about the information you found about that trend. Continue to track news about your

topic as the semester progresses. Cite sources properly.

3. Interpretation. What does the trend mean for the state of the industry? Is it evolving? How? What

does it tell you about media in general at the current time? What might it say about our culture or our

society? Can your information help us interpret the role of the industry in our lives? Write up your

interpretation in a five-page paper. (The first page should be a synopsis of the trend, with proper

citations.) You might not have to provide information from your sources for the next four pages

because this section is your interpretation of the trend. (Save any ideas you have about whether the

trend is “good” or “bad” for the Evaluation step of the Critical Process.)

4. Evaluation. Is the trend “good” or “bad?” For the industry? society? culture? democracy? us? What

do you think might happen in the future?

5. Engagement. Are there any actions you can take (related to your trend and the industry)? Possibilities

include posting your views on social media, creating a petition, contacting people in the industry to

see what they think of your interpretation and evaluation, or going to an industry event if any are held

nearby. (This step need not be required if students are not motivated to take action.)

Note: This exercise works well if each step of the Critical Process is due two weeks after the prior step is

due. Limiting students to only trade sources and only information from the current year helps keep them

on track. Your institution’s librarians should be able to provide students with information on how to

access industry trade sources.

CLASSROOM MEDIA RESOURCES

LAUNCHPAD FOR MEDIA & CULTURE: http://www.macmillanhighered.com/mediaculture11e

Books in the New Millennium (2009, 3:51 minutes). This video features authors, editors, and bookstore

owners discussing the future of the book publishing industry. Featuring Elizabeth Beier, Richard

Campbell, Heather Lyons, and Anne Rice.

Self-Publishing On Screen: 50 Shades of Grey (2015, 0:55 minutes). Watch the trailer for the film 50

Shades of Grey, a self-published e-book which became a best-selling book trilogy and later a series of

films.

Based On: Making Books into Movies (2010, 3:25 minutes). David Gale, Tom Perrotta, and Anne Rice

discuss the process of turning a novel into a movie.

Banned Books On Screen: Huck Finn (1993, 1:36). A brief clip from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

shows a film adaptation of a commonly banned work of literature.

Turning the Page: Books Go Digital (2010, 3:04 minutes). Featuring authors Andre Dubus III, Junot

Diaz, and Kathi Kamen Goldmark, this video looks at how books are going digital and what that

means for our reading experiences.

VIDEOS/DVDS/CDS

Book Industry (1997, 29 minutes). This program provides a detailed look at how trade and

educational/reference books are made, sold, and marketed (part of the Film, TV, and Media Today

series). Distributed by Films for the Humanities & Sciences, 800-322-8755; http://ffh.films.com.

The History of Print (1997, 30 minutes). This video illustrates the evolution of print culture and notes

print’s influence on cultural changes in Europe and the United States. The program also evaluates the

impact of new technologies on print culture.

WEB SITES

American Booksellers Association: http://www.bookweb.org

American Library Association: http://www.ala.org

Association of American Publishers: http://www.publishers.org

Association of American University Presses: http://www.aaupnet.org

Book Con (convention): http://www.thebookcon.com

Book Industry Study Group: http://www.bisg.org

The Bookseller: http://www.thebookseller.com

Children’s Book Council: http://www.cbcbooks.org

Independent Book Publishers Association: http://www.ibpa-online.org/

International Comic Arts Forum: http://www.internationalcomicartsforum.org

International Publishers Association: http://www.internationalpublishers.org

National Association of College Stores: http://www.nacs.org

New York Times Book Review: http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html

Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.net

Publishing Trends: http://www.publishingtrends.com

Publishers Weekly: http://www.publishersweekly.com

R. R. Bowker’s Bookwire: www.bookwire.com

Society for Scholarly Publishing: https://www.sspnet.org

Subtext: http://www.dawhois.com/www/subtext.net.html