020.715 no, U cop, 3 TRENDS IN AMERICAN PUBLISHING Allerton Park Institute The person charging this material is re- sponsible for its return on or before the Latest Date stamped below. Theft, mutilation, and underlining of books are reasons for disciplinary action and may result in dismissal from the University. University of Illinois Library L161 O-1096 ALLERTON PARK INSTITUTE Number Fourteen TRENDS IN AMERICAN PUBLISHING Papers presented at an Institute conducted by the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science November 5-8, 1967 Edited by Kathryn Luther Henderson University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science Champaign, Illinois Copyright 1968 by Kathryn Luther Henderson VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES The School Library Supervisor (Allerton Park Institute No. 1), 1956. $2 paper; $3 cloth. The Nature and Development of the Library Collection (No. 3), 1957. $2 paper; $3 cloth. The Library as a Community Information Center (No. 4), 1959. $2 paper; $3 cloth. The Role of Classification in the Modern American Library (No. 6), 1959. $2 paper; $3 cloth. Collecting Science Literature for General Reading (No. 7), 1960. $2 paper; $3 cloth. The Impact of the Library Services Act: Progress and Potential (No. 8), 1961. $2 paper; $3 cloth. Selection and Acquisition Procedures in Medium-Sized and Large Li- braries (No. 9), 1963. $2 paper; $3 cloth. The School Library Materials Center: Its Resources and Their Uti- lization (No. 10), 1964. $2 paper; $3 cloth. University Archives (No. 11), 1965. $2 paper; $3 cloth. The Changing Environment for Library Services in the Metropolitan Area (No. 12), 1966. $2 paper; $3 cloth. Federal Legislation for Libraries (No. 13), 1967. $2 paper; $3 cloth. Trends in American Publishing (No. 14), 1968. $4 cloth. NOTE: The papers from Institutes 2 and 5 have not been published. All volumes are available from the Illini Union Bookstore, 715 S. Wright Street, Champaign, Illinois 61820. . ( r FOREWORD The publishing industry is experiencing great growth and major changes. Books and periodicals, the familiar tools of the world of learning, have been joined in recent years by a variety of new media and new forms of publication. The publications explosion has touched every aspect of librarianship from selection to circulation. It was the intention of the Fourteenth Annual Allerton Institute sponsored by the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library Science to describe some of the current trends in American publishing and to assess their implications for the future. The conference was held from Sunday, November 5, to Wednesday, November 8, 1967, at Allerton Park, the conference center of the University of Illinois. Some eighty people from Washington state to New York state; from Minnesota to Puerto Rico, gathered as registrants for the con- ference and were joined by other members of the local library com- munity and the Library School. They were afforded the opportunity to continue with the questions and discussion which were begun during the more formal scheduled sessions, since we were fortunate in having many of the speakers with us throughout the conference. In this published volume, we can share only the results of the formal sessions. The results of the more informal sessions are recorded only in the minds, lives and future contributions of those who were active participants in these other learning experiences. The records of the two panel discussions are presented in summary form later in this Foreword. The first paper presented in this volume is Dan Lacy's opening address, "Major Trends in American Book Publishing." In it, he iden- tifies two principal forces which have produced dramatic changes in American book publishing in the last fifteen years: the large number of children born annually since World War n and the changing pattern of American education. In "Current Trends in American Publishing," Charles Madison presents the background to the numerous recent mergers, and to the entry of the electronics corporations into the publishing field, whose implications cannot be fully seen at this time. Robert W. Frase discusses the allied topic, "The Economics of Pub- lishing," including the part that libraries and other educational agencies play as consumers of published works. The aspects of the proposed copyright law which may affect libraries are indicated by Abe A. Goldman: fair use, requirement for and placement of copyright notice, duration of copyright, effects upon the copying of manuscript collections, and use of copyrighted works in computer-based systems. "The Role of Computers," as it has vi penetrated the publishing world in respect to one firm, the R. R. Bowker Company, and as it may be seen in relation to others in the future is discussed by Daniel Melcher. Robert J. R. Follett takes a look at educational publishing. Existing to serve education itself, it is very much influenced by two major trends in American education: (1) the shift to thinking of edu- cation as an investment rather than as an expense, and (2) the change in the emphasis of education from teaching to learning. As the only librarian among the writers of the formal papers, Edwin Castagna looks at the publisher- librarian relationship, con- sidering them as two groups which "share in the crucial responsi- bilities of maintaining our country's information network." From the vantage point of his own personal experience as a bookstore owner and operator of long standing, Louis Epstein discusses "Bookstores: A Main Distribution Agency for Books." Yet another aspect of American book publishing is presented in Emily Schossberger's account of the growth in size and importance of "The American Uni- versity Press" in the past two decades to which she adds a prediction of its future role and responsibility. A panel composed of Herbert Goldhor (Director, Graduate School of Library Science), moderator, and Emily Schossberger, Ed- win Castagna, Louis Epstein, and Charles Madison discussed the role of paperback publishing. Some points from this discussion are pre- sented here: 1. While the heyday of the mass- market, popular paperback seems to be over, the quality paperback can be expected to in- crease in the future. Quality paperbacks can be defined as those paperbacks handled by book dealers and jobbers rather than through magazine distribution agencies. 2. Because of the impact of education on all aspects of life and the increase in the number of students of all kinds, paperback books have come to fill a need not only in the lives of individual purchasers but in libraries as well. 3. Libraries will need to continue to buy paperbacks for . several reasons: (a) in some cases, paperback is the only form in which the book can be purchased; (b) better methods of binding paperbacks are now available; (c) paperbacks provide a less ex- pensive means of purchasing multiple copies of books which may be needed for short periods of use; (d) since a paperback often carries a connotation of being a "less scholarly" publication and less a reminder of "school" or "study," it introduces some readers to library materials who might otherwise resist them and (e) since paperbacks are more expendable than hardback books, they can be introduced in greater quantity, with little or no processing, into newly-organized or experimental programs. 4. The bookseller has to find a way to sell paperbacks. The VI 1 availability of so many different titles in paperback form makes it difficult to choose from among them when space for paperback stock is limited. Needs of users are difficult to determine and often much of the stock must be returned to the distributors. 5. Although, as mentioned earlier, some books now appear originally in paperback form, reprinting still makes up a sizable amount of paperback publishing. Throughout the conference, it had been reiterated that the re- sults of a conference such as this could not be known for some time to come. In an attempt to summarize some of its implications and to make suggestions for the future, a second panel discussion formed the concluding session. Holland E. Stevens of the Graduate School of Library Science of the University of Illinois served as moderator. Representatives of special, public and academic libraries included William S. Buddington, Librarian, The John Crerar Library; Robert D. Franklin, Director, Toledo (Ohio) Public Library; and Kenneth W. Soderland, Assistant Director for Preparations, University of Chi- cago. It was not possible for the representative of school libraries to take part, but frequent contributions were made by many of the other participants in the conference. Discussion centered around the following concerns: 1. The entry of the electronics industry into the publishing field may result in the curtailment of the publication of reference books and other tools needed by only a limited number of special users. On the other hand, this may be counter-balanced by the fact that the electronics firms have a deeper sense of the needs re- sulting from the information explosion and therefore may be able to make special records more quickly available through tapes, microforms, etc. 2. In the past, book selectors, especially in the nonfiction area, have relied upon the reputation of the publisher for the se- lection of materials when reviews are lacking or not yet available. With the entry of new interests into the publishing world, and the changing complexion of the entire publishing scene, this may no longer be as reliable a means as it has been in the past. Librar- ians may need to be more keenly aware of this fact. 3. At a time when libraries must perform new functions and when personnel shortages are at their highest, there has also been an increase in publications without a proportionate increase in li- brary personnel. Therefore it has become impossible for many libraries to give the attention to book selection that once was done. If, indeed, a closer scrutiny must be given in the future to the out- put of publishers, book selection will become increasingly difficult for many libraries. In view of these difficulties, it was suggested that a cooperative selection or reviewing service formed by the Vlll library profession itself might be helpful in alleviating these prob- lemsalthough it was realized that such a venture introduced new problems of its own. 4. Possible complications resulting from the proposed copy- right law were seen to come primarily from the removal of copy- right notice from stated places in the publication. The possibility of not knowing the date of appearance of the content of a book is of particular concern to the special library, where copyright date is essential information. Complications arising from the confusion over the applicability of copyright to computer technology, fac- simile transmission, etc. were seen as another area of real con- cern. The extension of the time limit for copyright that will result in uncertainty in many cases about date of death pluse fifty years was another concern. 5. A continuing need was seen for reprints in various sub- ject areas as new libraries come into existence and materials in old ones need to be extended or replaced. 6. The fear was expressed that, although "the book is here to stay" in principle, the problem of deteriorating paper often makes this a questionable statement in practice. Advances in pa- per technology have been made and some publishers are using durable "permanent" papers. However, it may be necessary to make some investigations about the added expense or the real need for more extensive use of such paper for library copies. While not all publications will need to "last forever," librarians expressed an interest in having more of a hand in the possible selection of titles for which "permanent" paper might be important. 7. It was concluded that only through cooperation between librarians and publishers could many of the fears be alleviated and many of the goals achieved. Since both groups have the goal of making information available where it is needed, it was hoped that this conference would lead to increased understanding and communication. No conference and its resulting papers come automatically into existence. A number of people in the Library School and the University have had a hand in this conference and in preparation of this volume. First of all should be mentioned Herbert Goldhor, who was respon- sible for many of the details of this conference. The rest of the Plan- ning Committee is grateful for his leadership. Mrs. Frances B. Jenkins, a member of the Committee was helpful in many ways be- fore, during and after the conference. The Committee was also fortunate in having Miss Eleanor Blum, Assistant Professor of Jour- nalism and Communications Librarian, as a member; without her knowledge of the publishing world, our task would have been much more difficult. We are also grateful to Holland E. Stevens and other members of the faculty for their help during the conference. ix The annual Allerton Park Institute was planned and presented in conjunction with the Division of University Extension. Timothy Sineath is the Academic Coordinator, Extension Library Science, Division of University Extension. He deserved a special note of thanks for his effective handling of the many details involved in such a conference. Those who administer the facilities at Allerton House made our stay a pleasant one and we wish to thank them for this. Nevertheless, the conference owes most to the papers prepared by busy people and to the attendance of the participants. If it has helped any of us to see more clearly our role as handlers of the world's information and has given us new insight and understanding into the cooperative efforts needed in the future to carry out this role, it will have fulfilled its purpose. April 1968 Kathryn Luther Henderson Chairman, Planning Committee TABLE OF CONTENTS Page FOREWORD v MAJOR TRENDS IN AMERICAN BOOK PUBLISHING Dan Lacy 1 CURRENT TRENDS IN AMERICAN PUBLISHING Charles Madison 16 THE ECONOMICS OF PUBLISHING Robert W. Frase 29 THE PROSPECTIVE NEW COPYRIGHT LAW Abe A. Goldman 39 THE ROLE OF COMPUTERS Daniel Melcher 49 CURRENT TRENDS IN EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING- A PERSONAL VIEW Robert J. R. Follett 60 A LIBRARIAN LOOKS AT AMERICAN PUBLISHING Edwin Castagna 75 BOOKSTORES: A MAIN DISTRIBUTION AGENCY FOR BOOKS Louis Epstein 89 THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Emily Schossberger 95 MAJOR TRENDS IN AMERICAN BOOK PUBLISHING* Dan Lacy Two principal forces have produced the rather dramatic changes in the character of American book publishing that have taken place in the last fifteen years. One has been the very large increase in the number of children born annually since World War II. The other is the changing patterns of American education. Other factors have, of course, been influential, but these have been determinative. During the years of the depression, the number of births in the United States fell to about two and a quarter million a year. It was the children of this decade who passed through the schools in the 1940's and early 1950's, and it was typical of school enrollment in those years to remain stable or even to decline from session to session. The routine replacement of worn out textbooks was almost the only stimulus the schools provided to publishing. Suddenly, at war's end, the birthrate increased by 65 percent in the brief period from 1945 to 1947. Thereafter the annual number of births climbed more slowly to an average of over 4,000,000, where it remained until the last few years. It then began to decline, at first slowly and for the last two years rather rapidly. This tidal wave of post-war children began to enter the schools about fifteen years ago and the impact was immediately felt, grade by grade, as they passed through the educational system. By 1965, the school system had 41,000,000 students enrolled in kindergarten and grades one through twelve, as compared with only 28,000,000 in 1950, a figure that had remained relatively stable since 1930. It should be noted that any increase in school enrollment creates a more than proportionate increase in the demand for text- books. Since texts are used on the average for about four years, only a fourth need be replaced in any year if enrollment is static. But when the number of students at any level is increased, all of the in- crement needs to be provided with new texts. A 25 percent increase *A part of this address was adapted from a chapter, "The Changing Face of Book Publishing," contributed to the second edition of Chand- ler Grannis, ed., What Happens in Book Publishing (New York, Colum- bia University Press, 1967), and from the Mary Richardson Lecture given at Geneseo State College in 1966. Dan Lacy is Senior Vice-President, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. 2 in enrollment in a year thus can mean even doubling the new teaching materials required. The simple impact of population growth at school-age levels and more recently at the college level has in itself produced a sudden and ^dramatic increase in the demand for teaching materials. This impact has been multiplied by three other factors that relate to changing patterns in American education. One is the prolongation of education. In pre- World War n years by no means all children entered high school. Fewer than one third graduated, and only about one in ten went on to college. This was changed, radically changed, following the war. The G.I. Bill of Rights altered social patterns by making a college education available to hundreds of thousands of veterans who otherwise could not have afforded it and might not even have thought of it. The affluence of the succeeding decades made longer periods of education attainable, and changing occupational patterns made them essential. The result of these factors has been a steady increase in the proportion of young people who continue their education after high school, from which three quarters of all youths now graduate. Nearly 40 percent of these graduates now enter college and millions of others continue various types of technical or vocational training. Even col- lege is not enough to meet the endless demands of the new society for men and women with advanced professional training, and enrollment in graduate and professional schools has increased even more rapidly than undergraduate education. The second factor has been an intensification of education. The curriculum has been made broader and more demanding; sciences and mathematics are taught earlier; attention to literature has been broadened; whole new disciplines in science and whole new areas of history and culture have been added to the college curriculum. All of these new areas of study have, of course, created and consumed an enormous flow of publication. The third factor is a changing concept of teaching that involves ' a far more extensive use of materials. The importance of supplemen- tal reading materials in all areas of elementary education has been recognized; elementary school libraries, once unusual, have become standard and books are supplied far more liberally in the classroom. Literature and history especially are taught at the high school level in ways that require far more extensive reading. Research and inde- pendent study are required at all levels. Many new types of tests, workbooks, slides, records, films, tapes, and other audio-visual ma- terials have come into wide use. The stimulus to this more abundant use of materials in the schools has come in large part from Federal aid, notably under the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and the Elementary and Sec- ondary Education Act of 1965, under which hundreds of millions of dollars have gone into supplemental teaching materials. Hence what we have witnessed is the confluence of three fac- tors: a great increase in the youthful population, a dramatic increase ! in the proportion of the upper high school and college aged groups enrolled, and a marked increase in the amount of textbook, library, and audio-visual materials made available per student. The result has been that education alone probably consumes annually more than a billion dollars of the output of book publishers, a figure several times as large as that a decade and a half ago. Other factors have also led to substantial increases in pub- lishers' output. Prosperity and the widely heralded cultural explosion have brought the public into bookstores as well as into museums, theaters, and symphony halls. Massive research activities in govern- ment and business have created a demand for advanced scientific and technical books; and a comparable growth has been experienced for professional books in other fields as well. The enormous increase in the number of homes with children, coupled again with prosperity, has brought a several-fold increase in the market for encyclopedias. And finally, the export of American books, a negligible matter before World War II, has now become quite important affording a market of well over $150,000,000 a year. The combination of all these factors has lifted the total sales of books by publishers from an annual figure of about $500,000,000 in 1952 to a figure that will approximate two and a half billion dollars in 1967. The growth over this period has been so extraordinarily rapid as to cause rather radical changes in the structure of the industry. This has come about primarily through the enormous need for work- ing capital to finance the expansion. Though it involves no extensive physical plant, book publishing is a chronically capital-hungry indus- try, requiring large sums for