MASS101 Chapter 4.pdf

LEARNING OBJECTIVES W hen John Green first started publishing, the young adult best sellers were science fiction and fantasy dystopias with the fate of the world on the line. Green’s novels are different. They are more personal; typically involve a “bright, troubled teenager”; and feature a lead f...

LEARNING OBJECTIVES W hen John Green first started publishing, the young adult best sellers were science fiction and fantasy dystopias with the fate of the world on the line. Green’s novels are different. They are more personal; typically involve a “bright, troubled teenager”; and feature a lead female character who could be described as a “manic pixie dream girl.”1 The author was not an immediate success. Green’s first book, 2005’s Looking for Alaska, was a somewhat autobiographical novel that was not a best seller, but it did win the Printz Award, a major prize for young adult fiction. This was followed by several more titles that helped grow a group of committed fans. But in January 2012, Green became a literary star, with the publication of his story of a romance between two teen cancer patients called The Fault in Our Stars. The book was a huge success, spending 124 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list and 43 weeks as the number-one young adult book. (To be fair, children’s and young adult best-seller lists tend to be more stable than those featuring books for adults.) The book was also at the top of the Amazon best-seller list, based on preorders, six months before it was released, though Green helped make that happen by promising in advance to personally autograph all 150,000 copies of the title’s first printing.2 The book ultimately sold more than 23 million copies and was the basis for a hit movie that made more than $307 million on a production budget of only $12 million.3 Since then, a high school drama teacher and four of his students adapted the book into a stage play with Green’s permission that was produced in 2019.4 If that’s not enough, Elon Musk’s SpaceX reusable rocket company has named its satellitebased broadband internet project “Starlink” in honor of The Fault in Our Stars.5 In addition to having best-selling novels and hit movies, Green is well known for the YouTube videos he makes with his brother Hank. Starting in 2006, he and his brother decided to spend a year communicating with each other exclusively through public videos on YouTube at a point where the video-sharing service was only entering its second year. Their videos posted as Vlogbrothers have been tremendously popular.6 Fourteen years after starting the project, the Green brothers are doing live recordings of their podcasts to raise money to help reduce child and maternal mortality in Sierra Leone.7 After studying this chapter, you will be able to 1 Describe three of the earliest forms of writing that predated the invention of the book 2 Identify two massive cultural changes that took place after the inventions of the type mold and printing press 3 Explain the basic functions of each of the three major players in the book publishing and distribution business 4 Describe the reasons why tension exists between “popular” books and “great” books 5 Describe how censoring attempts of challenged books are handled in the United States compared to how they are handled in other countries, such as Iran 6 Describe the advantages and disadvantages of e-books compared with traditional paper books Despite all his success, Green says he still gets nervous working on each new book. “I remember thinking when I was writing my first book, ‘The great thing if I get the opportunity to do this again will be that I will then know how to write a book.’ Then when it came time to write my second book, I was like, ‘I have no idea how to write a book,’ and each time that was the case.”8 While he had previously turned out books on a roughly annual schedule, it took nearly six years for him to complete Turtles All the Way Down, his follow-up to Fault. Aza Holmes, the heroine of Turtles, is a typical Green heroine, the “bright, troubled” teen, who also suffers from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a characteristic she shares with her creator. “Having OCD is something that is an ongoing part of my life and I assume will probably be part of my life for the rest of it.”9 Green has suffered from anxiety disorder and OCD for as long as he can remember. Following the success of The Fault in Our Stars, he had a particularly tough time with his illness. “I couldn’t escape the spiral of my thoughts, and I felt like they were coming from the outside,” Green told the New York Times.10 During his bout of serious mental illness, Green started and abandoned several writing projects, but following his recovery in 2015, he dug into writing and revising Turtles as a way of dealing with what he had Chapter 4 • BOOKS: THE BIRTH OF THE MASS MEDIA 75 experienced. “Coming out of that, it was difficult to write about anything else. The topic demanded itself.”11 “I want to talk about it, and not feel any embarrassment or shame because I think it’s important for people to hear from adults who have good fulfilling lives and manage chronic mental illness as part of those good fulfilling lives.” But Green also wants to make sure he doesn’t romanticize his illness or claim it as a source of his creativity. “For me, it’s a way out of myself, to not feel stuck inside myself. I want to be super careful not to claim there’s some huge benefit to this brain problem that I have.”12 Green is best known for the insight that he brings of the teenage mind. He told New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot, “I love the intensity teen-agers bring not just to first love but also to the first time you’re grappling with grief . . . , the first time you’re taking on why people suffer and whether there’s meaning in life. . . . Teen-agers feel that what you conclude about those questions is going to matter. And they’re dead right.”13 Green is not without criticism for how he relates to teens and for relying too heavily on his well-known catchphrases, Stay up to date on the latest in media by visiting the author’s blog at ralphehanson.com 76 such as “don’t forget to be awesome,” frequently abbreviated to “DFTBA.” In 2015, a teenage girl accused him online of being a “creep who panders to teenage girls so he can amass some weird cult-like following.”14 Despite Green’s occasional setbacks from criticism and his mental illness, Green has managed to create a wildly successful career in publishing (and on social media, which we will talk about later on). “[OCD] is not a mountain that you climb or a hurdle that you jump, it’s something that you live with in an ongoing way,” Green said. “People want that narrative of illness being in the past tense. But a lot of the time it isn’t.”15 Books are a source of entertainment, culture, and ideas for society and have given rise to more lasting controversies than almost any other medium. Book publishing is also a major business that is supported by the people who buy books. In this chapter, we look at how books developed from a hand-copied medium for elites into a popular medium consumed by millions, how society was revolutionized by the development of printing, how the publishing business operates, the conflict between literary and popular writing, and efforts to censor writers. Books and Mass Communication Books, consisting of words printed on paper, were the