Merchants of Culture. John B. Thompson

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СКАЧАТЬ to this revolution, mass-marketing techniques were restricted largely to the province of mass-market paperback publishers, who were commonly looked down upon by many who worked on the hardcover side of the business. But as the hardcover revolution gained momentum in the 1980s, practices that had originally been developed for the mass marketing of paperbacks became increasingly commonplace throughout the industry. Partly this was because, with the growing vertical integration of the industry, the bifurcation into hardback and paperback publishing, which had been such a pervasive feature of the industry in the 1970s and before, was beginning to break down. Partly it was also because many of the managers who rose to positions of power in the new publishing corporations that were taking shape in the 1980s were people who had honed their skills in the world of mass-market paperback publishing and were now able to introduce – even impose if necessary – more market-oriented values and practices into those sectors of the industry that had hitherto remained rather aloof.

      Cover design is a good example that illustrates how, in the day-to-day activities of a large publishing corporation in the late 1980s, the market-oriented values of mass-market paperback publishing began to prevail over the values and practices of the traditional hardcover business. A senior executive who had come out of mass-market paperback publishing and joined one of the large corporations in the 1980s recounted how, at the time, those who worked in the hardcover division were very resistant to changing the covers on their books in response to what sales reps might say:

      I remember going into a planning meeting one day in the hardcover division and I brought the sales reps in. They’d been to these meetings before but never with a voice. Most of the books had no jackets but one book did – it was a major title and the sales reps were whispering to me that the cover was terrible. One put his hand up and said ‘I think I’m going to have trouble selling that book with that cover.’ Well, I can’t remember who attacked him first – it was either the art director, the publisher, the editor or all three. It was like ‘Who the hell are you to be telling us whether or not we’ve got it right?’ And I shook my head – it was a pivotal moment for us because I went back in afterwards and said, ‘You know what, stick with that approach and you’re absolutely going to fail. These sales guys have to go in and sell your book to the person who’s going to sell your book, and if you can’t sell to them they can’t sell your book – you’ve got to wake up to it.’ Some got it faster than others but I would say that over the course of the next couple of years we turned over almost all of those people. Some just never got it.

      For many editors and publishers who had learned their trade in the world of traditional hardcover publishing, this confrontation with the values and practices of mass-market paperback publishing was a rude awakening. For many it was a question of either adapting to the new way of doing things or getting out. Some adapted and even thrived, going on to forge very successful careers as hardcover publishers who embraced the principles derived from mass-market paperback publishing and put them into practice in developing their hardcover lists, becoming legendary figures in their own right. But many of the old-school hardcover publishers of this time – the late 1980s – simply disappeared, forced out by the cultural revolution taking place at the heart of the firm.

A third consequence of this transformation is that it led, slowly but ineluctably, to the withering of the market from which the revolution had originally sprung – that of the mass-market paperback. This was due partly to the very success of the hardback revolution of the 1980s and early 1990s, and to the capacity of the new systems of distribution created by the book retailing chains to get large numbers of hardcover books into the marketplace very quickly. It was also due in part to the increased use of discounting by the chains and by other retailers who were selling books, a practice that greatly reduced the price differential between hardcover and paperback books. In the 1970s and before, the price differential was commonly around 10 : 1 – a mass-market paperback might cost a tenth of the price of the original hardcover edition. By the 1990s and early 2000s, when some retailers were selling new hardcovers at 40 per cent off the retail price, the price differential could be as little as 3 : 1. Moreover, as the baby-boomer generation which had driven the paperback revolution of the 1960s and 1970s began to age, they became more affluent and their needs began to change. The difference between $5 and $15 for a new book mattered less to them than the ability to get it quickly – why wait for another year until the paperback edition was available? – and to read it in a format that was kinder to ageing eyesight than the small typeface of the mass-market paperback. Hence, as the sales of hardcovers increased in the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, the market for mass-market paperbacks began to shrink. Publishers responded to this trend by making more use of the trade paperback format, which had been pioneered by Jason Epstein in the early 1950s when, as a young trainee editor at Doubleday, he came up with the idea of reprinting quality books in a sturdy paperback format, larger than the mass-market paperback, more expensive and on better-quality paper – the idea that underpinned Doubleday’s Anchor Books and the many imprints at other houses that were soon modelled on it.¹⁷ The shrinking of the market for mass-market paperbacks in the 1990s and early 2000s went hand in hand with the expansion of the market for trade paperbacks, as more and more hardcover books were put into trade paperback format rather than being repackaged as mass-market paperbacks. But the expansion of the market for trade paperbacks should not obscure the fact that the real revolution which transformed the industry in the 1980s and early 1990s was the massive growth in hardcover sales, stemming from the highly successful application to hardcover publishing of a set of values and practices that had been first developed in the world of the mass-market paperback.

The rise of Amazon

As Barnes & Noble and Borders were rolling out their national chains of superstores, a new mode of bookselling was beginning to emerge that would add another dimension to the reshaping of the retail landscape that was taking place in the 1990s: online bookselling. The key player here was, of course, Amazon. The brainchild of Jeff Bezos, a Princeton computer science graduate, Amazon.com opened for business from a suburban garage in Seattle in July 1995; by the end of 1998 it had become the third largest bookseller in the US.¹⁸ Amazon’s sales grew at a phenomenal rate throughout the late 1990s, increasing from $15.75 million in 1996 to $610 million in 1998, but so too did its losses: by 1998, Amazon was reporting losses of $124.5 million, which was more than 20 per cent of its turnover. By 2000, Amazon’s cumulative losses were a staggering $1.2 billion. Achieving profitability became an increasingly urgent corporate goal. In 2003 Amazon reported its first net annual profit of $35 million on net sales of $5.2 billion. By 2007 it was reporting net income of $476 million on net sales of $14.8 billion.

Spurred on by the astonishing growth of Amazon in the late 1990s, others began to enter the online bookselling market. Barnes & Noble had watched the rise of Amazon with growing concern, and in March 1997 it opened its own online bookstore, b&n.com. In 1998 Bertelsmann, which had already been planning to launch its own internet business, BooksOnline, acquired a 50 per cent stake in b&n.com for $200 million and rolled its proposed US operation into it. By 1999, b&n.com was posting sales of $202 million, making it the fifth largest bookselling establishment in the US. Barnes & Noble bought out Bertelsmann’s stake in b&n.com in 2003, and the following year it took full control of the online business. Although b&n.com is separate from Barnes & Noble and has a different corporate structure, the two companies work closely together and collaborate on the purchasing and managing of inventory, among other things. This gives b&n.com a certain competitive advantage vis-à-vis Amazon, its main rival, since it enables b&n.com to draw on a more extensive range of in-house inventory. The Borders group also launched its own online operation in 1997, but Borders.com trailed far behind Amazon and b&n.com, achieving sales of only $27 million in 2000. In 2001 Borders announced that it was handing its loss-making online operation over to Amazon, which became responsible for running the operation, fulfilling orders and providing customer service.

      The great advantage of the online retailers is that they are able СКАЧАТЬ