editorial outlays, authors' advances, \ the maintenance of inventories of tens of thousands of separate prod- ucts, and the financing of accounts receivable, payment of which is often abnormally slow. Working capital demands are heaviest in pre-i. cisely the areas textbooks and encyclopedias in which growth has been most rapid. Here the investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars over a number of years may be necessary to bring a new textbook series into being, and years more may pass before it is sufficiently widely adopted to be profitable. A far larger investment, running into the millions, even the many millions, of dollars is necessary to bring a new encyclopedia into being. Though it requires large investments as working capital to achieve growth (and in larger proportion as the growth is more rap- id), publishing is not a rapid or easy generator of profits. Its usual ^ net profits are below the average of those of American industry in general. The growth of the industry over the last decade and a half has required the investment of new capital in an amount probably between one and a half billion and two billion dollars a sum far beyond the ability of the industry to generate even if every penny of profits were reinvested and none paid out in dividends. This new capital has come from a variety of sources, and it is the entry of outside capital that has been the principal force in transforming publishing. This capital has come in four ways: through mergers within publishing, which have enabled companies with ampler resources to provide assistance to companies with more limited capital; through public stock flotations; through the entry of magazine and newspaper publishers into book publishing; and more recently through the entry of electronics companies. The mergers have probably been of less consequence than has been supposed. Rarely have they reduced the number of competing firms in any area of publishing. Rather they have been intended to round out companies. They have been typified by such mergers as that of Harper and Brothers, publishers in almost every field except elementary and high school textbooks, with Row, Peterson, and Com- pany publishing such textbooks almost exclusively, or that of Har- court, Brace with World Book Company, publishers of elementary textbooks and tests. Potentially somewhat more significant has been the process of v "going public." Though it may not have changed the management or control of a company, it has charged the management with a respon- sibility to outside stockholders who may have invested only for in- come and profit. That responsibility has to be publicly expressed in published reports, stockholders meetings, and conferences with securities analysts. A concern for profitability, which has of course always been acutely present in publishing as in other businesses, has been, if not accentuated, at least formalized and patterned. Eccen- tricities peculiar to publishing have tended to disappear as publishing firms have conformed more nearly to the management practices of American corporations generally. Most significant of all may be the entry of new firms into the book publishing field. Major magazine publishers have expanded into books, usually employing the editorial approaches successful in their magazines and seeking to serve a very similar market. Time- Life and Meredith have initiated major book enterprises, following the lead of the Reader's Digest. McGraw-Hill, originally primarily a magazine publisher, has become perhaps the largest book publisher. More recent has been the acquisition of book publishing companies by firms in other areas of communications or information transfer. The Times-Mirror Company, a Los Angeles newspaper publisher, has become the owner of five book publishing houses, in the fields of trade, Bible, dictionary, juvenile, mass-market paperbound, law, medical, and art publishing. Such diverse firms in the electronic and related worlds as RCA, IBM, Xerox, Raytheon, and General Electric have become the owners of or associates in book publishing enterprises. This latter group has been motivated by a conviction that the educational materials of the future are likely to take the form of systems rather than isolated units, and to be made up of a synthesis of printed and audio-visual materials, probably controlled and pre- sented by electronic devices. They have believed, hence, that success in the vast educational market would go to those companies that embodied in themselves such a synthesis of printed, audio-visual, and electronic approaches. Here the intention of the new investors has been active and creative, rather than passive, and their interests and special competences will no doubt be impressed upon their pub- lishing subsidiaries. One result of the growth of the industry, mergers, and the new investment is an increase in the size of companies. Fifteen years ago a book publishing house doing a business of $5,000,000 a year would have been thought a large one; and one doing $10,000,000 very large indeed. Today there are several firms whose total business probably exceeds $100,000,000 annually, and quite a number whose turnover is $25,000,000 or more. The difference is not merely one of degree; the larger houses require, and can afford, specialized management staffs, computerized accounting and management controls, systematically organized marketing services, research facilities, personnel offices, and in general a more professional and impersonal management. Such companies, with ample financing, are more able to shape both their products and their markets than publishing houses of a generation ago. Books conceived and created by publishing houses or by writers commissioned by them, have always played an impor- tant part in publishing but their proportion of the total output of books has sharply increased. These include not only encyclopedias and textbooks, but art books, children's books designed for supple- mental school use, books and series intended for mail-order sale, international publishing projects produced simultaneously in several countries, reprint series, cookbooks, and many other varieties; and will include such products of the marriage of print and electronics as may appear in the future. Publishing of this kind begins with a market and a method of selling and seeks to create a book salable by that method to that market, whereas traditional publishing began with a book and sought to find a market for it. To the degree that a publishing firm can indeed control the entire process from creation of a work to its final sale it is freed from the expensive uncertainties - that have always menaced publishing enterprises that must gamble on the unpredictability of authors, the vagaries of public taste, and the operations of a spotty and inadequate distribution system. i The ability to control both the source of manuscripts and the marketing of books has been sought within traditional patterns of publishing as well. Trade publishers, for example, have established their own inexpensive reprint lines, rather than relying solely on the sale of reprint rights to other houses. Conversely, reprint houses have entered original publishing in order to have a dependable source of titles. Direct mail sales to the public have markedly increased, as have direct sales to schools and libraries. In both cases marketing remains under the publisher's control, independent of jobbers and retailers. Another principal influence on publishing has been the increased importance of the school and library market for juvenile and adult trade books. The institutional market now absorbs perhaps 80 percent of the output of children's books (other than inexpensive mass market ^"" editions), and probably a majority of the more serious adult non- fiction. The startling increase in the number of titles published annu- ally is almost entirely responsive to this demand. The doubling of the number of new children's titles published annually, from about . 1500 to more than 3000 was made necessary primarily to provide supplemental books for school libraries, specifically planned to sup- port the curriculum. The principal increase in new adult titles pub- . lished annually has been in scholarly and informative works for the university and public library market. Similarly the rise in paper- bound titles produced annually from about 2500 to 7500 has been occasioned primarily by the school and college demand for copies for supplemental reading. These changes have disturbed many. Where once they feared that books and publishing might disappear altogether, they are now concerned that the very flood of print may submerge the traditional forms of publishing and the traditional values of books. Will a publicly held company, responsible to its stockholders for achieving a maxi- mum return on their investment, be free to undertake the risky publication of the works of untried authors? Will excellence be ^ entirely replaced by profitability as a criterion? When hundreds of millions of dollars are invested in books written to order to fill a particular need or suit a particular market, will there be opportunity for books written to express the author's encounter with meaning? Amid giant corporations, will there be room for the small, personal publisher? Will there be a role for the bookstore in an era of direct selling? ^ So far, the answers can be reassuring. Large, publicly held firms have not in fact eliminated the high-quality trade title from their lists. The number of novels, and of volumes of new poetry and drama published annually has increased, not decreased. A rapidly growing market has made possible the publication of many more scholarly books and the issuance of paperbound books of high intellectual quality. The largest publishing houses, concerned to maintain a high reputation in the educational world, have been jealous of the range and quality of their trade publishing programs in literary and scholarly fields. Very small, one-man, publishing houses are probably even more difficult to launch successfully than a generation ago; but there are dozens of relatively small to medium size inde- pendent publishing houses that play a vigorous and distinguished role. A rapid growth of university press publishing both in number and in the size of university presses has greatly extended the range of scholarly publishing and has increased the number of outlets for poetry. Bookstores, which languished for many years after the war, seem now to be experiencing a vigorous renaissance, with the number of members of the American Booksellers Association increasing from 1125 in 1955 to 2400 in 1966. This growth has probably been occasion- ed primarily by the availability of higher -priced paperbounds and by the almost explosively growing college market, but it has extended across the entire range of bookselling. In general, it can be said that the influx of new money and of new management into publishing, and the rise to a dominant position of what might be called market-oriented publishing has by no means smothered traditional forms of what might be called in distinction author -oriented publishing, but rather has given it new vigor and resources. What of the future? Certainly most of the trends that have been previously noted will continue. The rather sharp decline in births noted over the last few years will begin in two or three years to affect the demand for children's books and elementary school texts, as for the first time in decades we will face for a number of years an actual decline in enrollments, class by class, instead of the large annual increase we have come to accept as normal. Though this will, of course, exercise a limiting or moderating influence on the market for this age group, there is not likely to be an actual decline. In determining the size of this market, the policy of the educational system in providing materials, as reflected in per capita purchases, is a more important factor than the number of students. As pointed out later in the discussion of the future of Federal aid, there is every reason to suppose that there will be a major and continuing effort to improve the now very inadequate supply of books and other teaching materials. The declining birth rate will not be felt in the high schools for a decade and in the colleges for a decade and a half. There may indeed be no consequent drop in enrollment, certainly not at the college level, as an increase in the proportion attending will no doubt be a more than offsetting factor. The most important consequence of population changes, how- ever, will be the entry into adulthood of the children of the post-war 8 years. Until the present year, all the population increase of which we have been so conscious has consisted of children and teen-agers. There has in fact been an actual decline in the number of adults in some age groups; for example, there are fewer persons today aged thirty to thirty-five in the United States than there have been for a generation. But the children of the postwar baby boom will be be- ginning to leave college next spring. Ten years from now, there will be about 40,000,000 young people in their 20' s almost 15,000,000 more than there are now. And about 15,000,000 of them will have attended college. Through the succeeding decade as well, this rapid and novel growth of the adult population will continue. It will be a unique generation, in its size, its affluence, the quantity and quality of its education, the cosmopolitanism of its experience, its cultural openness. It should offer a magnificant opportunity for general adult trade publishing, which has hitherto benefitted little from either the population boom or increased public support of education. In particular I hope it will create a larger lay public audience for the work of scholars, and will permit commercial publishers to resume the function of serving as a bridge between scholarship and the public, a function now largely left to university presses. The coming into adulthood of this postwar generation will have other notable effects. As they marry and found families, there will be another upward surge in the annual number of births, even though the birth-rate for the age group may not rise. The whole cycle of demand for educational materials and children's books will begin again within the decade. Moreover, there will be a greatly heightened demand for the basic book equipment of the millions of new homes: the encyclopedias, cookbooks, gardening books, home repair manuals, dictionaries, etiquette books, and Bibles that are standard in the homes of young middle-class families. The actual demand for books, in the future as in the immediate past, will be affected most of all by public policy in purchasing books for use in schools and for school, college, and public libraries. The enormous impulse, especially in the children's books field given by the National Defense Education Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has already been mentioned. The Library Services and Construction Act, the Higher Education Act, the Medical Libraries Act, and others less important have also, in the aggregate, been a major factor in shaping the book market. The present year's appropriations represent a leveling off of Federal support; indeed the Federal dollars going specifically into book purchases this year may well decline. The question is, what is the outlook for enlarged Federal support for the purchase of library and educational materials in the future? The depressant force at the moment is, of course, the war in Vietnam. Almost certainly our 9 financial commitments there over the next few years will decline as a proportion of the gross national product, whether it be as a con- sequence of success or as a consequence of de-escalation and total or partial withdrawal. This will free enormous sums for expenditure for domestic social objectives, and the sharp upward curve of those expenditures is likely to resume. Education, however, is likely to occupy a relatively smaller place, competing for Federal funds, as it must, with slum -clearance, housing, urban rehabilitation, water and air purification, conservation, transportation, and attacks on poverty. Moreover, even within education I suspect a smaller proportion of funds will go into materi- als and a larger proportion into salaries, buildings, and services. Nevertheless, for all these limitations, I would think it reasonably certain that over the next decade there will be a steady and rather swift increase in Federal expenditures for library and teaching materials. It is even more certain that the rising level of technology and large scale education in our society, its increasing dependence on massive information transfer, will create a large and steady increase in the demand for scientific, technical, and professional books. The output of the book-publishing industry, measured in current dollars (i.e., including the consequences of inflation) has been increasing steadily at a rate of 10 percent to 15 percent a year, compounded. I see no reason to suppose that that rate will lessen, and indeed every reason to suppose that it will rise. A publishing industry substantially larger than five billion dollars a year seems quite probable by 1977. The consequence of this continued rapid growth will accentuate all the trends of the past decade. To sustain it will require the annual investment of at least a quarter of a billion dollars annually of new money. Moreover, the principal opportunities for growth will be in \ areas in which large units of investment are essential, as in the production of encyclopedias, textbook series, and new instructional systems embodying materials of a variety of physical sorts. Though ' the absolute growth of bookstores and other traditional channels of book distribution is likely to be large, the principal growth will be in materials that require direct marketing by the publisher by mail or by his own massive sales force. In consequence, the major opportunities for growth will be available only to publishing enterprises that (a) are quite large and (b) have access to large capital resources. The shift toward domi- \ nance of the industry by major companies with affiliations with large C capital sources will be not only continued but accelerated. Even these ' companies will probably find it necessary increasingly to have recourse to the general money markets in their search for capital through borrowings and the issuance of new stock. 10 All of these developments will have a tendency to place major publishing decisions at levels at which they are viewed in more purely fiscal terms. That is, the larger the corporation, and the more diverse the activities embraced within it, the more the common denominator of its activities becomes financial. And the pressure for a very favorable profit and return-on-investment picture will be further increased by the need for capital. When the capital is limited, the choice among possible investments within the company's program will necessarily tend to fall on those offering the maximum return. And it will be possible to attract outside capital only into enterprises offering the prospect of a very favorable return. This need not be a matter of concern so far as educational publishing is concerned. There are so many large companies in that field that competition will remain fierce and the sources of materials diverse. And the larger companies will be much better equipped to undertake research and the development of excellent and innovative materials. One cannot be as complacent, however, about the effect on "literary publishing." Although the publishing of poetry, drama, serious fiction, and thoughtful general non-fiction in traditional ways will, I believe, become considerably more profitable, it is unlikely that it will ever offer as large or as secure a return as investment in publishing enterprises in the educational, encyclopedia, and mail- order fields. Many major companies the principal encyclopedia houses other than Crowell-Collier, Macmillan and the principal magazine-related houses other than McGraw-Hill have stayed out of or have withdrawn from trade publishing, as have most of the houses whose programs center in elementary- school textbook publishing. Whether other houses now publicly held, like Harper and Row and Houghton-Mifflin, or newly passed into the ownership of outside companies, such as Random House and Holt, Rinehart, Winston, will continue their present distribution of emphasis or will tend to reduce their commitment to traditional trade publishing in favor of more profitable investment in other fields will remain to be seen. In the case of those houses whose reputation has been solidly founded in decades of excellent trade publishing, I would feel confident that this commitment would be sustained, and indeed that their ampler re- sources would make possible the extension of their literary publishing programs. In any event, society will certainly continue to be well served in this area, in view of the many independently owned and managed publishing houses with a long record of devotion to fine traditional publishing. Such independent houses will indeed be strengthened to the degree that larger houses may reduce their role in trade publishing. 