original medium of mass communication (although the Roman Catholic Church had previously achieved a degree of mass communication through sermons, as discussed in Chapter 1). Books allowed ideas to spread, encouraged the standardization of language and spelling, and created mass culture. Books and other printed materials also helped bring about such major social changes as the Protestant Reformation. However, before there could be books, there had to be writing. Writing is thought to have originated around 3500 BC in the Middle East, in either Egypt or Mesopotamia. This means that written language is around 5,500 years old; spoken language, in comparison, is thought to be at least 40,000 years old. The great advantage offered by writing was that information could be stored. No longer did people have to memorize enormous amounts of information to maintain it. Stories could be written down and preserved for generations. However, early writing was not yet a form of mass communication. Reading and writing were elite skills held by people called scribes; their rare abilities gave them power within religious institutions and governments (which were often the same).16 The earliest form of writing was the pictograph, which consisted of pictures of objects painted on rock walls. The next major development was the ideograph—an abstract symbol that stands for an object or an idea. An ideograph is more formalized than a pictograph, with one symbol for each object or idea. Languages such as Chinese, Korean, and Japanese still make use of ideographs. The major challenge created by having one symbol for each word is that people must learn thousands of individual symbols. For example, literary Chinese has fifty thousand or more symbols, and everyday written Chinese has between five thousand and eight thousand symbols. PART II • LEGACY MEDIA Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC-BY-2.5, https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/. Jim Unterschultz/ Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC-BY 2.0, https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/. pp This Proto-Elamite tablet is one of the earliest forms of writing. pp These Newspaper Rock petroglyphs are among the earliest forms of writing. World History Archive/Alamy Stock Photo Ideographs are often used as international symbols, for example street signs use ideographs that are recognizable throughout the world, think of the red hexagon—it means STOP. Ideographs are useful in areas where many languages are spoken and helpful to travelers looking for bathrooms, hospitals, and train stations. Imagine a traveler in Europe looking for a place to take a bath. With an ideograph, a single symbol can stand for bain in French, bad in Danish, or baño in Spanish. Most Americans typically have seen or heard of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the millennia old style of writing with symbols, but outside of that probably have never read a book written with ideographs. Chinese writing uses ideographs, but those symbols are relatively abstract and a long way from being recognizable drawings of something more than a symbol for an idea. Surprisingly though, it’s likely that you’ve used ideographs lately to send a text message, add content to an uploaded photo, or even in an email message. By using the emoji keyboard on your computer or mobile device, a smiling face, a smiling pile of poop, a smiling devil, a smiling cat, an Edvard Munch screaming face—you get the idea—are all available (plus hundreds more) for your messaging needs. It is tempting to think that these emojis, or small icons that stand for emotions or ideas, carry universal social meanings; however the truth is that people often do not agree on what they mean. For example, consider this one: While officially this is praying hands (available in any number of skin colors), some people see it portraying a reciprocal high five. A study by researchers at the University of Minnesota’s GroupLens lab found that people looking at the same emoji can come up with dramatically different interpretations of it. Further complicating things is that each social media platform has its own versions of emojis. Consider the “grinning face with smiling eyes” icon. The icon is quite different depending on whether you are looking at it on an Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, or LG platform.17 In 2018, the Unicode Consortium (which establishes the standards for the character sets on computers and mobile devices) published a list of new emojis to include in upcoming smartphone software updates, including redheads in the assortment of skin tone and hair color smiley emojis. There is also a wide range of skin tones to go with natural African American hair—not to mention a lacrosse stick, a strand of DNA, and a skateboard.18 At some point after 2000 BC people began using phonography, a system of writing in which symbols stand for spoken sounds rather than for objects or ideas in their writing. The use of phonographs pre-dates the more familiar concept of an alphabet, developed between 1700 BC and 1500 BC, in which letters represent individual sounds. Sound-based alphabet writing, with only a few dozen symbols, was relatively easy to learn compared to the earlier systems of ideographs. Being a scribe thus became less of an elite position. Among the earliest surviving written works are the Greek poet Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.19 pp The Egyptians developed papyrus, an early form of paper made from the papyrus reed, around 3100 BC. These hieroglyphics are from a papyrus scroll of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Chapter 4 • BOOKS: THE BIRTH OF THE MASS MEDIA 77 Chesnot / Contributor / Getty Images Once people had a way to record ideas in writing, they needed something to write on. The earliest documents were written on cave walls, rocks, and clay tablets, but these media had limited usefulness. Imagine taking notes on slabs of wet clay that had to be taken back to your dorm room to dry. Something light, portable, and relatively inexpensive was needed. Papyrus, a primitive form of paper made from the papyrus reed, was developed by the Egyptians around 3100 BC. Papyrus was placed on twenty- to thirty-foot-long rolls known as scrolls. Although it was more useful and portable than stone or clay tablets, papyrus tended to crumble or be eaten by bugs. Parchment, which was made from the skin of goats or sheep, eventually replaced papyrus because it was much less fragile. Paper, made from cotton rags or wood pulp, was invented by the Chinese between 240 BC and 105 BC.20 Knowledge of papermaking was brought from China to Baghdad by the Muslims in the late 700s, and then to Europe by way of Spain in the mid-eleventh century. Papermaking spread throughout Europe during the 1300s, but it did not replace parchment until printing became common in the 1500s. pp These stylized smiley faces and images are examples of emojis, small digital icons used in electronic communication to express feelings. Every year, the Unicode Consortium proposes new emojis. A Demand for Books Throughout the early medieval period (AD 400–800), most books in Europe were religious texts hand-copied by monks in the scriptoria, or copying rooms, of monasteries. Because of the difficulty of preparing parchment, monks sometimes scraped the writing off old parchments to create new books. This led to the loss of many Greek and Latin