By MARK THWAITE [Ready Steady Book] – I was very kindly asked to chair a seminar, organised by Verso, with André Schiffrin on the future of the book trade. Schiffrin was recently described by The Bookseller as the “legendary Pantheon publisher of old and independent firebrand of now with the not-for-profit house The New Press.” He is a publishing hero to many, myself very much included, having put luminaries such as Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky, Juliet Mitchell, R.D. Laing, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P.Thompson into print in the States. The excuse for the occasion was the publication of Schiffrin’s latest book, Words & Money, a follow-up of sorts, a decade on, to his excellent The Business of Books.

The format of the session was pretty typical: Schiffrin gave a synopsis of his argument, then I interviewed him (a first for me, hugely enjoyable and a massive privilege) and then I took questions from the floor. Schiffrin’s argument is essentially that “big-business conglomerate publishing in its current form is doomed… Investors are demanding as much as 15% returns on a business which, Schiffrin argues, can only offer 3 or 4%.” Widening-out from this is a cultural argument, of course: why is a business seen to be a failing concern if it is profitable, but just not massively so? This is a particular concern because, whilst publishing serious books can be profitable, it isn’t often hugely so. This kind of publishing, runs the argument, is already always anti-intellectual.

An excellent comment [from Robert McCrum in The Observer] takes up the argument, and brings our attention to its limitations (essentially, Schiffrin hasn’t really got to grips with the Internet):

For books, the first decade of the 21st century has seen one of the great cultural earthquakes. Go back 10 years, or perhaps 20, and the landscape is barely recognisable. No Amazon; no Google and no ebook. Wherever you look: writers, agents, publishers and booksellers transacting literary business like their great-grandparents. Since the millennium, the relationship between words and money has undergone almost total inversion. On the demand side, publishers recklessly drove up profit margins from a comfortable 3% to a suicidal 15%. As for supply, a privileged minority of “content providers” (AKA authors) reached audiences and made fortunes that started at six or seven figures. This takeover sometimes had the air of a gold rush, but it has not been a bonanza for everyone. At the end of the second world war there were more than 300 bookshops in New York City. Today there are fewer than 30.

Continued at Ready Steady Book | More Chronicle & Notices.