11 Technological considerations are the second major and not altogether predictable factor in the future of publishing over the next twenty years. The new technology may affect publishing in four ways: (1) Audio-visual materials (records, tapes, transparencies, films, filmstrips, slides, etc.) may offer competition to print as an educational medium. (2) Microform or digital computers may offer an alter- native form to print for the storage of information, as in libraries. (3) Inexpensive duplication and facsimile transmission methods may eliminate or reduce the need for large editions printed in advance by permitting the local reproduction from a single copy or master of just the material required by a user. (4) Publishing itself may be aided and made more efficient by new developments in printing and binding. With respect to the first, the newer media can do many things that a book cannot. A book cannot present action visually as a film can. It cannot reproduce a painting on the scale and with the vivid clarity of a slide. It cannot create the sound of music like a record. It cannot give a student the opportunity to compare his pronunciation of a foreign language with that of a native, like a language tape. Hence the role of audio-visual materials will not be to replace books by . doing better what books do, but to complement books by doing what books cannot do. Moreover, most of the audio-visual materials for schools are in fact produced by book publishers, so that publishers will not, as business enterprises, suffer from the wider use of diverse materials. So far as the more visionary forms of computer mediated or computer assisted instruction (CAI) are concerned, I believe the last few years have done much to demonstrate the extraordinary intellec- tual as well as technical and economic obstacles in the way of their creation and general adoption. Like our experience with the teaching machine, I suspect that our experiments with CAI may realize their principal fruits in helping us to improve more traditional teaching media. So far as the second area of technology is concerned, that of data storage in microform or in computer memory cores or other machine readable form, without here attempting to explain the reasons, I think that microforms may have a major and computer storage will have a relatively minor role to play, but that in either case the roles will be additional or complementary to the role of books and not a substitute for it. Books are useful in any case only for the dissemination or storage of a substantial body of information useful, organized in that fixed way, to some thousands of persons. They are and will remain by far the most efficient way to achieve the 12 dissemination and storage of that sort of content. But books are inefficient for material that has only a limited audience and is infrequently consulted, or that needs to be manipulated and selected in unanticipated permutations. Microform and computer storage may add greatly to the resources of libraries without in any way replacing conventional books in those uses that books efficiently serve. More significant is the use of inexpensive duplicating equipment. At one end of the spectrum this makes likely the feasibility of publishing works in much smaller editions than would otherwise be practicable, as in the many reprint services now bringing back into print thousands of out-of-print titles. It may make it quite practical to "publish" many works by creating a master copy, giving that full bibliographic treatment as in the case of normally published works, and reproducing copies to order. This indeed is what is done now in the publication of doctoral theses by University Microfilms. I expect that through these means publishers generally will equip themselves to issue works in much smaller editions than is now practical, and to keep works in print much longer in the face of limited sales. While publishing is strengthened by these aspects of repro- graphy, it is on the other hand frightened by their unlicensed use. It is now technically possible for schools and libraries to reproduce poems, music, stories, essays, journal articles, and textbook chapters copiously, without the permission of author or publisher and without reimbursement to either for his labor and investment. The conse- quences of this technology have not yet fallen seriously on book publishers; but publishers of music and of technical journals appear already to have been seriously affected, and book publishers will certainly become heavily involved as the technologies develop. Enormous amounts of heat have been generated in the discussion of this problem; and in view of the fact that a whole session is de- voted to it at this conference, let me say only that granted good will on both sides, it does not seem to me very difficult to work out a common conception of "fair use" that will exempt trivial uses, and a simple procedure that will enable the purchasers or users of copies to make an appropriate contribution to the authors' and publishers' costs. It is a serious problem and one that must be met; but not one that I believe will be allowed to become destructive to any of the interests involved. I see very considerable hope, in the fourth area, of technolog- ical improvements in composition, through the use of tape, photo- composition, and cathode ray tube character generation that will substantially reduce plant costs. Most technical improvements since the invention of the linotype machine have been in long-run printing and binding, and while they have helped, for example, to make possible the low-cost mass-market paperbound, they have done nothing for the short-run book. The new developments at last offer a 13 hope of relief in this area, and may do much to make it practical to produce books at a much lower break-even point than at present. The total effect of the new technology, granted a sensible copy- right policy, will, on balance, be to strengthen rather than damage any publishing enterprise operated with alert attention to its possi- bilities. It will tend to strengthen, relatively, the larger house able to take better advantage of the possibilities. Another set of factors affecting American publishing will be its increasing response to international needs. Traditionally, American < book publishing was inward- looking. Prior to World War II, American books that commanded attention abroad were published in Britain, ) and it was in their British editions that they reached the rest of the \ foreign market. American publishers took little interest in the export ' market. Though most novels and popular general books still reach foreign readers primarily in British editions, American textbooks, scientific, technical, medical, and scholarly books, and paperbound editions now command a very large world market. Exports run from 7 percent to 10 percent of the entire output, and may represent a third or more of the production of scientific, technical, and medical publishers and of the more distinguished university presses. The international involvements of American publishers, how- ever, embrace much more than exports. Many large American firms have subsidiaries in Latin America, in Great Britain, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries and in Asia. These subsidiaries not only sell the output of the parent companies in their respective areas, but increasingly produce new books themselves. In this development American publishers are reproducing the experience of British publishers, who established American subsidiaries over the last seventy-five years, several of which later developed into fully independent American firms. Major publishing projects are increasingly internationally planned and executed. Co-publishing, as the process was called, first developed in connection with art books and other expensively illustrated works, in which the great cost of color plates could be afforded only if there were very large printings, such as could be achieved only by simultaneous editions in a number of countries using the same illustrations in each. Increasingly, however, the idea extends to many other kinds of projects, in which the principal investment to be distributed is editorial. Encyclopedias and other reference works, scholarly series, and systems of teaching materials are representative of the kinds of projects that will more and more frequently be internationally planned and managed. The larger pub- lishing companies will no doubt devote an increasing proportion of their efforts to genuine international publishing and will set up specialized facilities for such projects. 14 One can perhaps foresee with some clarity the general shape of book publishing over the next decade. It will have become a multi- billion-dollar industry, with a total output of from five to seven billion dollars. The bulk of its output will be concentrated in relatively large firms, each with an annual turnover of $100,000,000 or more and a few substantially larger. The concentration will, however, intensify rather than reduce competition, and the industry will remain con- siderably more decentralized than most major manufacturing industries. The typical major firm will not be confined to book publishing, narrowly defined, but will embrace the educational media generally, producing films, tapes, records, microforms, slides, and machine readable materials. It will generally be owned by or related to larger firms, usually in the general communications area. Such publishing houses will have a highly professional manage- ment with well developed planning, research, and management staffs. They will increasingly control the creation and the distribution of their product, and will be active co-participants with the educational community in the development of educational materials. The success- ful firms will be aggressive, alert, innovative, we 11- financed, inter- nationally oriented, socially responsible. Their publishing will be planned in terms of programs and projects, designed to serve the needs of particular markets, rather than in terms of individual titles. Though such firms will provide the characteristic and the most dynamic element in book publishing over the coming decade the element most responsive to changing social, educational, and research needs they will by no means dominate the industry to the exclusion of other types of publishing enterprises. At least two other types of publishing houses are likely to continue to thrive and to become stronger, though probably a smaller proportion of the industry's total dollar output. One of these is the university press. The enormous increase in the number of professional scholars and in the time and resources they are able to devote to research and writing will, of course, multiply the volume of scholarly work seeking publication, and the growth of the scholarly community will provide a correspond- ing demand. University presses will certainly respond with a growth in number and size. The other is the relatively small, privately owned, trade pub- lishing house. The advantages that accrue to size in educational, reference book, and international publishing are far less important in literary publishing, and are offset by advantages that may accrue to a more personal management. The rapid growth that we can expect in the number of young, college educated, culturally sensitive adults opens an attractive future for all trade publishing, both on the part of large, publicly owned, general publishing houses and on the part of those that are smaller and more personal. I would be very confident 15 of the future of well run publishing enterprises doing from $2,500,000 to $10,000,000 business a year and reflecting distin- guished literary taste and judgment, as well as of even smaller, more personal, and more adventurous publishers. One clear fact emerges: that the shape of the whole industry, large houses and small, and of their output will increasingly reflect the demands of libraries, for it is libraries that will buy most of the new books, other than textbooks and encyclopedias, published in the United States. The health of those segments of the industry devoted to imaginative literature, to new ideas, to emerging tastes will depend in large part on the interest of libraries in those fields. The fate of this kind of publishing is, indeed, to a considerable extent in the hands of librarians. If libraries assert for themselves a vigorous role in the dissemination of the new and emerging literature of the decades ahead, there will be no lack of publishing response. CURRENT TRENDS IN AMERICAN PUBLISHING Charles Madison Not a few people, in and out of publishing, have recently come to fear that book publishing has been turned into a crass business by Wall Street manipulators and electronics corporations. To a certain extent they are right, except that this business emphasis began a long time ago. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century leading publishers strove to give their activity the aura of professional pres- tige. Faced with piratical competition in the 1870' s and 1880' s, which made normal book publishing of uncopyrighted English importa- tions a ruinous venture, the regular publishers Harper, Appleton, Putnam, Scribner, Lippincott, Holt, and Houghton persisted in main- taining their high critical and ethical standards. As late as 1898, for instance, Henry Holt wrote to Arthur Waugh, his English agent: I don't think I've made you understand yet that I didn't pub- lish anything that I didn't think is good, no matter how well it is expected to sell. My dear old friend George Bentley urged and urged me to publish Marie Corelli, telling me that I would make lots of money out of it. It was probable that I would, but I absolute- ly and reiteratedly refused. * Such professional idealism, made possible because none of these publishers was answerable to stockholders or a board of directors, started to decline in the 1890's, when the emerging literary agents began to foster almost reckless competition for popular authors. Royalties rose precipitously along with high advances, which in turn forced publishers into frantic and costly promotion of books they ex- pected to become best sellers. Even respectable publishers soon lured authors away from their long-time publishers; the few who would not stoop to this marketplace haggling lost some of their most profitable authors. Nor was this commercial trend stopped by the shock of receivership forced in 1900 upon two of the oldest and largest firms Harper and Appleton. It was in this connection that Henry Holt pointed to the removal of the industry "from the control of publishers into that of financiers. "^ A similar opinion was expressed by Walter Hines Page in The Confessions of a Publisher, issued in 1905: Charles Madison was formerly with Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc., New York. 16 17 Authorship and publishing the whole business of producing contemporaneous literature has for the moment a decided com- mercial squint. . . . That fine indifference to commercial results which was once supposed to be characteristic of the great pub- lishers does not exist today. 3 Page was here mildly guilty of the fallacy of hyperbole. More than one of the older publishers and not a few of the new ones, contin- ued to bring out good books regardless of their commercial qualifi- cation. Yet commercialism has undoubtedly been in the saddle ever since and only more so in recent decades. One of the most aggressive and successful of these commercial practitioners was Page's senior partner, Frank N. Doubleday, whose firm quickly became, and has since remained, a giant among pub- lishing houses. Yet his remarkable success was based primarily on his ability to find new buyers for his books, many of which were of high quality. Christopher Morley, long associated with the Doubleday firm, has stated: "Effendi [Kipling's acronym of Doubleday's ini- tials] was really the first of a new era in book publishing which he visualized foremost as a business. ... He was inexhaustible in fer- tile schemes for larger distribution. "4 Doubleday was nevertheless a real publisher to whom books were works of creative effort and not merely salable merchandise. Describing a publisher's function, he said: "In the successful working out of a publisher's problems, imagination is quite as necessary as business acumen; the ability to see visions and to actually work them out is the only thing that really counts. "5 His son Nelson and those who currently head the firm have generally followed Doubleday's precepts and practices, maintaining the company's primacy as a publisher and promoter in the field of trade books. And the firm's annual lists have contained a good mix- ture of popular and quality books. A contemporary of Doubleday, equally successful and even more eminent in the annals of publishing, was George P. Brett, founder of the American firm of The Macmillan Company. In 1890 he took over from his ailing father the relatively small American agency of the British Macmillans and developed it into the largest all-around publishing house in the United States, with sales reaching around $9,000,000 at the time of his retirement in 1931. What was remarkable about his achievement as a publisher was the catholicity of his annual lists, which included books by leading writers in the arts and sciences. He rejected no book on account of cost or content, pro- vided it had merit and was not too highly specialized. The first to develop a large textbook department, he managed to attract some of the outstanding teachers and scholars as his authors. And his effi- cient sales efforts made the firm a highly profitable enterprise. A new breed of publishers entered the industry in the early decades of this century. B. W. Huebsch, who printed his first book in 18 1902, brought a fresh spirit of venture and liberality into publishing. He was followed by Mitchell Kennerley, Alfred A. Knopf, Horace Liveright, Alfred Harcourt, Pascal Covici, and various others, all highly sympathetic to the current literary and social trends and ready to bring out books from which most older publishers shied away. Although short of capital, they accepted readily the work of young and radical writers who gave voice to the loosening of mores and morals brought about by World War I. Harcourt later spoke for most of these publishers when he stated: The contemporary scene interested me intensely, and I wanted to publish the books that reflected it. I wanted to give a hearing to the writers who were writing as individuals, with a fresh point of view, not merely following a literary tradition of the past. ^ Not that all new publishers were like Harcourt or Huebsch, or that all older publishers refused to issue the work of new writers. The house of Charles Scribner, for instance, became conspicuous for its hospitality to new writers under the sympathetic editorship of Max- well Perkins. On the other hand, the relatively new firm of Simon and Schuster, whose owners were sophisticates eager to succeed financially, saw no dichotomy in the mixture of solid literary stan- dards with unalloyed commercialism. Publishing developments up to and during the years between the two world wars concerned mostly trade books and were notable primarily for the emphasis on new literary styles and standards, established by such writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Ernest Hemingway. Publishing history after 1945 centered in textbooks and underwent radical economic and financial innovations. War restrictions and economies created a great demand for general reading matter. Civilians no less than the armed forces read more books than ever before books being the most readily available means of absorbing hours of leisure. Technical advances and pub- lishing initiative helped to make this wide reading possible. After many futile efforts to produce books cheaply for mass consumption, Pocket Books in 1939 succeeded in bringing out paperbound editions of good books at 25 cents a copy. The striking popularity of these editions they were soon selling in the millions resulted in the es- tablishment of other firms eager to join in the exploitation of the newly opened mass market. A fortuitous stimulus to wide reading came early in the war when the Council on Books in Wartime was formed by a group of publishers to assure an adequate supply of reading matter for the armed forces. With the cooperation of all publishers, the Council in the course of the war brought out paper- covered editions of 1324 books in all categories, totaling 123,535,305 copies. 19 The effect of this mass -product! on was tremendous. It not only expedited the expansion of paperback publishing but also developed millions of readers who previously had seldom looked into a book. Equally significant is the fact that these and subsequent paperback editions were not limited to popular fiction but included many works of high quality in various fields of nonfiction. In 1955 Kurt Enoch, an expert in paperback publishing, commented on this phenomenon: Editorially, the gap between mass and class publishing narrowed strikingly, and it is also editorially that the paperbound book has made the most dynamic and challenging strides in its own relatively brief history. In the past fifteen years we have witnessed an enormous broadening of the variety of paper titles, accompanied by an astonishingly enthusiastic public acceptance of high-quality fiction and nonfiction that few, even in publishing, would have once believed could be successfully marketed in quan- tities large enough to be priced as low as 25 and 35 cents. 