texts. Books that had lasted hundreds of years and survived the fall of Rome were lost simply because they were erased! With the rise of literacy in the thirteenth century, the demand for books increased. It soon exceeded the output of the monks, and the production of books shifted to licensed publishers, or stationers. Books were still copied by hand one at a time from a supposedly perfect original (or exemplar). One title from this era was Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which is still in print today. By the fourteenth century, books were becoming relatively common. Religious texts known as illuminated manuscripts were embellished with pictures and elaborately decorated calligraphy, in part to help transmit the message to nonliterate audiences.21 The Development of the Printing Press. Printing was invented in China toward the end of the second century. Images were carved into blocks of wood, which were inked and placed on sheets of paper, thereby reproducing the image. However, woodcuts saw limited usage because materials could not be reproduced rapidly. Between 1050 and 1200, both the Chinese and the Koreans developed the idea of movable type, but with thousands of separate ideographs, printing was not practical. Johannes Gutenberg (1394–1468), a metalworker living in Mainz, Germany, in the mid1400s, became the first European to develop movable type. Although he developed the first practical printing press (using a modified winepress), Gutenberg’s most significant invention was the type mold, which enabled printers to make multiple, identical copies of a single letter without hand-carving each. The most famous of Gutenberg’s printed books was his edition of the Bible published in 1455. Approximately 120 copies of this Bible were printed, of which 46 are known to survive. In the 78 PART II • LEGACY MEDIA Library of Congress 1980s, one of Gutenberg’s Bibles sold for $5.39 million at Christie’s auction house.22 Typesetting was a difficult task in Gutenberg’s day. The printer selected a type case containing all the characters of a typeface in a particular size and style known as a font—from a font or fountain of type. (Today the word font has become largely synonymous with typeface and is no longer restricted to mean a size and style—for example, bold or italic.) The printer then took from the case the letters needed to spell the words in a line of type and placed them on a type stick, which looked something like the rack used to hold letters in a Scrabble game. Once an entire line had been set, the printer placed it in a printer’s frame, which held the type down. Italics were invented in 1501 by the Italian printer Aldus Manutius (c. 1450–1515), from whom the early desktop publishing firm Aldus took its name. By the 1600s, printers could purchase mass-produced type rather than making their own type molds. Many popular typefaces originated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and are named after the printers who devised them: Claude Garamond, William Caslon, John Baskerville, and Giambattista Bodoni. A quick check of a computer’s font menu will show how many of them are still in use.23 pp German metalworker Johannes Gutenberg (right), depicted here, developed the type mold and printing press that led to the first mass-produced books. Books and Mass Culture Gutenberg’s development of the type mold and printing press signaled the invention of mass communication and some major cultural changes. During this time, culture was rapidly changing from the concept of beliefs, traditions, and ways of life in small communities to a phenomenon that, by reaching a mass audience, had a regional, national, or even international effect on large populations. The invention of movable type brought a major cultural change: the printing of standardized books. With the invention of the printing press, text could be stored in multiple “perfect” copies. No longer could copyists insert mistakes when they reproduced a book. Printing allowed students to have identical copies of books to study. The printing press also made books available in greater numbers and at lower cost. Although printing did not make books inexpensive, it did make them affordable to people besides priests and the wealthy, especially due to the growth of libraries. The printing press also made new types of books available, particularly those written in a country’s common language, such as German, instead of Latin, which was spoken only by the highly educated. The second major cultural change happened when English printer William Caxton (c. 1422–1491) helped to establish the rules for English: standardizing word usage, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. He accomplished much of this simply by publishing books in English rather than in the more scholarly Latin.24 The standardization of the English language came about gradually, though. For example, in his journals written in the early 1800s, explorer William Clark notes that he and Meriwether Lewis set out “under a jentle brease.”25 It’s not so much that Clark didn’t know how to spell these words; at the time, there was still no single “correct” spelling. What was necessary for standardizing of language was putting together a definitive English dictionary. Work on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) began in 1857 with the goal of finding the origin of every word in the English language. When the authors started the project, they thought it might take ten years. Instead, the first edition, all ten volumes of it, was not completed until April 1928. Today the OED has been through two editions and several supplements. In the 1990s, work began on an electronic version of the dictionary. In June 2018, the editors completed their most Chapter 4 • BOOKS: THE BIRTH OF THE MASS MEDIA 79 recent updating of the dictionary and started over again with the letter A.26 Each month, contributors to the OED submit more than eighteen thousand new words to be considered for inclusion. The January 2020 update included several words and new definitions from a range of cultures within the American melting pot:27 • Bodega—“U.S. regional (New York City) A small local shop, usually with extended opening hours, where customers can buy a limited range of household goods and groceries; a convenience store.” The word’s current usage comes from Puerto-Rican owned shops in New York. Many Americans may get their first exposure to the term through the movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit Broadway show In The Heights that tells the story of a Dominican Republic immigrant in Brooklyn Heights, New York, who owns a bodega. • Jewish penicillin—“n. colloquial (a humorous name for) chicken soup, strongly associated with Jewish culture, and popularly considered as a remedy for all ailments or valued for its supposed restorative properties.” • Taxi wallah—“n. originally and chiefly Indian English a taxi driver.” While the use of the term to describe a taxi driver dates back to the 1920s, using the term “wallah” to describe someone who carries things or does a job dates back to 1776. Spreading Ideas Through Publishing Don Arnold / Contributor / Getty Images By far the most important effect of the printing press was that it allowed ideas—such as those of the Protestant Reformation—to spread easily beyond the communities where they originated. Although the printing press did not cause the Protestant Reformation, it certainly helped it take