The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford Business Books)


Product Description
Is publishing a cultural or commercial endeavor? Drawing on extensive data sets and applying the theoretical tools of both sociology and economics, The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century is the definitive social and economic analysis of the current state and future trends of the industry. This book examines the substantive issues, challenges, and problems confronting the diverse, and in many ways fragile, book publishing industry in the United States. The authors specifically emphasize the consumer, college textbook, and scholarly publishing components of the U.S. book publishing industry as they analyze the cultural and economic structure of the book publishing industry in the twenty-first century.
The book begins by charting the changes in the book publishing industry between 1945 and 2005, then goes on to examine industry specifics, strategies being employed for domestic and global competitiveness, and the economics of publishing and the impact of technology. Through in-person interviews and a broad sampling of people from every sector of the industry it examine the demographic trends in play. The temperature of the current publishing culture is presented in a chapter titled "I'm Glad I'm Not An Author . . ." The book ends by looking forward, highlighting the trends likely to impact the growth of the industry in the future.
Throughout the book, the tables provided track the industry from 1945 until 2005, and give the reader a snapshot of the data year-by-year, and category by category: bestsellers, average book prices, U.S. bookstore sales, average sales by category, and the demographic breakdown of readers. It also provides forecasts for the coming years, both units and revenues, for 2005-2009. The thoughtful analysis presented in this book will be valuable to leaders in publishing as well as the scholars and analysts who study this industry.
The book begins by charting the changes in the book publishing industry between 1945 and 2005, then goes on to examine industry specifics, strategies being employed for domestic and global competitiveness, and the economics of publishing and the impact of technology. Through in-person interviews and a broad sampling of people from every sector of the industry it examine the demographic trends in play. The temperature of the current publishing culture is presented in a chapter titled "I'm Glad I'm Not An Author . . ." The book ends by looking forward, highlighting the trends likely to impact the growth of the industry in the future.
Throughout the book, the tables provided track the industry from 1945 until 2005, and give the reader a snapshot of the data year-by-year, and category by category: bestsellers, average book prices, U.S. bookstore sales, average sales by category, and the demographic breakdown of readers. It also provides forecasts for the coming years, both units and revenues, for 2005-2009. The thoughtful analysis presented in this book will be valuable to leaders in publishing as well as the scholars and analysts who study this industry.
The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford Business Books) Review
This book purports to answer the question, 'Is publishing a cultural or commercial endeavor.' The answer, of course, is a simple, 'Yes.' To the large corporation owning a publishing company the answer is 'mostly commercial.' To a unversity press (this book is published by Stanford University Press), the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. This book, for instance, is not likely to make the best seller charts. To a church owned press, or a self-published book the answer is probably 'mostly cultural.'This book concentrates mostly on the larger companies, the publishers whose names we all know. There isn't much from the World War II soldier that has just decided to publish his memoirs, or the church that has put it's significant books on the web for anyone to read.
The general feeling about the industry is not good. The percentage of readers in the country has gone down. The small book stores are having to find niches where Barnes & Noble and WalMart don't compete. And all of this is true.
Then there's Harry Potter, where even the announcement of the title of the next book gets announced on the evening network TV news. And there were 172,000 new books published in the US in 2005; 375,000 published in the English Speaking World. New technologies makes small print runs more profitable. Internet marketing is as of yet, an unknown. As this book says in it's final sentence, 'The game changed in the summer of 1995 when Jeff Bezos opened Amazon.com; we just do not know whether the game changed for better or worse.
This book is one view of the book publishing industry in America. Anyone with a position of responsibility in the business will ignore it at their peril.
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