7 The price of paperback editions has of course risen consider- ably since then, along with the price of hardbound editions; but it is also a fact that the character and quality of paperbound editions have continued to improve. This has been made possible by the increasing market for such editions in colleges. Many teachers, aware of the crowded conditions in college libraries and of the greater affluence of most students, now recommend a half dozen supplementary paper- backs along with the basic text. Meantime paperbound editions of popular new fiction and nonfiction continue to sell in the millions annually. At present more than thirty-five thousand titles are in print and around five hundred new editions and original titles are issued monthly, tending to saturate the market, with millions of copies remaining unsold. Pessimists to the contrary, however, paperback editions have become part of permanent American book publishing. The so-called "paperback revolution," considered financially, is only a minor factor in postwar American publishing. A more basic departure from the earlier character of book publishing has been the growing dominance of textbooks and Wall Street interest in them, which has caused a number of firms to give up private owner- ship for the more lucrative public ownership, brought about numer- ous mergers, and yielded the control of various companies to the large periodical and electronics corporations. It all began with the rosy prospects for greatly increased text- book sales after World War II, when nearly 8,000,000 veterans, re- turning to civilian life during the next decade, entered high schools and colleges at government expense, (which totaled nearly $13,000,- 000,000) and thus greatly accelerated the sale of textbooks. 20 Concurrently the large increase in the birth rate gave rise to pre- dictions of a continually increasing market for textbooks. Investment counselors were quick to publicize this growth expectation in text- book publishing, tempting speculators and financiers to investigate the likely acquisition and exploitation of going textbook houses. R. W. Apple, Jr. , stated later in Saturday Review: Wall street, after decades of treating the publishing industry with indifference, has suddenly decided that it merits the kind of feverish attention the Street devotes to industries it deems to have the potential for rapid, dazzling growth. 8 The first of the publishing firms to come into the control of financial investors was the old and reputable house of Henry Holt and Company. Two years after the death of its founder in 1926, the firm became a public stock company when its management agreed to obtain control of the Holt assets. For more than a decade thereafter the company was in financial straits, owing largely to the depression of the 1930's, but it regained its former solidity during the war in the early 1940' s. When E. N. Bristol, who owned over 51 percent of the common stock, died in 1944, his heirs decided to turn the shares into cash. A group of financiers headed by Clint W. Murchison, the Texas oil millionaire, soon bought these and other shares of the company. When not long after the new president of Holt floundered financially, he was replaced by Edgar T. Rigg of Standard and Poor, an able business executive. No bookman, he knew that most profit lay in textbooks and therefore concentrated on the expansion and aggres- siveness of the school and college departments. To increase his liquid capital he paid dividends in stock instead of cash. Once the firm functioned to his satisfaction, he launched his policy of expan- sion. In the early 1950's he bought four periodicals, including the popular Field and Stream. In 1958 he purchased Dryden Press, a small but active publisher of college textbooks. Two years later he arranged the merger with Rinehart and Company and John C. Winston and Company, making Holt, Rinehart & Winston one of the largest general publishing organizations. In 1961 he bought Mentzer, Bush and Company, a Chicago firm with a strong list of texts for Catholic schools. As a result of these mergers the firm was able to take a large share of the available market, and its sales spurted from $40,596,000 in 1961 to $70,249,000 in 1966. Meantime the Holt stock had split several times and multiplied many times in value, so that the original stockholders were greatly enriched. Early in 1967 the firm, considered by its current president, A. C. Edwards, too large to be bought, was readily acquired by CBS. The Holt firm was only the first of a number which became greatly enlarged by inner expansion and merging. During the early 1940' s publishers of scientific and technical books benefited vastly 21 from the publication of works needed for the war effort. After 1945 the worldwide demand for American books in science, engineering, and technology increased the prestige and profit of such houses as McGraw-Hill, Prentice-Hall, and Wiley. All of these companies invested heavily in the expansion of their textbook departments and in the acquisition of firms in line with their projected plans and poli- cies, with McGraw-Hill and Prentice-Hall advancing most rapidly to their present gigantic size. McGraw-Hill Book Company, now probably the largest of the book publishing firms, illustrates a common trend. It was formed in 1909 as a merger of the small book divisions of the McGraw Pub- lishing Company and the Hill Publishing Company; both primarily interested in technical periodicals. At first strictly an engineering book house, it published a number of high-level texts. In 1928 it ac- quired A. W. Shaw Company of Chicago and thereby became a major publisher of business books. It also expanded into the natural, physi- cal, and social sciences. In 1930 it started a trade department. After the war, swollen with capital and bursting with managerial energy, it began a policy of expansion which not only greatly enlarged the existing departments but also launched new ones. In addition it acquired a number of firms, among them Blakiston Company, the Harper high school department, Webster Publishing Company, Harvey House, Seashore Press, and the California Test Bureau. All of this activity was managed with well- formed plans, so that the firm grew rapidly to its present mammoth proportions. It should be stated that although McGraw-Hill remains basically a technical publishing enterprise, it has to its credit a number of projects of literary and artistic quality, such as the Boswell Papers, The Encyclopedia of World Art, and the Da Vinci Notebooks. If McGraw-Hill and Prentice-Hall were managed aggressively and successfully during recent decades, two other leading firms- American Book Company and The Macmillan Company were con- currently undergoing a period of decline. When American Book Company was organized in 1890 by a merger of five large textbook houses, it achieved a near-monopoly in the elementary textbook field, controlling around 90 percent of the market. In time other textbook firms, much smaller but intelligently managed, nibbled away this dominance, so that during the priod after 1945 several firms ex- ceeded it in sales. More recently, under new management, it began to expand its operations, acquiring McCormick- Mathers Publishing Company and accelerating its general activities, but early this year it became a subsidiary of Litton Industries. The largest house in the 1930's, The Macmillan Company was also surpassed in size by several houses at the end of World War II. George P. Brett, Jr. , who headed the company, was not as able or as 22 astute as his father, and his policies prevented his associates from making the most of their talents and opportunities. In 1951, when he prevailed upon the English Macmillans to divest themselves of their majority stock in the American company, and went "public" to do sc he exposed the firm to ready seizure by covetous and aggressive investors. Several years later the management of Crowell- Collier Company, having in 1956 suspended publication of their unprofitable mass- circulation magazines, began to buy Macmillan shares in the open market. In 1959 Brett and his son unwittingly sold Crowell- Collier 50,000 shares of unissued stock, permitting it to acquire a controlling interest. The merger that followed was routine. Soon thereafter Crowell- Collier bought Free Press, a small publisher of nonfiction books, and made it part of the Macmillan book division. Now, under aggressive management, this division began to enlarge its activities and has greatly increased its sales. Several other long and solidly established publishing houses lost their independence in recent years. D. Appleton and Company, one of the oldest and in the latter half of the nineteenth century secc only to Harper in size and prestige, failed to retain its eminence afl it came under the control of bankers in 1900. For years it functione in the shortening shadow of its reputation. In 1933 it merged with The Century Company and in 1947 with F. S. Crofts and Company, but its position in the industry continued to decline. In 1960 it was acquired by Meredith Publishing Company, which owned Successful Farming and Better Homes and Gardens. Now interested in develop ing a successful book division, Meredith proceeded to purchase the trade house of Duell, Sloan and Pearce, the school textbook firm of Lyons and Carnahan, and Channel Press, which operated several religious book clubs and two religious periodicals, and is managing this combined subsidiary on strictly business lines. Another journalistic giant, the Los Angeles Times-Mirror Company, entered the field of book publishing in 1960 with the acquisition of the New American Library, a successful paperback firm which started in 1948 and is generally known as NAL. Times- Mirror also gained control of World Publishing Company, which has long specialized in inexpensive Bibles, dictionaries, and other reprints, but which had also developed an active trade list of new books. Both firms were merged and reorganized for their greater commercial efficiency. In this connection it is pertinent to point out that Victor Weybright, an active founder of NAL, has blasted this commercial efficiency of Times-Mirror in his recently published book, The Making of a Publisher. Stating that this gigantic organiza- tion operated its acquired publishing firms by " absolute remote control"^ and by giving dominance to the vice-president in charge o marketing, he concludes: 23 It should be apparent to any man of sense that the totalitarian combination of a mechanistic parent company with an insensitive business type in a publishing house subsidiary spells the doom of creativity, of increasing profits and of the spirit which attracts the finest authors and scholars. * Last year Times-Mirror also purchased the house of Harry N. Abrams, which has pioneered in the publication of attractively printed art books. In the late 1950's large electronics and technical corporations began discovering an affinity between their products and textbooks, maintaining that new electronic developments in communication were certain radically to affect the educational process and would supple- ment or supplant the conventional textbook. I have already mentioned the aquisition of the American Book Company by Litton Industries. A similar purchase affected the Bobbs-Merrill Company, which traces its origin to Samuel Merrill's book store, started in 1838. This firm achieved its most successful period in the 1900' s, when it led the industry in the number of popular best sellers. Thereafter it experienced years of decline and spurts of prosperity. In 1929 it marketed an issue of stock to buy the equity of the Bobbs heirs. Subsequently it managed to do little more than maintain itself, de- clining to a financial deficit in 1958, the year in which it was bought by Howard W. Sams and Company. Sams, who had started his thriving electronic research and publishing company in 1946, revitalized the old firm with fresh capital and energetic management, later adding to it the Public School Publishing Company, C. A. Gregory Publishing Company, and Liberal Arts Press all bought in the early 1960's. Earlier this year, however, the middle-sized fish was swallowed by the big fish known as ITT. Other similar acquisitions were consummated during the past few years. Among them were the following: D. C. Heath, an old and solid textbook house, was bought by Raytheon Company; Xerox pur- chased University Microfilms of Ann Arbor and American Educa- tional Publications from Wesleyan University; IBM acquired Science Research Associates, which in turn arranged with Howard Chandler Company of San Francisco to market its college textbooks; CIT has just bought Grosset and Dunlap, the oldest of the reprint firms; General Electric has joined Time Inc. in forming the General Learning Corporation, which included the textbook firm of Silver- Burdett, a Time subsidiary. It might be stated here that Time entered the book field in a large way in 1961, when it started Time- Life Books. This division produces books of a synthetic but highly readable nature and sells them by mail through Time- Life's enormous lists. In 1966 their sale reached around 16,000,000 copies, placing Time among the ten largest book publishers. This year Time entered the 24 field of fiction by purchasing a sizable interest in the German Rowohlt Verlag. RCA's purchase of the Random House-Knopf companies is per- haps the most significant of the acquisitions by an electronic corpor- ation, inasmuch as these firms have been notable primarily as trade houses. Random House began functioning in the late 1920's and was not long in becoming an active and prestigious trade firm. In 1936 it bought the small trade house of Smith and Haas, adding a number of well-known authors to its own important list. By the end of World War II it was among the major publishing companies, with its juvenile department one of the most successful in the industry. Fur- ther to expand its enterprising activities and to establish itself in the textbook field, it went "public" in 1959. Bennett Cerf said at the time: "It comes as a shock after all these years suddenly to find Wall Street tycoons embracing us and waving certified checks in our faces. "11 The next year Random House made front-page headlines when it announced the merger with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. , which was started in 1915 and quickly became one of the best quality publishers. In the same year Random bought Beginning Books and L. W. Singer Company, a sizable publisher of elementary and secondary textbooks. The merged firm also strengthened its relatively small college de- partment. In 1961 Random further buttressed its trade list with the purchase of Pantheon Press. With both Knopf and Cerf retaining editorial autonomy under the RCA arrangement, their qualitative standards should remain unchanged for the near future. Harcourt, Brace and World, as of now, is a publishing house which grew large without diluting its qualitative character or losing its independent status. From the time of its establishment in 1919 both as a trade and textbook house, Harcourt, Brace maintained a stan- dard of quality that was the envy of many older houses. Its growth was steady over the first three decades, particularly in the textbook division. With the rise of William Jovanovich to the presidency in 1954, the firm spurted ahead even more rapidly. In 1960 he took advantage of the current Wall Street interest in book publishing by splitting the firm's privately held shares nine to one and going "public." Later that year he arranged a merger with World Book Company, a large publisher of educational tests. The merged firm continued to advance by giant strides, doubling its sales in five years and showing every indication of continued acceleration. This year, like the gigantic Doubleday firm and the bantam Grove Press, it entered the amusement field by obtaining licenses for two television stations and applying for four more; like Crowell- Collier- Mac millan, it also emulated big business practices by forcing its employees to sign a loyalty oath to the firm an indignity violating the professional character of publishing. 25 Harper and Row, a much older firm, has recently followed a similarly aggressive policy. A leading house through most of the nineteenth century, forced into practical receivership in 1900 and into financial reorganization two decades later, it rebounded into a position of eminence soon thereafter and has recently been actively prominent in the trade field. It also enlarged its college department. In 1961 the Harper management was encouraged by Wall Street ad- visers to "go public" and to split the privately held shares twenty- two to one. Concurrently it arranged a merger with Row, Peterson and Company, an energetic publisher of school texts. The merged firm has advanced rapidly in sales since then, but whether it has gained more than bigness remains to be demonstrated. Scott, Foresman and Company, a Chicago textbook concern, has grown considerably in recent years. In 1960 it followed the cur- rent pattern of going "public." Continuing its sizable increase in sales, it recently acquired control of William Morrow and Company, a middle-sized trade house, and South- Western Publishing Company, which specializes in business and economic textbooks. An older but equally successful educational firm, Ginn and Company, also went "public" in 1960, splitting the shares owned by the partners thirty-five to one. Subsequently it acquired Personnel Press and Blaisdell Publishing Company, a small technical textbook concern, originally formed with Random House backing. A number of established companies have neither gone "public" nor expanded by merging. Among them are the distinguished houses of Charles Scribner, Lippincott, Little- Brown, Button, Dodd-Mead, T. Y. Crowell, Viking, and Norton all of them flourishing while main- taining the relatively high-level policies laid down by their founders. A few other firms have recently gone "public" among them Houghton-Mifflin, Putnam, Simon and Schuster, and Grove Press but it is too soon to tell whether or not this dilution of ownership will affect their procedures and policies. Of the newer privately held firms, Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Atheneum Publishers are most notable for the quality of their lists. Encyclopedia publishers and book clubs have become an im- portant part of the book publishing industry. The first have grown into financial giants. The four major companies Encyclopedia Britannica, Crowell-Collier, Grolier, and Field Enterprises control 95 percent of the total reference business. An indication of their extraordinary growth may be gathered from the fact that while in 1948 the sale of reference works came to $69,800,000, in 1965 it rose to $439,700,000, with $81,300,000 of that amount obtained in foreign markets. It is of interest to note that Britannica has last year entered trade publishing by acquiring the firm of Frederick A. Praeger and Company, which was formed in 1950 with little capital 26 and grew fast by publishing nonfiction books of current interest, a number of them having a definite anti- communist bias, and some of them being partly subsidized. In recent years it has also brought out a good many books in the arts. This year, with Britannica backing, it bought Phaidon Press, distinguished for its attractive art books. Book clubs have become another major peripheral publishing activity. Of the scores of book clubs now in operation, most of them catering to various special interests, none has reached the popularity of the two major ones the independent Book- of- the- Month Club and the Doubleday- owned Literary Guild. The first is the larger and more prestigious, having mailed to its members over 200,000,000 books since its formation in 1924. The value of book clubs lies in reaching a good many people who are far from book stores and who would otherwise probably never acquire the books they now receive through the mails. The striking changes in book publishing since 1945, merely highlighted in the foregoing account, have reflected sharply the na- tion's greater emphasis on education. Our school population has greatly increased, particularly on the college level. Thus, while in 1941 only 1,180,000 out of 9,703,000 college-age boys and girls actually attended colleges, in 1966, 6,055,000 out of a total of 12,879,000 college- age youths, or 47 percent, were enrolled in col- leges. The increase in elementary and secondary school enrollment was not so spectacular, but was also considerable. The Federal government in particular, but also state and local agencies, have passed laws and ordinances favoring school attendance and gener- ously providing billions of dollars to this end. A good part of this money was spent on the purchase of textbooks and juveniles in the schools and libraries $326,000,000 by the Federal government alone in 1966. As a result the total sale of books has risen during the last decade from $750,000,000 to over $2,000,000,000. It should also be mentioned that the libraries last year bought books costing more than $261,000,000. Yet our nation still lacks enough schools and teachers to meet the proper needs of our ever-growing school population. It is this continued increase in the number of our school- age children, furthered by the efforts of all government agencies to stimulate school attendance, that attracted investment counselors and made textbook publishing a "growth" industry. The recent entrance of large electronics corporations into publishing is based partly on the desire to diversify, but also on the assumption that electronic devices may ultimately replace the text- book in the study of academic subjects. Thus the Xerox Company re- cently stated: "We view formal education from pre-school through post-doctoral as a most important field in which to concentrate, and are gearing our principal efforts toward the elementary and high 27 school segments." 