root. Martin Luther, the German monk who founded the Lutheran Church, clearly understood how the printing press could be used to spread his ideas throughout Europe. In 1522, Luther translated the New Testament of the Bible into German so that ordinary people might be able to read it. The first printing press in the New World was set up by the Spanish in Mexico City in 1539; by 1560, the press had issued more than thirty-seven titles. This was a full century before the British in the Massachusetts Bay Colony would start printing. Unfortunately, none of the books from the Spanish press survive today.28 Printing in North America began in 1640 with the publication of The Whole Booke of Psalmes, known familiarly as the Bay Psalm Book. Put together by Puritans who were unhappy with existing translations of the psalms, the first edition sold 1,700 copies, a spectacular accomplishment when one considers that only 3,500 families lived in New England at the time. (Book historian James D. Hart suggests that some of these copies were exported back to England.29) During the next 125 years, the Bay Psalm Book went through at least fifty-one editions in the colonies and Europe. (You can read more about how the Bay Psalm Book played a role in the establishment of the media business in the New World in Chapter 3.) The advent of the printing press and the publication of books in the language of everyday life helped doom Latin as a spoken language and put literacy—and the ability to interpret religious pp Many Americans may get their first exposure to the term bodega through the movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit Broadway show In The Heights that tells the story of a Dominican Republic immigrant in Brooklyn Heights, New York, who owns a bodega. 80 PART II • LEGACY MEDIA texts—within the reach of common people for the first time in history. The creation of a literate mass society also helped spread scientific ideas, such as Copernicus’s claim that Earth was not the center of the universe. Books made it possible for people to learn individually, thus allowing new ideas to break into an otherwise closed community. This is also why every government since Gutenberg’s time has wanted at least some control over the mass media.30 So, with the advent of mass media barely begun, we see the first examples of Secret 1—The media are essential components of our lives, and Secret 4—Nothing is new: Everything that happened in the past will happen again. What did people in the American colonies read? Among the best-known authors was Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanack sold nearly ten thousand copies per year, far more to date than any other books at the time in North America.31 Nonreligious books that sold well in New England included those on agriculture and animal husbandry, science, surveying, and the military. But not everything was of serious interest. In the 1680s, Boston’s leading bookseller attempted to order two copies of the book The London Jilt, or, the Politick Whore; shewing all the artifices and stratagems which the Ladies of Pleasure make use of, for the intriguing and decoying of men; interwoven with several pleasant stories of the Misses’ ingenious performances, a title not that different from what might be ordered today.32 Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, published in 1740, was the first English novel. It was a book for the middle class, with characters and situations that ordinary people could identify with. Franklin published a colonial edition of the novel in 1744, but it would be forty-five years until the first American novel was published. The Development of Large-Scale, Mass-Produced Books The industrial prosperity of the mid-1800s spurred the growth of cities and the emergence of the middle class. During this time, the number of people who attended public schools grew as well. Education up to the high school level, although still not universal, was becoming common.33 Mass culture in the United States expanded throughout the nineteenth century, disseminating widely through penny press newspapers, magazines, Sunday School tracts, and inexpensively produced books. Serial novels, which were published in installments, were popular in the 1830s and 1840s. Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers as a serial novel. Serial publication made each section of the book less expensive than a whole book, which appealed to readers, and brought in a steady flow of income, which appealed to publishers.34 (Serial novels got a boost again in the 1990s when Stephen King published his novel The Green Mile in paperback serial form.) The first paperbacks, the so-called dime novels (which, despite their name, often sold for as little as a nickel), were heroic action stories, popularized by authors such as Bret Harte, and they generally celebrated democratic ideals. The Civil War was a big time for sales of dime novels, with copies being shipped to Union soldiers as a morale booster. The 1800s saw massive changes on the business side of publishing, too. Hand-powered flatbed presses could print no more than 350 pages a day, but the new steam-powered rotary press (invented in 1814) could print as many as sixteen thousand sections (not just pages) in the same amount of time. Through all this, type still had to be set by hand, much as it was in Gutenberg’s day. But 1885 saw the introduction of the Mergenthaler Linotype typesetting machine, which let a compositor type at a keyboard rather than pick each letter out by hand, thus speeding up the printing process once again. The Linotype was the standard for typesetting until the age of computer composition. The nineteenth century thus brought the first real mass media that could be recognized today, with books, newspapers, and magazines being printed and distributed in forms that anyone could afford. With the growth of democracy and mass-produced reading materials came the growth of mass literacy. Chapter 4 • BOOKS: THE BIRTH OF THE MASS MEDIA 81 Buying and Selling Books In the twentieth century, the writing and selling of books became big business, with a huge variety of books being published. The numbers have continued to grow in the early twenty-first century. In 1995, 1.2 million separate books were available, and by 2005, Amazon.com claimed to have more than 3.7 million titles available.35 But getting a reliable number from Amazon is problematic at best. The company almost never discusses the specific number of items sold. Derek Haines, writing for the Just Publishing Advice blog in April 2018, tried to do a search on Amazon to come up with a number and estimated that there were 3.4 million Kindle e-books on the market and 48.5 million paper titles.36 (We’ll talk more about Amazon’s competitors in just a minute.) Getting all those books from the authors’ computers or typewriters into the hands of readers is what the publishing business is all about. It involves three major players: 1. Publishers—Companies that buy manuscripts and develop them into books 2. Writers—People (authors) who write the books 3. Booksellers—Companies that take the book from the publisher to the book-buying public Library of Congress pp Kit Carson on the WarPath, published by Munro’s Ten Cent Novels, was one of the many dime novels read by the newly literate public in the nineteenth century. 