243
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: Trade books are the largest segment of the book industry, and one of the
fastest-growing segments within trade books are graphic novels and comics. Graphic novels now
comprise 6 percent of the U.S. book market. In fact, comics and graphic novels have made a big
impact in the book industry and popular culture, especially as the stories have been transformed
into television and movie narratives. Despite these successes, the New York Times decided in
2017 to drop their graphic novel best seller lists—Hardcover Graphic Novel, Paperback Graphic
Novel, and Manga. This action prompted 900 individuals, led by a literary agent for graphic
novelists, to sign a letter in February 2018 to the Times’s publisher to bring back the lists and
expand coverage of comics.
244
I. The History of Books from Papyrus to Paperbacks
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
1. Trade 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
245
A. Ownership Patterns
B. The Structure of Book Publishing
C. Selling Books: Book Superstores and Independent Booksellers
D. Selling Books Online
E. Alternative Voices
V. Books and the Future of Democracy
Examining Ethics: Contemporary Politics Revives Interest in Classic Novels
Global Village: Buenos Aires, the World’s Bookstore Capital
Media Literacy and the Critical Process: Banned Books and “Family Values”
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
246
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.
247
• 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.”
Another title from Puritan times was A Token for Children: Being an Exact Account of the
Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives, and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children.
• The first publisher to specialize in books for young people was John Newbery (1713–1767).
He began publishing in 1744. The Newbery award, established in 1921, is the most
prominent children’s book award in the United States.
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll, published in 1865, was a revolutionary
children’s book in that it was the first to capture children as they are. It was the first book
written for children that didn’t lecture to them.
248
• By the 1950s, the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series became prominent. They were
action/adventure books that sought to compete with television and comic books.
• In the 1960s and 1970s, a new genre of young adult novels focused (like movies) on sex,
drugs, 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
249
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 groups. Across the United States and Canada, small groups of people join
together to read selected books and then meet in places like living rooms, libraries,
bookstores, churches, and community centers to debate and discuss them. Reading groups
take an individualistic medium—the book— and use it as a launching pad for the shared
experience of conversation and friendship.
All forty–eight books featured on the coveted Oprah’s Book Club list during its first 6 years
became best–sellers, and about three-fourths were written by women.
In 2012, Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 was launched, replacing the original book club. A full list of
book club selections is available at: https://static.oprah.com/images/o2/201608/201608-obc–
complete–list-01a.pdf.
• C-Span2 and its bookish founder and CEO Brian Lamb focus on discussions, interviews,
book festivals, and readings (http://www.booktv.org). Besides programming interviews with
authors and book readings, C-Span2’s Book TV camera crews visit neighborhood reading
clubs, quirky 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.
250
• Consumers can choose from: small, dedicated e-readers like the Amazon Kindle, Sony
Reader Pocket Edition, or Kobo eReader; midsize readers/tablets like the Samsung Galaxy
Tab, HTC Flyer, Kindle Fire, and Nook Tablet; large-screen readers/tablets like the Amazon
Kindle DX, Apple iPad, and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.
• Features, like an e-ink screen on some readers, reproduce the look of black-and–white print
and can be read in full sunlight; LCD displays allow for color and other graphics. Additional
features range from Wi–Fi capabilities to more advanced apps in the larger tablets.
• Prices range from less than one hundred dollars to several hundred dollars.
• Reading e-books is also possible on other platforms such as computers and smartphones.
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.)
• Of the top trade book publishers, nine out of ten are headquartered in New York City.
251
• Discuss the various distribution outlets in the publishing industry, including the rise (and fall)
of book superstores and online distribution outlets.
• Book distribution—where retail and online bookstores get their books—is also monopolized
by two huge companies: Ingram and Baker & Taylor.
• The American Booksellers Association (ABA) offers independently owned, brick-and–mortar
ABA bookstores the opportunity to create an online retail site through its IndieCommerce
program so that they can stay competitive but still offer their customers the intimate
experience and unique character of an independent bookstore. Two examples of
IndieCommerce sites are http://www.vromansbookstore.com and http://steamboatbooks.com.
According to the New York Times, “The American Booksellers Association counted 1,712
member stores in 2,227 locations in 2015, up from 1,410 in 1,660 locations five years ago”
(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/23/business/media/the-plot-twist-e-book-sales–slip–and–
print-is–far–from-dead.html?_r=0).
• 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
252
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.”
• Compare and contrast the pricing dispute between Amazon and the publishing industry with
Apple’s pricing battle with the recording industry.
• Amazon reported net income of $2.5 billion in the second quarter of 2018 compared with an
income of $734 million in the same quarter of the previous year. Amazon has extended its
product offerings. The company’s cloud-hosting enterprise, Amazon Web Services, was
responsible for much of the success; it grew nearly 48.9 percent in the second quarter of
2018, far above what analysts expected. Amazon’s Fire TV remains among the top streaming
media players, and Echo (“Alexa”) is a hands-free device that operates on voice recognition
and integrates with numerous services to become a multimedia device for listening to music,
shopping, and even controlling lighting, heat, and other connected-home features.
V. Books and the Future of Democracy
253
• 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
prompted President Theodore Roosevelt to investigate meatpackers and led Congress to pass
the Pure Food and Drug Act.
• Hiroshima by John Hersey (1946). The publication of this account of atomic-bomb
survivors was a huge event. The original article filled an entire (sold-out) New Yorker issue
and was also read on the ABC radio network and discussed in magazines and papers around
the country. The book version sold millions. “Hersey was one of the very first to make us
confront the ethical dimensions of how we won the war and what keeping the peace might
really be like,” said Columbia University journalism professor Andie Tucher.
• The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard (1957). This sensationalistic shot at admen in
the business-friendly Eisenhower era was a cultural milestone, marking a new interest in
questioning authority.
254
• 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