12 Somewhat later, however, the president of Xerox, C. Peter McColough, spoke in a less optimistic vein in con- nection with the use of teaching machines: "The danger in ingenious hardware is that it detracts attention from education. What good is a wonderful machine if you don't know what to put in it?" 1 ** Roy L. Ash, president of Litton Industries, was equally realistic in his recent speech before the American Book Publishers Council: The computer will not decide what should be published and what will sell. The copying machine will not create its own ori- ginals or edit any copy. The teaching machine will not improvise its own course material. The book publishing industry need not be pre-empted by those whose expertise is in some of the new tools of communication but not in the substance to be communicated. ^ The likelihood is that various electronic devices will in one way or another, and to a greater or less degree, supplement the available textbooks, which will remain the basic tool of education ' in the foreseeable future. Whether electronics companies will adjust themselves to this prospect or gradually ease out of publishing, re- mains to be seen. In any event, culturally the more important function of book publishing the production and promotion of works of fiction and nonfiction is of little interest to these industrial giants and their Wall Street advisers. Books of creative content and scholarly appli- cation appeal mostly to men who know and appreciate the esthetic and intellectual values of such writing, and they usually do not enter publishing for pecuniary reasons but because they believe that association with books and authors will enrich their lives. Bennett Cerf, speaking of the entry of various corporations into publishing, has well described this situation: These huge corporations are interested in the expansion of textbook publishing and the entrance of electronic equipment into education. They like best sellers, but they'll leave trade publish- ing to the people who know about it. This business has to be run by people who love books. A publishing house without a soul will wither away. It is my observation that, for various reasons, fewer and fewer current trade houses have what Cerf calls a soul. And it seems to me also that fewer authors are now producing books having the lasting quality of literature. Yet I am equally of the belief that good writing and quality publishing will not actually disappear from our midst. 28 REFERENCES 1. Quoted in Madison, Charles A. Book Publishing in America. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1966, p. 105. 2. Holt, Henry. "The Commercialization of Literature: A Summing Up," Putnam's Monthly, 1:566, Feb. 1907. 3. Quoted in Madison, op. cit. , p. 160. 4. Ibid. , p. 289. 5. Ibid. , p. 163. 6. Ibid., pp. 339-340. 7. Ibid. , p. 549. 8. Ibid. , p. 402. 9. Weybright, Victor. The Making of a Publisher. New York, Reynal &Co., 1966, p. 309. 10. Ibid., p. 322. 11. Quoted in Madison, op. cit., p. 508. 12. "Currents," Publishers' Weekly, 191:23, April 3, 1967. 13. Brooks, John. "Xerox Xerox Xerox Xerox," The New Yorker, 43:87, April 1, 1967. 14. "Answers to 'Why Change?'" Publishers' Weekly, 191:25- 26, May 1, 1967. 15. Reeves, Richard. "Book Boom Spurs a Debate on Quality and Profits," The New York Times, March 20, 1967, p. 28, coL 1. THE ECONOMICS OF PUBLISHING Robert W. Frase Some fifteen years ago I gave a paper, "Economic Trends in Trade Book Publishing," under the auspices of the University of Illi- nois, as part of the 1952 Windsor Lectures. The over- all subject was Books and the Mass Market* and my two fellow lecturers were the late Harold Guinzburg, founder and president of the Viking Press, and Theodore Waller, now vice-president of Grolier, Inc. The significance of book publishing economics lies not in its impact on the over-all economic life of the nation but on its intellec- tual, political and artistic life. If I may be permitted the luxury of quoting myself, the following was the opening paragraph of my 1952 Windsor Lecture: The economics of book publishing, and more specifically "trade" or general book publishing is important primarily as it affects the kind of books which are produced and distributed. The industry is so small compared to most others that it has little or no influence on general economic developments. The direct eco- nomic value of the industry's products is an infinitesimal fraction of the total annual production of goods and services in this coun- try. In terms of intellectual and artistic content, however, the annual production of general books would rank at the top of the scale. This discussion will deal, therefore, not with the economics per se of a small industry, but with the influence of economic fac- tors on what books are published and how widely they can be distributed. ^ A great many things have happened in book publishing in the last fifteen years, as I realized when I recently reread my 1952 lecture, and this paper will be devoted primarily to an analysis of the changes in this last decade and a half. It is, however, not as comprehensive as was the 1952 lecture and I would refer the reader to the earlier paper for details not covered here. Unfortunately the statistics on book publishing, although greatly improved in recent years, still leave a good deal to be desired. For one thing, annual statistics are still not available on many important aspects of the business, and there- fore, in the statistical tables which follow, it is not possible in many Robert W. Frase is Director, American Book Publishers Council, Inc., Washington, D.C. 29 30 CO HH e CO O os HH rH H ^ OMMU r, 1954 CO H W O s o o o o CO ^^ CD CQ gS> ^ ^ If) CO CD CO rH IrS 1& in rH CO ^ OS OS rH CU * fab m Tft vt wj c a Q) "H o o CO CO l> >> CO rH rH rH rH CO CM t- ^- CM s CO J-J CO O s O O 1 .& S -2 3 2 ^ ^ CM 3 1 1 o" in P H d) (** CD *+H IT i-H CM CO _j ^ 2 PH "O /"\ r-4 CM OS CO rH CM CO CO 00 O C- CO m o CO CO CO 10 os o OS rH 00 OS CM oo in CO oo CO X csf rH CO U CM OS CO CO in o o cu CO f in u . cu (A rH OS co" T CO & 03 rH OS CO c- CO CSJ e- 3 co" rH o CM CO rH CO O rH m --" rH co^ CO - c- t- !>* in oo" co" co OS rH CO CO o CO i c^ rH CO - rH CO 3 CO to 1 Newspapers Periodicals Book publishing Miscellaneo publishing - cu fi & works and broadcast- ing station 31 O5 CO CM CO 6P S CM 05 CO CM CD CO oT * C- c m O5 CO 00^ -H o 35 o" 1 s" u CO - O O co CD CO c>^ CM c 05 35" CM If) ^4 ~ M- S * CD 00 CO co" o" co" ^* lu t- O5 CD tr-^ O I CD CM 1/5 T ^ (0 in t* - S- Television networks and broad- casting stations iil 'S, -FH co * ^H C CO 0> r: .2 6 S -S o s 2 - S *- 0^ H I 1 H CO O5 CO 32 cases to give figures which cover the whole span of time from 1952 to 1967. The Communications Industries. Book publishing is only one of a group of activities of business, government and nonprofit organizations which Fritz Machlup of Princeton has called "the knowledge indus- try. "3 in its broadest aspect this includes education and scientific and other research. Within that very broad group there is an important sub- category which may be called the communications industries- publishing, broadcasting and motion pictures. Table 1 above shows the relative growth in these industries in the period 1947 to 1963, which is the last year for which complete census data is available. A number of interesting facts show up in this table. Book pub- lishing has more than held its own in this sixteen-year period, with about 10 percent of total receipts in 1947 and 12.75 percent in 1963. In addition, the book industry shows up as the strongest in the group in terms of rate of growth in the 1954-63 period. It has also become the largest of the industries which sell only editorial content and de- rive no substantial revenue from advertising. The only other indus- try in this group with no significant advertising revenue is the motion picture industry, and it has failed to keep pace both with the commu- nications industries as a whole and with book publishing. The freedom from advertising revenue has a direct influence on editorial content, which does not have to be tailored to a mass audience and can be adjusted on a title-by-title basis for smaller groups. This point will be elaborated later in connection with an analysis of the cost of publishing individual titles. Growth of Book Publishing. Various types of book publishing are in- fluenced by conditions peculiar to each. There are similarities but also many variances in the economics of textbook and encyclopedia publishing, for example, as compared to general or trade publishing with which this discussion is primarily concerned. Before proceed- ing with the more detailed analysis, however, it will be desirable to consider what the relative volumes and growth rates have been in the various major categories of book publishing in recent years. This is shown in Table 2 which follows. It will be noted in this table that in the period 1954 to 1966 text- books and encyclopedia sales have grown somewhat more proportion- ately than general book sales which comprise the remainder of the categories in the table. The difference has not been great, however, and as at the end of the period in 1966 general book sales were still very close to half of total sales. Growth in Title Production. We turn now to changes in the industry in the last decade and a half in terms of title output rather than dollar TABLE 2 ESTIMATES OF BOOK SALES 1954, 1963, AND 1966 (000 omitted) 33 Categories 1954 1963 1966 Adult trade, hardbound and paperbound $ 86,496 $ 125,544 $ 173,000 Juvenile books 37,253 103,935 160,000 Bibles and religious books 36,132 81,120 103,000 Technical and profes- sional books 63,635 165,550 226,000 Book club books 75,235 143,418 202,000 Mass-market paper- bound books 46,621 87,380 119,000 University press books 4,295 18,274 28,000 Other books 20,008 102,056 124,000 Textbooks 186,550 464,900 705,600 Subscription reference books Total 129,650 379,750 455,000 $685,875 $1,671,927 $2,295,600 Sources: For 1954 and 1963 the data are a combination of Census of Manufactures and annual surveys for the American Book Publishers Council and the American Textbook Publishers Institute. For 1966 the data are solely from industry sources. The margin of error in the individual categories is greater in 1954 because the Census and industry surveys were then not yet using identical categories and definitions. sales volume. Table 3 below gives some selected statistics on the publishing of new and substantially revised titles as reported by Publishers' Weekly in the years 1951 and 1966. Although only figures for these two years are given in the table, the trend was steadily up- ward throughout this period. 34 TABLE 3 BOOK TITLE PRODUCTION 1951 AND 1966* Category 1951 1966 Total titles 11,255 30,050 Paperbound titles (est. ) Popular priced Other 8 50 (est.) 50 (est.) 2,006 7,340 Juveniles 1,072 2,713 Total fiction titles 2,135 3,018 Popular priced paperbound fiction titles 800 (est.) 1,545 Total fiction titles minus popular priced paperbound titles l,335(est.) 1,473 Percentage fiction of total titles 18.97% 10.0% Percentage popular priced fiction of total fiction titles 37. 47% (est.) 51. 19% *Includes new books and new editions Source: Calculated from annual title production tables of Publishers' Weekly. It should be noted that some portion of the growth in title output of roughly 250 percent in this period is not real but merely the result of better statistical coverage of book publishing output in the latter years of the period. A very large component in total growth has been in paperback books and particularly the higher-priced, predominantly nonfiction paperbacks which are not distributed primarily through magazine marketing channels. This latter category grew from an al- most zero base in 1951 to over 25 percent of total title production in 1966. Fiction declined drastically as a proportion of total titles and by 1966 over half of the fiction titles were popular-priced paperbacks. This change in the internal composition of title production illustrates the shift in book markets that has gone on in the last decade and a half. Although growing vigorously, general book production has shifted more and more to serving an educational and institutional market and has given up a considerable part of its recreational functions to other 35 media such as television, and also a wide variety of other competing uses of leisure time such as travel, sports and do-it-yourself activities. Size of Editions. Tables 2 and 3 have indicated that while dollar sales have increased steadily, so has title production; we should thus ex- pect that the average size of trade editions would not have increased very much during this period. That this is a fact is shown in Table 4 which shows the average size of printings in 1953, 1958 and 1964 for a large sample of hard-cover trade books. In this sample the average size edition actually declined somewhat from 1953 to 1964. TABLE 4 AVERAGE SIZE OF TRADE BOOK EDITIONS FOR BOOKS PUBLISHED IN 1953, 1958 AND 1964* Year Number of Titles in Sample Average Number of Copies Printed 1953 2,883 9,484 1958 2,551 9,268 1964 4,046 9,172 "Tabulation based on data supplied by 58 trade and university press publishers for 1953. The same firms reported for 1958 and 1964 but the number of companies reporting was smaller because of mergers. Source: U. S. Congress, House Committee on the Judiciary. Hear- ings Before Subcommittee No. 3 on Copyright Law Revision (Printed Record of the Hearings). 89th Cong., 1st Sess. , p. 1579. Testimony by Robert W. Frase, on H.R. 4347, H.R. 5680, H.R. 6831 and H.R. 6835. Book Purchases by Libraries. An indication of the shift of general book sales toward the educational and institutional market is provided in Table 5, which gives estimates of book purchases by four major types of libraries from 1956 to 1965. If Table 5 on library purchases is compared with Table 2 on re- ceipts of book publishers it will be seen that library purchases of books grew substantially more in the last decade or so than total sales of general books. Library purchases of books increased by about 285 percent in the nine-year period 1956-65, while general book sales increased only by 207 percent in the twelve-year period 1954-66. It should also be noted that the calendar year 1965 did not include the 36 TABLE 5 ESTIMATED BOOK PURCHASES OF LIBRARIES 1956 AND 1965 Type of Library 1956 1965 School $20,000,000 $ 93,308,000 Public 26,118,000 73,656,000 College and university 17,407,000 76,836,000 Special 4,265,000 17,317,000 $67,790,000 $261,117,000 Source: The Bowker Annual of Library and Book Trade Information. New York, R. R. Bowker Company, 1967, p. 6. large increase in library purchases of books which began only in the following calendar year as the result of the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and the Higher Education Act of 1965. Economics of the Trade Title. We have seen that although the gen- eral book market has grown and shifted in character, the edition size of the average hard-cover trade book has not changed very much. The result has been that the relative component costs of such books are very much the same as they were in the early fifties. Table 6 shows these costs in 1951 and 1966 for a large and representative sample of adult trade book publishers. The table shows that wholesale and retail distribution expenses account for almost half of the total price of this type of book, and if to these expenses are added the costs of advertising, sales, shipping and warehousing, the distribution cost comes to almost 60 percent. This may seem high but is not out of line with other consumer goods industries. It is surprising that the distribution cost is not even higher in view of the fact that almost 200,000 individual book titles are in print and the volume of paper work and the amount of time involved for handling a single five-dollar book title may be almost as great as for a $400 washing machine or electric range. Cost of a Single Title. I pointed out in my 1952 lecture that: As contrasted with newspapers, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and television, trade book publishing is composed of very small 37 TABLE 6 APPROXIMATE COMPONENT COSTS OF AN AVERAGE HARDBOUND ADULT TRADE BOOK 1951 AND 1966 Component Costs Percentage of Retail Price 1951 1966 Manufacturing costs, including inven- tory write-offs 23.0% 20.0% Authors' royalties 10.8 8.6 Publishers' editorial and overhead 12.3 10.2 expenses * Publishers' advertising, promotion, and sales expenses 10.0 89.6 Shipping and warehousing 2.3 2.5 Publishers' profit -0.4 3.1 Distribution expenses wholesalers' and retailers' margin, including transportation costs Total 42.0 46.0 100.0% 100.0% business units; and the individual book title can be produced and distributed at an infinitesimal fraction of the cost of these other media. The book is the pamphlet of our time. Ideas of an author can be placed before 10,000 readers in book form in an economi- cally self-sustaining operation for an initial outlay of $15,000 or so; and among the two or three hundred possible publishers, one can usually be found to finance the endeavor. The book publisher is not rigidly bound by the "formula" of the magazines; each book publisher may have a slightly different combination of subjects on which he specializes, but compared to magazines the output of individual houses is quite varied. This flexibility is in part the professional heritage of the book publisher, but it is also made feasible by the economics of the industry. In taking an individual 38 book, a "controversial book" let us say, the book publisher does not endanger the finances of a whole multimillion-dollar enter- prise tailored to a continuing editorial formula or pattern. He takes a chance on finding a few thousand readers for the intellec- tually honest ideas in the book; tomorrow he may try to find an- other and perhaps different group of readers for an honest presentation of the other side of the same question. This is the essence of freedom of the press as it originally evolved in our culture. It has survived in its purest historical form in trade book publishing, in part because it is still economically feasible and in part because of the long professional tradition of the industry. 4 These essential facts about the magnitude of the risks involved in publishing trade book titles remain true even though the absolute figures have changed somewhat. In 1952 I spoke of reaching 10,000 readers for an initial outlay by the publisher of $15,000. This was an estimate based on conversations with experienced trade book pub- lishers. In the fall of 1967 a well-known author's agent in an article in Publishers' Weekly detailed the costs of a specific trade title pub- lished in 1965. This was a better than average title with 16,647 copies produced in three separate printings, and the total out-of- pocket cost to the publisher, not counting overhead, was $25,000.5 Thus it is still true that economically the book is the pamphlet of our time and that trade book publishers, far more than businessmen in other communications industries, can take the risk of publishing the new, the untried and the controversial. REFERENCES 1. Guinzburg, Harold K. , et al. Books and the Mass Market. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1953. 2. Ibid. , p. 21. 3. Machlup, Fritz. Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States. Princeton, N. J. , Princeton University Press, 1962. 4. Guinzburg, op. cit. , pp. 29-30. 5. Reynolds, Paul R. "One Book's Earnings for Author and Publisher," Publishers' Weekly, 192:42-43, Sept. 11, 1967. THE PROSPECTIVE NEW COPYRIGHT LAW Abe A. Goldman It is common for writers and speakers on copyright to begin by quoting the clause in the Federal Constitution on which our copyright law is founded. This has become a cliche because it has the merit of compressing some profound concepts in a few words. Congress shall have the power, the Constitution says, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." In paraphrase, to enable authors to devote their time and talent to the creation of works of literature, music, and the arts, the copy- right law gives them property rights in their creations whereby they can reap economic rewards for their contributions to learning and culture. As Justice Reed put it in a leading decision of the Supreme Court: The economic philosophy behind the clause empowering Congress to grant patents and copyrights is the conviction that encouragement of individual effort by personal gain is the best way to advance public welfare through the talents of authors and inventors in "Science and useful Arts." Sacrificial days devoted to such creative activities deserve rewards commensurate with the service rendered. [Mazer v. Stein, 347 U.S. 201, 219] Between 1790, when the First Congress enacted our first copy- right law, and 1909, when the most recent revision was adopted, social and economic change impelled a comprehensive rewriting of the copy- right law about every forty years. Another complete revision of the 1909 model now almost sixty years old is overdue. Twelve years of steady and painstaking work have gone into the current revision project. Copyright is a complex subject of many facets, but I think it is no exaggeration to say that every important issue has been considered in depth. All of the many and diverse in- terested groups have contributed their thinking and suggestions to the process of bringing the problems into focus and finding solutions, and their cooperation and good will have been essential in the search for accommodations of differing points of view. In particular, one Abe A. Goldman is General Counsel, Copyright Office, Washington, D.C. 39 40 should mention that the dedication of the members of the Congres- sional committees in giving so much of their time and attention to the revision problems has been remarkable. The years of labor promise to come to their final fruition during the next year when the new copyright law is expected to be enacted. I shall not review the entire bill or even the many changes it makes in the present law. Many of its provisions, though vitally important for the particular interest groups concerned, would prob- ably be of no special interest to librarians and publishers; few would feel much concern, for example, about the provisions concerning jukeboxes, or community antenna television systems, or the royalty rate for making phonograph records, or the termination of assign- ment contracts, all of which have been controversial issues of prime importance to the industry groups affected. The broad scope of the revision bill is indicated by the length of the bill itself 55 pages and of the House Committee Report 144 pages. The Report explains in considerable detail what the bill provides and why. I propose to review below those half dozen issues on which the library and educational groups have manifested a special interest. To those who wish to delve more deeply or widely, I commend the House Committee Report 1 on the copyright law revision. 