82 Publishers Publishers are the companies that buy manuscripts from authors and turn them into books. Although there are thousands of publishers worldwide, a small number of companies publish most of all books sold today. This proportion has grown substantially since the 1920s, when the twenty largest publishers were responsible for only 50 percent of all books published.37 This transformation has taken place because regional publishers are buying up small independent publishing houses, and international conglomerates are buying up major national publishing companies. As a result, the range of ownership of the publishing business is increasingly limited, and fewer people are making more of the decisions that determine what people will be able to read.38 You can get a visual representation of this consolidation with a chart that shows what the five biggest U.S. trade book publishers own: https://almossawi.com/big-five-publishers/. The process of consolidation in the publishing industry can be seen in the story of American publisher Random House. Random House was founded in 1925. After years of growth, in 1960 the company acquired another major American publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf. In 1965, media conglomerate RCA bought Random House, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Random House continued to grow, buying up a host of publishers. In 1998, German media giant Bertelsmann bought Random House and combined it with its existing publishing holdings, and in 2013, the group added trade publisher Penguin to the mix.39 Penguin Random House has continued to grow by acquiring smaller publishers. In 2009, it acquired Ten Speed Press, an independent alternative publisher of titles such as What Color Is Your Parachute? and the Moosewood Cookbook. This acquisition brings to mind another, when News Corporation, through its HarperCollins division, bought out literary publisher Ecco Press. Daniel Halpern, founder of the press, told the Washington Post, PART II • LEGACY MEDIA People will say, “There goes another independent press, isn’t it too bad.” The short answer is, “Yes, it’s too bad.” But that’s the reality. Let’s not be sentimental about this stuff. This is not a time when the small press can survive.40 The World’s Top Publishers. The publishing business is a global industry, with owners in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, and the Netherlands. These companies publish a variety of books, ranging from best-selling fiction to textbooks to technical references. Table 4.1 reports the world’s top publishers of trade books—the commercial, mass market fiction and non-fiction books targeted at general audiences. p TABLE 4.1 Big Five Trade Publishers Top Five Trade Publishers Revenue Ownership 1. Penguin Random House Sells 800 million copies of print, audio, and e-books annually $4.4 billion Co-owned by publishing giants Pearson PLC and Bertelsmann 2. Hachette Livre Publishes more separate titles than Penguin Random House $2.7 billion Lagardère Group, a media conglomerate headquartered in France 3. HarperCollins Has more than 120 separate imprints $1.5 billion News Corp. 4. Macmillan Publishers Original publisher for Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, and W.B. Yeats $1.4 billion Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, a family owned German publisher 5. Simon & Schuster Original publisher for Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald $830 million ViacomCBS Source: Adapted from “The Largest Book Publishers in 2020,” Reedsy Blog, https://blog.reedsy.com/largest-book-publishers/ University and Small Presses. Not all publishing is done by large corporations; a substantial number of university and small presses issue a limited number of books and may not be in the business for profit. Among their titles are books that serve a limited geographic or subject area or an academic discipline—mostly scholarly books or textbooks. An example of a small press is Interweave, which publishes books about knitting, weaving, and crafting. But academic presses occasionally print breakout books. The late Norman Maclean, an English professor at the University of Chicago, had his memoir about growing up in Montana and fly-fishing published by the University of Chicago Press. The book, A River Runs Through It, was an enormous success (and was made into a movie directed by Robert Redford and starring Brad Pitt).41 Small Publishers. Not all successful books come from big publishers, and not all big books are conventional novels or biographies. Newcomer independent publisher Cottage Door Press has had big success since it was founded in 2014 by publishing a wide range of books targeted at children. In 2014, the company had nine employees and had published no books. By 2018, Cottage Door Press had reached twenty-four employees and was releasing 158 titles that year. Those books also might not match your stereotypes of what a book should look like. These include padded board books, lift-a-flap books, touch-and-feel books, and books that make sounds. Marketing manager Melissa Tigges told Publishers Weekly, “We believe in educating and entertaining both children and their grown-ups. We choose artwork and language that interests, informs, and stretches their growing minds.”42 Similar to the bigger publishers, Cottage Door has started acquiring titles from other struggling publishers that are going out of business.43 The Government Publishing Office. Surprisingly, the federal government is one of the nation’s biggest publishers. The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) has been producing government documents and books in a variety of forms since it was founded back in 1861. Chapter 4 • BOOKS: THE BIRTH OF THE MASS MEDIA 83 BSIP/Universal Images Group Editorial/Getty Images pp Small press publisher Cottage Door Press has found a market niche publishing a range of books for small children, including board books for infants. 84 While most of its titles are dry government reports, the GPO has published occasional best sellers, including the 9/11 Commission Report, the Warren Commission’s report on the Kennedy assassination, and the so-called Pentagon Papers (discussed in Chapters 2 and 13). To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Warren Commission report, the GPO published a digital edition, including the 888-page report along with the twenty-six volumes covering the hearings.44 Writers The next group of players in the publishing business is composed of the people who write the books—the authors. Most media attention goes to blockbuster writers and authors, such as Margaret Atwood and, as mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, John Green, or literary authors, such as Richard Russo and Alice Munro; less is written about the vast majority of authors who write without multimillion-dollar contracts, book tours, or television commercials during The View. But what is the publishing experience like for an ordinary author? Consider the story of a typical book, a science fiction romance titled Moon of Desire. Pam Hanson (a first-time author and the wife of this book’s author) and her mother, Barbara Andrews (who authored several romance novels in the 1980s), wrote a proposal for the novel and a sample chapter and submitted them to a publisher in March (see Figure 4.1). Then they waited. In June, the publisher agreed to acquire the manuscript. The authors received a contract for the book, which called for the manuscript to be delivered by December 1. With the contract signed, the authors were paid the first