1. Fair Use. The issue to which both library and educational groups have given most attention has been that of making copies of copyrighted material. Quite early in the revision program, the ma- jor library associations* formed a joint committee to consider the problem of photocopying by libraries as fair use. The joint com- mittee assembled information on the photocopying practices of libraries generally and conducted studies of the actual photocopying carried on in several large research and university libraries over a period of time. It concluded, in a report made in 1961, that what the libraries were doing in supplying to patrons upon request, single photocopies of copyrighted material, mostly of individual articles in journals, was in line with traditional library service and was not injuring copyright owners. It recommended that libraries adopt the policy of supplying a single photocopy of any material upon request, with the later qualification that before making a copy of an entire work, the library should try to ascertain whether a copy is available through normal trade channels. That recommendation was quite similar to a suggestion made in the 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights, 2 in which the *American Library Association, Association of Research Libraries, Special Libraries Association, and American Association of Law Libraries. 41 Copyright Office put forward its initial proposals for a new copyright law as a basis for discussion. The library associations eventually decided, however, that they would prefer not to have any formula on library photocopying spelled out in the statute; even if it seemed appropriate for the present, they felt, a statutory formula might , prove to be rigidly narrow in the future. The author groups were also opposed to the suggested statutory provisions on the ground that they might prove to be too broad. There was agreement on both sides that the problem was best left to the flexible principles governing fair use. Fair use is an equitable doctrine that can no more be stated in precise terms or as a rule- of- thumb than concepts such as due care or ethical conduct or fair play. You will find no mention of fair use in the present copyright statute, which provides for the exclusive right of the copyright owner to copy his work, without qualification. But the courts, over the years, have developed the fair use doctrine in a variety of situations. The courts have adhered to the basic copy- right principle of protecting copyright owners against copying that may make inroads into the potential market for their works; but at the same time the courts have responded to the need for flexibility by allowing, as fair use, limited copying for socially useful purposes where the value of the copyright would not be appreciably affected. The revision bill contains, for the first time, a statutory declaration of the fair use doctrine. The history of the fair use sec- tion in the bill has some aspects that are amusing in retrospect, but amusement was no part of the sharp and sometimes heated debate on the request of an ad hoc group of educational organizations for spe- cial exemptions to allow copying of copyrighted material for educa- tional purposes. The revision bill initially drafted in 1964 as a basis for dis- cussion contained a provision on fair use consisting of two sentences. The first sentence stated broadly that fair use of a work is not an infringement, and cited, as examples of purposes for which uses might qualify as fair use, "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research. " The second sentence stated four factors, which had been distilled from the court decisions, to be considered in determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use. These four factors were: (1) the pur- pose and character of the use; (2) the nature of the copyrighted work; (3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in rela- tion to the copyrighted work as a whole; and (4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. The librarians appeared to be content with these provisions. The ad hoc educational group approved of the first sentence but wanted the second sentence omitted. Teachers, they said, were not familiar with the fair use doctrine, and the limitations implied by the four 42 factors would frighten them away from reproducing pertinent mate- rial for classroom use. The authors and publishers, on the other hand, were fearful that the first sentence might be read by teachers and others to allow them wide freedom to make copies for the pur- poses cited as examples, while the limitations inherent in the four factors stated in the second sentence would be overlooked. With both sides having opposed the initial draft of the fair use provision, though for opposite reasons, the bill as reformulated and introduced in 1965 for Congressional consideration stated simply that "the fair use of a copyrighted work is not an infringement of copyright. " Meanwhile the education group urged the addition to the bill of a new section that would, in substance, permit any teacher or other person to make any number of copies of "excerpts" from copyrighted works, and an individual copy of a complete work, for use in a non- profit educational institution. The reaction by the representatives of the authors and publishers was predictably stormy. I shall not trace the further pulling and hauling that threatened to produce an impasse on this issue. After a series of meetings at which the author, pub- lisher, and education groups were brought together, they finally reached a settlement of the issue by agreeing upon a modified version of the original two- sentence provision on fair use, with the under- standing that the application of the criteria of fair use to the making of copies for classroom teaching would be explained in some detail in the House Committee Report on the bilL The House Committee adopted this resolution of the issue and devoted eight tightly-packed pages of its Report to a review of the fair use doctrine, with special emphasis on its application to repro- duction for purposes of teaching. The House Committee also added another feature in this situa- tion. Responding to the argument that teachers are generally not familiar with the fair use concept, the Committee inserted a provision in the bill that, in a case where a teacher has over- stepped the bounds of fair use in making copies for classroom teaching, but has done so in the honest belief that it was a fair use, the court may reduce or remit the statutory damages that would usually be assessed against an infringer. A group of library spokesmen has since suggested to the Senate Subcommittee that a similar provision should be added with respect to librarians who innocently overstep the bounds of fair use. 2. Copyright Notice. Another issue on which library groups have expressed a major interest is the requirement in the present law that a copyright notice be placed on the published copies of a work. There was some movement among authors' societies, at an earlier stage of the revision discussions, for eliminating the notice 43 requirement and incidentally, there is generally no requirement of a notice in the copyright laws of other countries. But librarians, among others, have taken a strong position in favor of keeping the notice as a convenient source of information concerning the copyright status of a work and its currency. The grave fault of the notice provisions in the present law has been that technical omissions and errors in complying with the rather rigid specifications for the notice could often bring about the for- feiture of copyright. ^The revision bill continues to require that a copyright notice be placed on published copies, but it seeks to avoid forfeitures by allowing omissions or errors to be cured. So, where the notice has been omitted, the copyright can be preserved by making a registration within five years after the publication of copies without the notice. 'Nevertheless, anyone who acts in good faith in reliance upon the absence of a notice, and thereby infringes innocently, is shielded from liability for the infringement. A special point made by library associations, particularly in relation to maps, is that the notice should be required to contain the year of publication. The present law allows the year date to be omit- ted from the notice on maps and other graphic, pictorial and art works; the proposed bill as it now stands requires the year date as part of the notice on all kinds of works. An objection has been voiced by one library group to the bill's departure from the precise specifications in the present law of the place in the copies where the notice is to appear. These specifica- tions are an example of the rigidities in the present notice provisions that have caused trouble for copyright claimants. The revision bill allows placement of the notice in any position where it will reasonably serve the purpose of giving notice of the copyright. 3. Manuscripts. One of the fundamental changes that the bill will effect in our copyright system will have consequences of con- siderable significance for libraries having manuscript collections. At present, unpublished works are subject to the literary property rights of the author and his heirs, under the common law, with no time limit. So there is always the possibility today that the author's heirs may assert their literary property rights in old manuscripts. The revision bill would do away with common law literary property, granting instead copyright protection under the statute to unpublished as well as published works. But the copyright in all cases would expire after the term fixed in the statue: manuscripts would then go into the public domain fifty years after the author's death or, if the author is unknown, when the manuscript is one hundred years old. The revision bill also contains another innovation regarding manuscripts and other unpublished materials in the collections of 44 any nonprofit archival institution. The bill explicitly permits any such institution to make facsimile copies of unpublished works in its collections "for purposes of preservation and security, or for deposit for research use in any other such institution. " The making of such copies today may well be a violation of the literary property rights of the author or his heirs. 4. Duration. One of the most important changes made in the revision bill is in the duration of copyright. Our present term of twenty- eight years from publication of the work plus a renewal for another twenty-eight years leaves us standing virtually alone in the world. Almost all other countries have a copyright term running for the life of the author and a period of years after his death; and most commonly, this period after death is fifty years. In an era of world- wide distribution and transmission of works of authorship, our unique term of copyright has become an anachronism and causes complica- tions in the international uses of works. The revision bill adopts, for works created in the future, the term most prevalent throughout the world: the life of the author plus fifty years. The life-plus-fifty term is one of the keystones of the bill and has the overwhelming endorsement of almost all interested groups. To the authors, this is probably the most important single feature of the entire bill. And the adoption of this term will remove what has been the main obstacle to our joining the older and more pervasive international copyright convention, that of the Berne Union. Some groups of librarians and educators have expressed oppo- sition to basing our term on the life of the author, in spite of the fact that the rest of the world does so. The main objection to a term based on the author's life has been that it may often be difficult, and some- times impossible, to ascertain when an obscure author died. In order to explain how the bill meets this objection, I must go back for a moment. There are some situations in which the term cannot be meas- ured from the author's death. In this category are anonymous works and the many works of corporate authorship. For these works the bill provides for a term of seventy-five years from publication or, to take care of unpublished works, a hundred years from their creation. Now coming back to works by obscure authors whose death date would be difficult to ascertain: the bill provides for a record of the death dates of authors to be kept in the Copyright Office; and if the Office cannot provide information as to when an author died, the copyright in his work is presumed to have expired seventy-five years after its publication or a hundred years after its creation, whichever is earlier. 45 I might add that even the library and education spokesmen who have opposed the term of the author's life plus fifty years have ex- pressed their assent to lengthening the present term. Instead of the present twenty- eight years from publication plus a renewal of twenty- eight years, they have suggested twenty- eight years plus a renewal of forty-seven years, or a total of seventy-five years from publication. And this, incidentally, is what the bill provides for copyrights already in existence when the new law becomes effective. 5. Uses of Works in Computer-based Systems. The 1961 Register's Report 3 carries no discussion of what has since become one of the most important problems in copyright revision, that of the computer uses of copyrighted materials. There were brief references to the question in panel discussions convened by the Register of Copy- rights in 1963, but not until 1965 did this become a significant issue. The debate had begun, but it produced little testimony on the problem at public hearings conducted by the House Committee in 1965. This seems strange in the light of the advancing computer technology at that time, but there was little realization of the probable impact of the computer in this area, and it was too early to formulate positions. The ensuing discussion and speculation has dealt, for the most part, with the future. Basic to the debate is the projection of the changes foreseen in the coming age of the computer. There are those who see what is happening as the beginning of a social revolution comparable to that brought about by Gutenberg's introduction of movable type. Others read events as more evolutionary, with the computer accelerating tremendously the speed and efficiency of the processing and distri- bution of intellectual works. As between these differences in outlook, I believe that computers and associated technology will revolutionize the distribution of works of authorship, but that we shall still need to enlist the skill and talent of human authors and pay them to produce those works. Whatever the future may hold, we have little or no practical experience to go on. In the absence of experience, there is much fear of the impending collision between computers and copyright. Con- gress, in working on a complete revision of the copyright law, must now decide: shall it legislate on the computer issue or wait for fur- ther developments ? The present revision bill, with one exception which I shall advert to later, carries no special provisions for computer uses. It assumes that the broad principles governing the uses of copyrighted works in other media are appropriate for their use in computer-based systems. Under the bill, copyright would apply to the reproduction of works for and by computer systems, subject to the principles of fair use. 46 The problem may be seen in three aspects. The first is the "input" problem: whether the reproduction of a single copy of an entire work, or substantial parts of it, for storage and use by a com- puter does or should constitute copyright infringement. The second is the "scanning" question: the effect of scanning or manipulation of material stored in the computer. The third is the "output" problem: what forms of "read -out," "print-out," or "display" should constitute infringement ? On the question of input, it is difficult to find authority for the argument that the unauthorized reproduction of an entire book for storage in a computer is not an infringement under the present law. The making of punch cards, magnetic tapes, etc., for input, capable of serving the same purpose as hundreds or thousands of traditional copies seems a clear violation of the owner's basic right to "print, reprint, publish, copy, and vend" his work. On the second question, scanning or manipulation of the contents of a work within the system does not involve a reproduction, the preparation of a derivative work, or a public distribution, perfor- mance, or display, and thus would not be an infringement. On the output problem, there is little dispute that, under the present law and the bill, the print- out in hard copy of substantial parts of a work should constitute an infringement. As elsewhere, there are areas of disagreement as to what constitutes "fair use" on output. A difficult problem is presented by displays of the stored text of works on viewing devices connected through a transmission system with a computer-based library. The revision bill grants an exemption for performances or displays in transmissions of instructional pro- grams of nonprofit educational institutions, and this applies broadly to in- school transmissions, whether by broadcasting or closed cir- cuit. It does not appear likely that such transmissions would displace the use in schools of copies of the works presented in the trans- missions. But a radically different result is feared by authors and publishers when central information storage systems, such as auto- mated libraries, are combined with transmission networks so that students and researchers having access to a receiving unit can call up, at will, an image reproduction of any work in the system, when- ever and as often as they wish. This could, it is argued, destroy the market for printed copies, and the bill as passed by the House does not exempt such networks of reproductive-transmissions-upon-demand from copyright control. Some educators and librarians have objected to the exclusion of such networks from the exemption, while author and publisher groups have insisted that an exemption here would be disastrous. For the most part, arguments have centered on this point and on the question of whether input of a work itself should be subject to copyright. 47 Related to this discussion is the important subsidiary question of the establishment of mass- licensing systems for computer uses. No one questions the fact that the increasing use of computers will present copyright problems requiring special legislative solu- tions. Such solutions require solid information and experience on which to base the kind of carefully- wrought statutory provisions necessary to preserve copyright protection without unjustifiably re- stricting the development of computer technology. The House Judici- ary Committee, in its Report on the revision bill, put it this way: "Recognizing the profound impact that information storage and re- trieval devices seem destined to have on authorship, communications, and human life itself, the committee is also aware of the dangers of legislating prematurely in this area of exploding technology." The anticipated development of central data banks and computer- based information systems raises many questions which have not been explored. The demands of computers, or rather of those who control computers, upon copyright works are enormous. If a few large sys- tems are to be all inclusive, the costs will be terrific, and inevitably the operators must face the question of selection. Who is to make the selection? If these are to be central systems, will everyone have access to them? If the original work is to be converted or abstracted for computer input, what safeguards are there for insuring the integ- rity of the work? How can this integrity be maintained in the face of possible manipulation and modification within the computer. These and similar questions are of great concern to the author and scholar and should be of equal concern to all. Most people who have considered the problem realize the need for more time to gauge the continuing development of computer and associated technology in relation to works of authorship. Experts say it will be five years, more likely ten years, before computer storage of entire works on a large scale is practicable. In the mean- time, there has been concern that passage of the revision bill, in its present form, may freeze Congressional action on computers for years to come. I do not believe this will happen but I fully support the suggestions made on both sides for the establishment of a Com- mission to study the matter and report back to the Congress. Senator McClellan, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Sub- committee considering the revision bill, called a meeting of the in- terested parties on July 25, 1967, to discuss a proposed bill to establish such a study commission. That meeting was attended by about 150 representatives of authors, publishers, educators, li- brarians, computer users, and government agencies, all of whom favored the idea of such a commission. On August 2, 1967, Senator McClellan introduced S. 2216 to establish a Commission to study and compile "data on the reproduction and use of copyrighted works in automatic systems capable of storing, processing, retrieving, and 48 transferring information, and by various forms of machine repro- duction. " The Commission is to make recommendations as to "changes in copyright law or procedures that may be necessary to assure for such purposes access to copyrighted works, and to provide recognition of the rights of copyright owners. " The Commission will be headed by the Librarian of Congress and will consist of twenty-three members, including two members each from the Senate and the House of Representatives, and eighteen persons appointed by the President with the consent of the Senate, with the Register of Copyrights serving ex officio. Of the eighteen, seven are to be selected from authors and other copyright owners, seven from users of copyrighted works, and four from the general public. The Commission is to submit a preliminary report within one year, and a final report and recommendations within three years. On October 12, 1967, the Senate passed S. 2216 and the bill is now pending in the House. Passage of the bill by the House and its final approval during the 1968 session of Congress can be expected. In the meantime, the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to com- plete its consideration of the general revision bill in 1968, and enact- ment of the revision bill during that year is a hopeful prospect REFERENCES 1. "Copyright Law Revision," House Report No. 83, 90th Con- gress, 1st Session, on H.R. 2512. 2. Sixty- Fourth Annual Report of the Register of Copyrights. Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Washington, B.C., 1962, pp. 5-6. 3. Ibid. THE ROLE OF COMPUTERS Daniel Melcher Several years ago, in 1963 to be exact, I drafted an advertise- ment in which Bowker announced that any of its book information could be had in any form, including punched cards, punched paper tape, magnetic tape, or any other machinable form, including over- the-wire service. The advertisement was repeated once or twice. I think it will come as no surprise, however, that the only responses were received from branches of the IBM company. The offer was bona fide. We were already using punched cards and punched paper tape in various ways and were fully prepared to deliver whatever anyone might want at a nominal rate, just to lend a hand with any experiments. Four years have passed since that announcement and I must confess that the future is still where it always was, although various experiments have been tried. We were at one point supplying the data on Forthcoming Books to the Library of Congress for magnetic tape conversion. The idea was to help LC know when to expect books an- nounced for publication but not yet received for cataloging, but any actual use of the data in this way by the Library of Congress is still in the future. In another experiment we started supplying inventory control data to forty college stores, covering Paperbound Books in Print. Some of the data went out as punched cards, some in other forms. It was and remains an "interesting experiment," if I may use the conventional euphemism for "unsuccessful experiment. " I do not want to give the impression that we are disillusioned about the ultimate potential of the new technologies but I do think it would be awfully easy to read the literature and the conference agendas and get the idea that things are further along than they are. I could say, for instance, that we now have the capability of creating cross references from author-title input; but in a spirit of somewhat greater candor, I could recount that our computer for reasons best known to itself tucked in a cross-reference reading "Pathology of the Patient See Much Ado About Nothing," or that on one run it assigned each subject heading to the preceding title, thus misclassifying 44,000 titles on a single pass. I ought not to say this, of course. The rules of the computer game are that you talk only about what you are going to do, never Daniel Melcher is President, R. R. Bowker Company, New York. 49 50 about how it turned out. This is a science in which you publish the re- sults of your experiments before you make them. I have tried to get and publish stories of the sad aftermath of many noble experiments, but the trouble is that the victims will not talk. And more's the pity, because in failure there is much wisdom. Let me take the narrow view, leaving to McLuhan the consider- ation of what things will be like in 1984. Let me try to review how things are right now, with respect to the use of computers in the pub- lishing process. Most large publishers now have computers, and many small ones use computers. They use computers for the most part, how- ever, in exactly the same way that other industries use them for billing, accounting, inventory control, and sales analysis. Very few report any net savings resulting from conversion to computer, and most went through agonies in the conversion process. They all hope for tangible economies in the future, although it is a bit puzzling to note that the $5 million companies seem to expect those economies when they reach $10 million, and the $10 million dollar companies think there might be economies when they reach $20 million, and so on upward. The tangible results of computerization as they affect the pub- lishers' customers and authors are easier to identify. Computers have unmistakably lengthened the time it takes to fill an order, and have made it almost impossible to understand a royalty statement or get an intelligent answer to a complaint or query. The following ex- perience is only too true. A librarian received a piece of promotion for a set of art books and ordered them. When they did not come she sent a tracer. Pretty soon one set arrived with bill. A bit later an- other set arrived, without bill. She reported the arrival of the extra set whereupon came a form letter indicating that if she was dissatis- fied with her purchase in any way she could return it for a refund. She returned it with a note explaining that no refund was due. Of course, she received a refund. She returned the refund with further explanation and received another set of the art books. The biggest advantage always cited in support of this business department automation is that it will provide management with far more extensive operating information, more promptly. To the extent that this becomes effective, presumably publishers will be out of stock less often. Unhappily, the near-term result often seems to be that information formerly available by means of a telephone call to the order department is reported as unknowable until the computer makes its next periodic report. Of more interest really than the automation of clerical proce- dures is the automation of functions peculiar to publishing, notably type composition, indexing, directory compilation, SDI (selective dis- semination of information) , and machine translation. 51 So far the computer has made only modest contributions to the economics of typesetting. Quite a few printers are using small com- puters to relieve human compositors of their so-called "end of the line" decisions, that is, where to break the lines, whether to hyphenate, and so forth. I think it is fair to say, however, that thus far there has been no big breakthrough. Somebody must still keyboard the manu- script at some point. And this will be so for some time to come as regards most books. Only in certain kinds of directories and cumula- tions does the computer offer a means of getting multiple outputs from a single input as, for example, in the case of Books in Print where a computer can itself make the title index by inverting and resequencing the author entries. A firm of systems analysts recently claimed that they had found a way to cut typesetting costs by 80 percent. Careful study revealed, however, that the promised composition savings depended on getting the author to do the work of the compositor and further, of getting him not to make corrections in proof. Any publisher who could achieve those things could make spectacular savings with or without computers. It is true that some spectacularly high-speed type composing machines are becoming available, starting with the Photon Zip first used for the Index Medicus, and now including even faster machines such as RCA Videocomp, the Linotron, the Harris -Intertype and Alphanumeric 's Photocomposition System APS- 2. These promise a radical improvement in the quality of computer composition, although no breakthrough in the general run of book composition. They may help keep down the costs of such cumulations as Books in Print, and perhaps enable corrections to be made in a late stage of the publica- tion process. Automatic indexing is another way of using computers in the publishing process. Some progress has been made, and more will be made, but anyone who has ever tried to use a KWIK index, knows that computers have much to learn about indexing. Machine ^ translation of (say) Russian into English has been explored rather thoroughly. The results have been interesting, but to date the human brain still scores an easy win over the computer in this area. There is no doubt computers are here to stay. They are crea- tures of their time, and they come because they are needed. To my mind four factors are working together to put a computer in your future or mine, even if their full promise is yet to be realized. The first factor is the steady rise in the cost of human time. Not so long ago, anyone who wanted a card file of the advance book reviews in Library Journal would type up or paste up his own. More recently, given the cost of clerical help, he became glad to pay $100 just to have Library Journal duplicate on cards what he was already getting separately in the journal itself. Where once a library had only a single set of Books in Print in a central place, it may now have 52 multiple sets in several places. Where once a library bought card sets at 10 cents, it now prefers complete book processing kits at 29 cents, because of the saving in labor. With each upward boost in salaries and fringe benefits, new labor-saving services become more practical and former luxuries become present economies. The second basic kind of change is the declining cost of ma- chine time. Computers cost less, or do more. Other machines also cost less or do more. The cost of offset printing plates drops from $1. 50 a page to $1 a page to 50 cents a page to 10 cents a page, even to 5 cents a page in an almost unbelievable series of technical break-throughs. The third big change as I see it, after the rise in the cost of human time, and the decline in the cost of machine time, is the en- largement of the market. Where once only the biggest reference libraries would have bought certain kinds of new reference tools, now even high schools become prospects. There are more users among whom to divide costs. A fourth change is in our attitude toward time. We have become impatient with abstracting services that are two years behind, and national bibliographies that are up to five years behind. We want to learn more promptly about what is coming or is now ready, and to get it more promptly once we learn of it, and then to get it into ser- vice more promptly once it arrives. The pace is quickening. Out of these changes emerge many opportunities for improving information services, not all of which have been exploited by any means. In effect, in today's world, name it and you can probably have it. Out of these changes has come the reprint revolution under which long out of print items are coming back into print in droves: the count for the latest Books in Print is up from 190,000 to 240,000. Out of them has come the possibility of reprinting not merely editions of 1,000 or more, but even editions of 100, or 25, or even editions of one. Out of it all has come new interest in microforms, although there is precious little in either the reprint, mini- or micro- technology that was not rather clearly set forth thirty years ago in Robert C. Binkley's classic Manual on Methods of Reproducing Research Materials. 1 Out of the changes have come time-saving services like the enlarged new Forthcoming Books which not only looks five months ahead, but will now begin to provide cumulative information on everything published since the latest revision of Books in Print. It must be noted, however, that as yet the utilization of com- puters to meet these changing needs has been massively disappoint- ing. When an eminent Australian librarian came here in late 1965, filled with enthusiasm by the rosy projections of library automation which he found throughout our library literature, he was forced to go back reporting that almost nothing of the promise had come to pass, 53 or even seemed imminent. 2 He found just one seemingly effective automated system for claiming missing serials, and just one example of reasonably efficient over-all library automation, although even this depended on punched card technology more than on computers. Let's face it The glamor is in the computers, but the break- throughs are elsewhere. It ought to be news, big news, when one publisher bucks the trend, and provides same-day shipment on all orders received before 3 p.m. 3 It would be if he had used a computer to do it, but he did not. The computer is a marvelous machine, and it does some things marvelously well, like handling airline reservations. But all too often we find ourselves invited to applaud computer applications that are pretty much in a class with the dog who played the violin not because it was done well, but rather because it was done at all. A shining exception is the brief news item in a recent Library Journal^ which reports the candid recommendation, in a recent study, that a three- months experiment with a telefacsimile link between two South Carolina libraries be discontinued because of "excessive cost" and "infrequent use." One may hear that a certain encyclopedia is to be indexed by computer. Later one finds that it was, indeed, tried, but given up. It is reported that one of the book wholesalers has automated. Of course, his service goes into a tailspin, but ultimately straightens out. Did he get the bugs finally out of the system? Not a bit of it, he finally threw out the system. I talked to one wholesaler who had really made his automation work, but wound up with costs a good deal higher than a competitor's. I asked whether he really thought he could get his costs down; he said, "No, but I think his costs will rise he's automating too." Then there is the story that was told about the 3-M Corporation. Back in the days when a big corporation could not hold its head up without a computer, they went right along with the rest. But they were unusually well-advised on procedure and they recruited and trained an inside team of systems analysts and gave them a full two years to prepare the way for the computer. At the end of that time the company was able to report that the computerization pro- gram had already shown greater savings than anticipated, even though the computer itself had not yet arrived. In our own case, we began quite early to inquire about the pos- sibility of computerizing our bibliographies. Ordinarily the computer people would announce almost before looking around that their equip- ment was ideal for our needs and could save us much time and money. After study they would report that they could produce Books in Print in so many months for so much a page. Then I would have to break it to them that just using our old-fashioned methods we were already producing it in half that time and at half that cost, with greater legi- bility to boot. 54 Times change of course. I keep inquiring every year or so to see whether the rising hourly cost of people has yet crossed the de- scending unit cost of computers with respect to any of our projects. It is interesting to watch the action at the interface between the computer world and the printing world. I have a gambit I like to use on hardware people when they brag about how fast their machines can go: I say, "Yes, but your output is so slow." They bridle a bit and point out that even the least of their impact printers can knock out 600 lines a minute. I look sorrowful and say that we have a printer who can turn out better than two million lines a minute. They do not believe me, of course, but they ask what kind of printer that is, and I tell them it is a printer with a printing press. It's true. The web offset press which does Books in Print delivers 20,000 signatures an hour, each containing 32 pages, and 100 lines to the column. Now I know perfectly well that is not a fair comparison, but I think there is a grain of wisdom in it. You can, if you like, produce 250 book catalogs covering holdings of 50,000 titles, for an annual expenditure of something like $50,000. If, however, you are willing to settle for a book catalog covering not only your 50,000 books, but 190,000 others as well (namely Books in Print) , you can get the same number of sets of these far more all-embracing book catalogs for as little as one-tenth as much. This possibility invites thought. Suppose the Dewey or LC class numbers, or both, were to be added to Books in Print itself might this not offer most of the advantages of a custom-made book catalog- plus substantial additional advantages ?* The real glamor of the computer is at its chromium- plated best, however, when talking about real-time access to central data banks, from which an inquirer can get answers almost instantly either on a television screen, or in the form of hard copy made from the image on the television screen. This is a fascinating concept. I wonder, however, what proportion of our patrons are going to value this kind of speed enough to be willing to pay its cost. I have the impression that the man who is vaguely resolved to take out a copy of War and Peace, if he can ever find one on the shelf, is getting lumped in with the surgeon who has a patient hanging between life and death and needs quick advice from the National Library of Medicine. *With the successful computerization of the Books in Print data base itself, embracing Forthcoming Books and most fully demonstrated in the November, 1967, issue of Paperbound Books in Print, the Bowker Company is now prepared to offer also a custom "book catalog" ser- vice tailored to any desired specifications and benefiting to any de- sired degree from the daily maintenance done on the Books in Print data base itself. 