half of their advance. This did not mean, however, that they got rich. Advances for first novels at the time were typically between $1,000 and $5,000, and this advance was typical. Then came the work of writing the book—ninety thousand words, or about 360 typed, double-spaced pages. The mother and daughter traded drafts back and forth between their computers. A week before the deadline, they sent the finished book to their editor at the publishing company. If the authors had missed their deadline, the publisher would have had the right to reject the book and cancel the contract. A few weeks later, in early January, the editor sent revisions to the authors. Manuscript revisions may consist of anything from trivial changes in punctuation or grammar to major changes in characterization or plot. In this case, the only major change was that the mutant cannibals menacing the heroine in one chapter had to be toned down a bit. Once the manuscript was accepted, the authors received the second half of the advance. But keep in mind that advances are against royalties (a percentage of the selling price of each book paid to the author), meaning that the advance payments will be deducted from the author’s royalty payments. After a manuscript has been accepted and revised, the book goes into production. An artist creates a cover illustration based on information from an “art fact sheet” that suggests possible scenes for the cover and describes what the hero and heroine look like. The Moon of Desire cover featured the hero and heroine on a raft floating on a flaming sea. A book designer lays out the rest of the book, deciding what the pages will look like, what typeface will be used, and how big the book will be. (These can be serious considerations. Stephen King was required to cut 150,000 words, nearly half its length, from the original edition of The Stand to make it more marketable.45) Once the book is set in type, a copy of the ready-to-print pages—known as proofs—is sent to the authors. Authors are supposed to correct only blatant errors in proofs, although PART II • LEGACY MEDIA p FIGURE 4.1 Ten Steps in the Book Publishing Process 2 1 Authors write proposal and sample chapters. Submit to publisher. 3 Publisher signs book. Authors paid first half of advance. Authors write book. 4 Book delivered to publisher. Time from proposal to bookstore: twenty months 10 Authors get first royalties. Authors revise manuscript. Book is accepted; authors paid second half of advance. 5 Book can be purchased in bookstores. 9 Book enters production. Cover is designed. Book is printed and distributed to bookstores. 8 Authors read and correct proofs. 6 7 Source: iStockphoto.com/penfold, iStockphoto.com/julichka, iStockphoto.com/5455586, iStockphoto.com/frender, iStockphoto.com/LonelySnailDesign, iStockphoto.com/milosluz, iStockphoto.com, iStockphoto.com/Warchi, iStockphoto.com/4x6, iStockphoto.com/tashka2000 some have been known to start rewriting the book at this point. As is usual in popular fiction, Hanson and Andrews had about a week to read the proofs of their book and send them back to the publisher; after the corrections were made, the proofs were sent to a printer to produce the finished book. At this point, it is time to start marketing the book. This may include placing advertisements in newspapers, in fan magazines, or even on television and scheduling a book tour and media appearances. But Andrews and Hanson, like most first-time novelists, had to make do with virtually no marketing support. Twenty months after the original proposal was submitted, the book was available in bookstores. Book publishing can be lucrative for some, but most writers make very little money. Nicholas Sparks’s multimillion-dollar advances are exciting but not typical. The median annual wage for writers and authors was $62,170 in May 2018.46 Hanson and Andrews, who wrote their book under a single pseudonym, Pam Rock, saw their first royalties beyond the initial advance more than two and a half years after the initial proposal was sent in. Chapter 4 • BOOKS: THE BIRTH OF THE MASS MEDIA 85 Booksellers The Photo Works / Alamy Stock Photo The last major players in the book business are the book wholesalers and retailers—the companies that take the book from the publisher to the book-buying public. The Ingram Book Company, the nation’s largest book wholesaler, distributes more than fourteen million book titles to more than thirty-nine thousand retail, library, and educational outlets. Essentially, Ingram and its smaller competitors are the sources from which bookstores buy their books.47 The buyers at Ingram are among the most important in the book business; they determine how many copies of a book will be stocked in the company’s warehouses. This can, in turn, determine the size of a book’s press run. Ingram’s buyers are respected not only by bookstore owners but also by scholarly presses.48 Among booksellers, Barnes & Noble has been the one legacy chain still standing, but it was bought in 2019 by Elliott Advisors private equity fund for $683 million. What that will mean for the remaining brick-and-mortar bookstore chain is unclear.49 As of 2018, the company’s revenue totaled $3.7 billion for the year, and it operated 630 superstores. Through its education division, it operated 724 college bookstores throughout the United States with an annual revenue of $1.9 billion.50 In 2020 during Black History Month the company stepped into a big controversy when it issued a line of classic British novels, such as Frankenstein and Moby Dick, with covers featuring black or brown characters. Only one of the books, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, was written by a person of color. Critics accused Barnes & Noble of engaging in “literary blackface.” Writing in an editorial, the Guardian newspaper pointed out, “[I]f Barnes & Noble really wanted to honor black history, the company could promote books by black authors.” While there can be little question that online bookseller Amazon has killed off the chain book superstores, recent years have seen independent bookstores resurging in popularity. The American Booksellers Association reports that between the mid-1990s and 2009, the number of independent bookstores dropped by about 40 percent. But between 2009 and 2015, something amazing happened—the number of indie bookstores grew by 35 percent, going from 1,651 to 2,227. That growth has continued. Dane Neller, owner of New York’s Shakespeare & Co., has opened his third successful bookstore. “Bookstores are back and they’re back in a big way,” he told CBS News. “I’m not giving into hyperbole—it was record-breaking for us.”51 Organizational behavior professor Ryan Raffaelli found three major reasons for the resurgence of independent booksellers: pp Hamilton creator LinManuel Miranda, along with three of his collaborators, purchased the Drama Book Shop to save it when rents in its Times Square location became to expensive for the store to stay open. The new owners plan to find it a more affordable Midtown location. Miranda wrote much of his first musical In The Heights in the basement of the store. • The sense of community they provide. Just as people love their local coffee shops, they like the community connection of a local bookstore. • Successful independent bookstores have a good sense of what their customers are interested in and can make recommendations that go beyond the national best-seller lists. • Local bookstores provide an intellectual hub for their communities with lectures, book signings, and reading groups, to name just a few.52 As an example, when Stephen King did a book tour to promote his novel End of Watch, he was hosted by independent bookstores in twelve cities of varying size across the country.53 If you’re paying attention as you read through the reasons why independent bookstores are finding new life in the past decade, you’ll notice that it’s all about the interaction of customers with the store, with authors, and with each other. In other words, it’s because of Secret 5—All media are social. 86 PART II • LEGACY MEDIA Books and the Long Tail. The internet launched the long-tail segment of the media by allowing a company to produce a catalog that is available to everyone with little marginal cost for each additional viewer. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos started selling books on the internet because the web was the only practical way to offer the variety that he sought: It . . . turns out that you can’t have a big book catalog on paper; it’s totally impractical. There are more than 100,000 new books published every year, and even a superstore can’t carry them all. The biggest superstores have 175,000 titles and there are only about three that big. So that became the idea: let Amazon.com be the first place where you can easily find and buy a million different books.54 And this was the radical notion—instead of offering a selection of books, why not offer every book, all 7.5 million or so English-language books in print? Amazon can keep the most popular books in stock in its warehouses and seamlessly order books from publishers if they are in smaller demand. It can even offer out-of-print books from private stores that partner with Amazon or custom-publish them through arrangements it’s made with publishers. (This is a prime example of Secret 2—There are no mainstream media. Due to long-tail retailers like Amazon, consumers are no longer limited to just the biggest books from the biggest publishers.) The online bookstore began operations in July 1995, and by December 1998, it had served more than 4.5 million customers. Why is it called Amazon? Because it begins with an A and therefore will appear first on alphabetical lists. In 1998, Amazon started selling videos and CDs, and since 1999, it has added toys, clothing, kitchen equipment, and other merchandise. A key feature of Amazon is that it tracks customers’ interests by recording what they’ve already bought on Amazon.com. Each time a buyer enters the site, a personalized home page shows related books that the customer might not have known about otherwise. A shopper looking at the description of the thriller Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews gets a recommendation for Brad Meltzer’s The Escape Artist. Or at a more prosaic level, checking out Personal Finance for Dummies by Eric Tyson will get you a recommendation for How to be a Real Estate Investor by Phil Pustejovsky. Online bookstores are among the most successful businesses in electronic commerce. One reason for their initial success was that in the early days of the commercialized internet, people who owned computers were also likely to read books. Also, well-educated people, who tend to read for pleasure and entertainment, are likely to work in offices where they have internet connections and thus can buy books online. Finding books online can be easier than finding them in a bookstore, especially if the title is obscure. A former Penguin Random House executive notes that online bookstores provide instant gratification.55 Marketing partnerships are an important element of online bookstores. Anyone who wants to can set up an online bookstore on his or her website in partnership with Amazon and receive a small commission for every book sold. In the past, barnesandnoble.com had partnerships with the New York Times and USA Today websites that let readers purchase the books being written about in the papers. Of course, such partnerships raise questions about objectivity: Can a book review be objective when the newspaper that’s reviewing the book is also selling the book?56 The Textbook Business. Textbooks are different from other books in one major respect—the people who select the books are not the same as the end users, the people who must buy and pay for them. Students charge that, because of this disconnect, faculty members do not take price sufficiently into account when picking books for their courses. Estimates on how much students spend per year on textbooks vary widely. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests that students spend an average of $1,250 a year on books and supplies.57 On the other hand, figures from the National Association of College Stores reports that student spending on course materials has dropped on average from $701 per year Chapter 4 • BOOKS: THE BIRTH OF THE MASS MEDIA 87 in 2007–2008 to $415 in 2018–2019.58 Among the reasons for these possible price drops are the growth of book rentals, inclusive access plans, and electronic books.59 The textbook industry is currently going through a big period of change, says John Fallon, CEO of education publishing giant Pearson. In an interview with tech journalist Kara Swisher, Fallon said that the era of the “$300 textbook” is over. Instead, students will be buying access to a host of electronic resources ranging from e-books, to study sites, to mobile phone apps.60 Fallon told Swisher that revenues for the big publishers have been falling steadily, with Pearson’s dropping from $2 billion in 2013 to $1.3 billion for 2019. This change is being driven in large part by the fact that students can rent books from companies like Amazon or Chegg. Under a rental plan, students pay a fee that is between two-thirds and one-half the cost of either a new or used book, then they turn the book back into the bookstore at the end of the semester. In essence, it’s a guaranteed buyback plan.61 A report from Orbis Research suggests that students are also saving money by renting e-textbooks rather than paper books at substantially lower costs.62 The disadvantage of rentals, of course, is that after the semester is over, students no longer have the books to use as a reference. While students like e-textbooks in principle, when forced to choose between a printed book and an e-book, most choose a printed textbook.63 An informal survey of your author’s students showed that while students liked e-books for recreational reading, they much preferred paper editions for the textbooks. They do, however, like the lower prices of e-books. One of the students’ major complaints about textbook costs is having to use one-time purchase access codes. These codes are sold by publishers and can be used for review and other study materials, but they can also be for homework systems required to complete the class. In addition to objecting to the costs, students complain that unlike paper and electronic textbooks, homework accounts cannot be shared.64 A radically different approach a few universities are taking is so-called inclusive access programs where schools license all the assigned books electronically from a major publisher and make them available to students at either a discounted rate or no additional charge. In some cases, the e-books are integrated into the school’s course management system that delivers other class materials. Students are typically signed up for the rental automatically and then have a short period of time when they can opt out from using the book. The advantage for faculty is that all students will have access to their books on the first day of class rather than waiting until sometimes weeks into the semester to get their books.65 McGraw-Hill, Cengage, and Pearson have all found success with these programs. There are also downsides to these inclusive access programs. In many cases, students only have access when they are online. If they want a downloadable version, there is often an extra fee. Another issue is that these contracts strongly push faculty to order their texts from a preferred company rather than from the publisher that has what they consider to be the best book. Nicole Allen, an advocate for research libraries and open access materials, told Inside Higher Ed these programs are “the opposite of inclusive, because it is premised on publishers controlling when, where and for how long students have access to their materials.”66 As this period of transition in textbook publishing progresses, it is possible that the already concentrated ownership of textbook publishers will get even more concentrated. Currently four publishers control more than 80 percent of the higher education marketplace: Pearson, Cengage, Wiley, and McGraw-Hill.67 As of this writing in the spring of 2020, McGraw-Hill Education and Cengage had announced plans to merge but were facing strong opposition from consumer groups, students, and college bookstores. Critics worry that combining two of the top four educational publishers into an even larger company would continue to reduce competition in the marketplace and give the new company more control over prices. The two companies claim the merger will let them be more efficient and lower costs.68 88 PART II • LEGACY MEDIA Books and Culture Library of Congress For all the attention that movies, television, CDs, and video games get from social critics, books continue to be a major source of excitement, controversy, money, and even violence. A continual tension exists between blockbuster books that make large amounts of money for publishers and so-called important books that have lasting literary value. But this tension is nothing new—it dates back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century. As noted earlier in this chapter, the mid-1800s were a period of strong growth for the publishing business, with the number of serious novels and popular fiction titles increasing rapidly. Americans wrote almost one thousand novels from 1840 to 1850, up from the 109 books of American fiction published between 1820 and 1830.69 The 1850s saw the publication of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but none of these “great books” sold nearly as well as popular novels written by and for women. Hawthorne resented losing sales to popular women authors. He once became so frustrated that he commented, “America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash—and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.”70 The domestic novels that Hawthorne was complaining about told of women who overcame tremendous problems through their Christian strength, virtue, and faith, ending up in prosperous middle-class homes. One of the best known of Hawthorne’s “scribblers,” at least today, is Sarah Josepha Hale. She was well known not only as a novelist but also as a writer of children’s books (she was the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”) and the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, a popular women’s magazine of the day (see Chapter 5).71 Women authors of popular fiction continue to sell well today. According to the Romance Writers of America, romantic fiction had annual sales of $1.08 billion in 2013, the majority of which was written and read by women. Nearly 40 percent of the sales of romances were as e-books, and the rest were spread among mass-market paperbacks, trade paperbacks, and hardbacks.72 Hawthorne’s complaints about popular fiction outselling serious writing are often echoed today. Major publishers work hard to promote a limited number of blockbuster books—in part because only a small percentage of books make a profit. For example, in 2000, romance publisher Harlequin recorded a dramatic increase in profits primarily because of two best-selling titles.73 Typical among the best-selling authors whom publishers love is mystery writer Janet Evanovich. She started writing romance novels for Bantam, then branched out into the wildly successful Stephanie Plum bounty hunter novels. Evanovich’s novels mix humor, adventure, mystery, and romance. “I wanted to write the book that made people feel good. If you are having a bad day, you could read my book and I might make you smile,” she said.74 Why did Evanovich choose to write about a somewhat inept female bounty hunter? According to her, she saw a space for it in the marketplace: “So I took what I loved about the romance genre and squashed it into a mystery format.”75 The first printing of her 2009 novel Finger Lickin’ Fifteen was two million copies, and thirty million copies of her books are in print. In contrast, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize– winning novel Gilead sold only 345,000 copies. Good sales, to be sure, but nowhere near the levels of popular fiction.76 pp Famed photographer Mathew Brady took this portrait of celebrated American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in the midnineteenth century. Brady’s role in the development of photojournalism is discussed in Chapter 5. Chapter 4 • BOOKS: THE BIRTH OF THE MASS MEDIA 89 Not every best-selling book is popular fiction, however. Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird, which has stayed in print for more than sixty years, continues to sell nearly one million copies a year.77 These blockbuster authors illustrate the main thrust of the publishing business today— finding writers who can turn out one big hit after another. Harry Hoffman, a former bookstore chain CEO, points out that books must compete with Nintendo and television. In Hoffman’s view, publishing no longer views itself as being in the literature business; instead, it considers itself to be in the entertainment business.78 Of course, popular fiction and literature can sometimes intersect. Among the most influential best sellers of the past fifty years is John Ronald Reuel (J. R. R.) Tolkien’s epic-length fantasy trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Initially published in England in 1954 and 1955, the story has remained continuously in print and has now sold more than hundreds of millions of copies— eleven million during 2002 alone. (The sales boost in 2001 and following years can be attributed in part to the popularity of the movie series based on the books.) Tolkien, an English professor at Oxford, was a colleague of Clive Staples (C. S.) Lewis, author of the popular Chronicles of Narnia, which also formed the basis for a popular movie series. A veteran of World War I, Tolkien specialized in the history of language and literature, and his passion was European myths and sagas. He started work on The Hobbit, his first book set in the fictional Middle Earth, in 1930, telling the story of Bilbo Baggins and his adventures. The Hobbit was written initially to entertain Tolkien’s four children, but the book was published in 1937 after the ten-year-old son of an editor read the manuscript and liked it. The book was a succes