55 Some time ago, attending a seminar on technological progress in publishing, I found myself eating breakfast with one of the speakers who was in charge of research at General Electric. He had told us the evening before that he thought books would be obsolete within a decade. I told him I suspected he did not really believe it himself but was simply trying to needle us. With an absolutely straight face he said that he did indeed mean it. I tried to kid him out of it. I said it seemed likely to me that ten years hence, or twenty years hence, or fifty years hence if my wife got up in the morning and felt like making a batch of raisin bran muffins she would still feel that the simplest approach to the matter was to reach for her trusty copy of Rombauer's Joy of Cooking. He implied that while there might be some problem about re- training my generation, he felt that the generations coming up would have learned to present not just some problems, but any and all prob- lems directly to the household's communications console. I asked him to give me a rough idea of how he saw this working in the case of the raisin bran muffins. He said I would go to the console and tap out the word "muffin." I asked him if perhaps keyboarding itself was not already obsolete and he apologized for overlooking this point and agreed that it was. He started afresh by saying that I would go to the console and simply say in words, "It's muffins that I want to talk to you about." He said the screen of the console would promptly flash a legend such as, "I have information on muff ins -hi story, muffins-nutrition, and muffins- recipes. Which aspect of muffins did you have in mind?" I reminded him that he had told us the night before that reading itself might be obsolete, thus making it impractical for a future gen- eration to read anything off a screen unless pictorialized. He con- ceded the point and amended his example to presuppose that the choices would be pictorialized or verbalized. He forgot about this a moment later though, when he had the screen showing me the table of contents of a cookbook and then any selected page from the cookbook. Well, I do not know. I have a feeling that ten years from now not only will my wife still have a copy of Rombauer in the kitchen, but so will my son, and so will my son's son. If nothing else it would surely be cheaper, even if interrogations of the console came as cheap as phone calls (which seems unlikely cost is a problem that is often glossed over). I see no reason to doubt that all of the promised electronic miracles are technologically possible. I have, however, the greatest doubts about how soon they are going to be really practical or de- sirable except in very special circumstances. In a very high propor- tion of current library inquiries, even our old-fashioned library methods provide fast and satisfactory answers. Of the remainder, 56 some would probably go unsatisfied anyway, and the residue might well survive modest delays rather than warrant involvement of heavy hardware. Consider if you will the number of librarians who are right now talking in dead earnest about real-time, on-line access to the holdings of other libraries, while at the same time accepting substantial de- lays on access to their own holdings. Consider the libraries which are right now cumulating orders for weeks instead of placing them daily and which are accepting four-week delays in delivery of the books by the wholesaler, six- week delays in processing, and twelve- week delays in binding serials, while trying for real-time access to data in other libraries where similar backlogs exist. I do not want to sound pessimistic because I am not. One can cite many nice little breakthroughs. At Bowker we began by just put- ting our information about Forthcoming Books on punched cards, using one not- very-terrifying keypunch. We then started re- shuffling the cards to get better statistics. Then we got a second keypunch. But we were still sending out the cards to a service bureau for listing. Then one day we discovered to our delight that we were, technically speaking, computerized that is to say the service bureau put our cards through its computer instead of through the far simpler card lister formerly used. The result was no different and they charged us three times as much, but it made us feel big league. Then we decided something had to be done about the horrid ALL CAP type you get out of computers. It was about 20 cents a page for ALL CAP, and $5 a page for taking the same computer output and feeding it through a linotype, or Photon. However, we made a few more calculations and concluded that if we operated our own Justo- writers we could get a really legible page for under $1 with real bookface type. So we plunged. We bought two Justowriters (they could just as well have been President Model Flexowriters) that would take punched tape from the computer and give us book pages ready for offset. It was one of the happiest experiments we ever tried. The whole staff was infatuated with those busy little machines, and lined up to watch them work. You could see what was happening; it was going on out in the open, not inside some black box. You could watch the machines fill in the running heads, and page numbers, and work their way around spaces for advertisements, and write both columns at once. On those machines we not only did Forthcoming Books but also two catalogs of children's books. We got the hang of inputting by Flexowriter and proofing from computer listings. We marvelled at how we could put in material in scrambled sequence and have it come back neatly sorted by author, title, subject and publisher, sometimes with impersonal little reproving messages from the computer like "You goofed price omitted." 57 Our next step up is to the Photon Zip; it was either that or buy 20 Justowriters. From this many other dividends may come. If you want any of this data in any kind of machinable form just say the word. We are tooled up to give you six months advance notice on books to come, changes of publication date, changes of price, books out-of- print, and so on, as often as daily if you should be interested. On call you could have it by subject, year, publisher, and so on. To be candid about it, however, I rather think that we could have done all this if anybody had wanted it, even before the invention of the computer. There are cases where you can do things with a computer that you could not otherwise have done at all. But there are many more cases where the computer represents only a small step forward in speed, economy or any other advantage, if that. And there are probably even more cases where the most efficient way of doing some- thing by computer conversion would show no gain at all unless the comparison was with some former method that was hopelessly in- efficient by old-fashioned standards. This should not sound negative. The computer enthusiasts can point with pride to Index Medicus and Chemical Abstracts, and Science Citation Index. Publishing is going to be revolutionized by the computer without a doubt, although to date it has certainly been even more affected by such other revolutionary developments as cold-type, lowered offset costs, Xerox copying, microtechniques, wire transmission, and the spread of library service itself. One tangible and very imminent development is the use of Standard^Book Numbers. This has already made real progress in West Germany and Great Britain, and been adopted in principle by U.S. publishers, wholesalers, librarians and booksellers. Within the year, Standard Book Numbers (-or SBN's as they are called) will be- gin to replace the LC card numbers, and appear in even more places in almost every kind of listing, review, catalog, or advertise- ment. Their use will be optional, but increasingly useful in speeding book ordering, reporting on unobtainable items, checking of invoices, central processing and procurement, inventory control, and so on and on. Although Bowker's ventures into the world of computers have thus far been few and unsophisticated, we have still made our full share of mistakes, and taken our quota of punishment. Tuition in this school comes high. If I think back over things I wish I had known sooner, several points come to mind. In the first place, I have long since ceased to ask any computer man whether a thing can be done. The answer is always "Yes." Any- thing can be done, I guess. But that is not the issue. What matters is whether anyone in his right mind would choose that way of doing it. If I had not been through it, I would not have believed the idiotic advice you can get from systems analysts who should know better. One man, 58 after extended discussion of whether certain data could be got in two lines instead of three, came out in dead seriousness with the idea of leaving out the space between words. One man brushed aside a prob- lem involving incompatible formats by saying that you could convert anything to anything. I guess you can, if you can find the equipment, or if cost and delay are no object. But it can easily cost more to convert than to re-keyboard. My second piece of burnt- child cynicism has to do with reli- ance on outside consultants. It goes almost without saying that no reliance whatever is to be placed on any advice you get from a hard- ware salesman. In this situation, as in others, advice that is free of charge, but not free of motivation, is worth about what you pay for it. But the situation is nearly as bad when it comes to independent out- side consultants, nor can they really be blamed for it. The fact is, they do not, and could not know your problems, and they are no more likely to be able to pick up what they need to know about your prob- lems in a series of interviews, than you are likely to pick up what you need to know of their expertise in the same brief exposure. There is no substitute for inside expertise, and developing it is inevitably going to be a slow process whether you try to find it inside or out- side the staff. My third lesson comes from watching others fall on their faces. I am glad that I have avoided thus far any really big pratfalls. For the most part I have done my pratfalling in private; the temptations to try and fly before you can crawl are legion, but they must be resisted. Another lesson, which I feel I am just beginning to appreciate the importance of, is this: do not try to clean up an inefficient manual situation by a direct jump to automated methods. Clean up the manual methods first. It may seem double work, but without it, there is grave danger of blanketing waste motion into the automated plan. I know one big school system which uses five times as much time, money and paper to place an order as is remotely necessary. But instead of eliminating the red tape they are automating it. The worst pitfall in computerizing, to my mind, is batch pro- cessing. You do not hear about it in the beginning. Only later do you find that while your computer could do what you want done, it vastly prefers to do things its own way, with delays all along the line. It can delay your orders, delay your deliveries, delay your payments, and cut you off from ready access to your own data. Books are not obsolete. Not all inquiry is for easily tagged, / isolated facts. Much is for browsing, review, enlightenment, inspira- tion, entertainment, and for most of these uses the book is a supreme- ly efficient package. Nor is reading obsolete. Reading as a means of input to the mind is several times as fast as listening. The interaction between 59 mind and book is "on line" and "random access." For best use of computers we are told to avoid situations where the computer's capacity to process data is bottle-necked by its capacity to take in the data to be processed. The same logic can be applied to the mind. In a vast variety of situations only the book can provide input to the mind fast enough to stretch the mind. REFERENCES 1. Binkley, Robert C. Manual on Methods of Reproducing Re- search Materials: A Survey Made for the Joint Committee on Mate- rials for Research of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Ann Arbor, Mich., Edwards Brothers, 1936. 2. Bryan, Harrison. "American Automation in Action," Library Journal, 92:189-196, Jan. 15, 1967. 3. Scott, H. Fred. "Behind the Scenes at Britain's 'Best Shipper,'" Publishers' Weekly, 192:27-29, Oct. 23, 1967. 4. "Telecopier Experiment Report Released," Library Journal, 92:3584, Oct. 15, 1967. CURRENT TRENDS IN EDUCATIONAL PUBLISHING-A PERSONAL VIEW Robert J. R. Follett Perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of our times is the rapid increase in the rate of change. In whatever field one cares to look, the pace of change is accelerating. This is certainly true of education. Because educational publishing serves education, the really important trends in educational publishing are the result of changes in education or in society's view of education. My thesis, stated briefly and straightforwardly, is that there are two major trends at work in American education. The first is a shift in society's view of education: once considered an expense, education is now seen as an -Investment. The second is a shift in the emphasis from teaching to learning. Education as investment. Education as learning. These two phrases embody the ideas I hope to clarify and embroider. It will quickly be seen that the most important trends in educational pub- lishing are a consequence of these two trends in education. In 1958 total expenditures on education in this country were $21 billion dollars. In the current year, total expenditures on education will be $52 billion dollars, an increase of 147 percent in just ten years. Every indication is that expenditures on education will continue to rise. Yet while it is true that the contribution of the Federal government to education has risen spectacularly since Sputnik, it is also true that the Federal government's share of the total expendi- tures on education is still only 12.5 percent. Most of the increase in expenditures has come about because private citizens have made conscious decisions to spend more for education. These decisions have most often been made in voting booths when tax levies for edu- cation have been voted upon. Although it is generally acknowledged that increasing property taxes is the most difficult way to raise money, yet the citizens of this country have consistently voted to raise their property taxes in order to finance more and better educa- tion at all levels. These increasing expenditures are impressive, but they alone do not prove that society has shifted its view of education, now seeing it as an investment. This country has always viewed education as Robert J. R. Follett is Vice- President, Follett Publishing Company, Chicago. 60 61 important. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 made special provisions to see that schools were a part of the total development of this wilder- ness region. Since that time education has become an ever-larger function of government. Until recently, however, education was not seen as an investment of the same type as roads, dams or improved agricultural methods which had visible payoffs. Good schools were not seen as a necessary concomitant of economic growth. Today we are just beginning to believe that economic growth and well-being are tied to the level of education of vast numbers of people, rather than to a talented leadership alone. Although its truth is hard to establish, the belief is now widely accepted that California leads the nation in receiving defense contracts and obtaining research grants because of the magnitude of its investment in educational fa- cilities and programs. The connection between California's invest- ment in education and its success in obtaining contracts and grants has been cited by so many opinion leaders in Washington, in Califor- nia, and in many envious state capitals, that it has almost become conventional wisdom. This "conventional wisdom" is translated into action, for a num- ber of states and local areas have determined to lift themselves up by investing in education just as other states and communities have in- vested in roads or dams or bridges or harbor facilities to lift them- selves up. Some communities have now determined that the best way to overcome economic doldrums is to construct colleges. Community- financed factories to attract industry have long been a popular form of investment in community growth. Colleges are becoming another form of community investment. The view of education as an investment is particularly common in the South, where many now feel that the extremely low expenditures on education in the past have been responsible in part for the de- pressed economy of the region. Economic planners and politicians have both determined that increased investments in education must be made if the South is to move forward. In the so-called underdeveloped or developing nations, trans- portation and education are now seen as the primary areas for invest- ment. And if education is seen in its broader perspective including education in improved agricultural methods and commercial tech- niques, as well as in basic literacy then investment in effective education is perhaps the most basic investment requirement of most African, Asian, and Latin American countries. If we move our attention from the national level to the family level, we find that the vast majority of Americans expect their chil- dren to have an opportunity to complete at least fourteen years of formal education. They know very well that without this their children have less hope of achieving economic success or social status. Yet it was not so just a few years ago. In my lifetime there has been a 62 profound change in expectation. When I was a child, a majority of American youngsters did not finish high school. Only a tiny fraction went to college. Most of the top positions in business and government were held by men who prided themselves on being self-made, by men who had often never completed the eighth grade, much less high school or college. When I was a youth, it was expected that every youngster would finish high school. This would be the terminus of formal education for most citizens, with only a few going on to higher education. Top positions in business and government were then being held by men with bachelor's degrees. Now the expectations are greater still. It is generally expected that most youngsters will have an opportunity for at least two years of education beyond high school. Most of the top positions in our society are held by college graduates. The percentage of leaders holding advanced degrees is growing very rapidly and may already be as high as one-third. Beyond these changes have come others. When I was in school, education was generally regarded as an experience that occurred during only one period of youth. When your head had been sufficiently filled with knowledge you left school, never needing further educa- tion. The majority of citizens now expect education to be a lifelong process. They expect to be trained and re-trained several times during their working careers. They look forward to education in leisure-time activities. Graduation from school is no longer con- sidered the end of the learning activity for the rest of one's life. These changes, these altered expectations, have come about because our society has begun to see education as an investment that will produce tangible returns. An example will illustrate: we see Aid to Dependent Children, the of ten- maligned ADC, as an expense, not an investment. Social breakdown or individual malfunctioning have made it necessary to spend money to help the unfortunate chil- dren who are dependent. We suffer the expense because we are basically humanitarian toward children. But we tend to treat the mother as a sinner. We are generally reluctant to increase expen- ditures for ADC, no matter how carefully the need has been docu- mented. This is because we see ADC as an expense. Perhaps, however, it should be considered as an investment. If the children helped by ADC can grow up to lead productive lives as effective citizens, then their contributions to society, including their taxes, will repay the amount spent on ADC many times over. Indeed, a few forward thinkers do see ADC and other welfare payments as investments in human development that will pay back many times the amount invested. But society in general has not yet accepted that way of thinking. Society still views Aid to Dependent Children as I believe it viewed education some years ago as a necessary expense which has to be borne and as an expense which must be carefully controlled, reluctantly increased, and always given grudgingly. 63 Education, however, has now passed from that unhappy situation. The opinion of leaders in society now is that education is an invest- ment that will bring about tangible returns. As with all investments, there is concern that the money be invested as wisely as possible. In- vestment priorities continue to demand decisions. The quantity and quality of the return on the investment is the subject of much debate. But it now seems clear that eduction at all levels and in all kinds of institutions has come to be regarded as an investment rather than an expense. The major visible consequence of this change in viewpoint is the tremendous increase in expenditures on education previously men- tioned. Spending on every kind of educational program has soared, with no end in sight. After defense, it is the country's largest single area of expenditure. The realization that education is an investment has led to more time, as well as more money, being devoted to it. With Head Start programs and nursery schools and pre-kindergartens, a very large number of children begin their formal schooling at the age of three or four. Most of these children will not complete their formal schooling until they reach twenty-one, while many will continue formal schooling for some years after that. And all of the children now in our schools will have a lifetime of learning in the military service, on the job, at home, and in more formal programs at schools and colleges. More of each day, more of each year, more of each life- time will be invested in education. As with money, we expect this increased investment of time to have a payoff to society and to the individual. Because society is now willing to give education more money and more time than ever before, it is going to demand more in the way of visible results: compensatory education will be expected to free young people from the ghetto; vocational training will be expected to insure skilled workers; and education in general will be expected to produce literate citizens capable of enjoying satisfying leisure. Many school administrators and teachers have not yet tuned in on the new climate of opinion. Too many are not yet ready to be judged in terms of their results but are still talking in vague gener- alities about turning out good citizens or effective adults, without defining specifically what behavior they have taught to bring about good citizenship or effective adulthood. The coming years are going to be difficult for educators who are not willing to be measured by tangible, observable results. For those educators who respond to the new role of education, it will be an exciting time. They will have more resources at their command, higher status in society, and more power to influence the course of society. But the dull, mediocre, time-server will find him- self increasingly pressured and increasingly uncomfortable. 64 And what about the educational publisher? Well, there are dull, mediocre, time-serving educational publishers, too, who will find themselves increasingly pressured and increasingly uncomfortable. The educational publisher who can serve the new education, whose products and services can bring about tangible, observable results, will prosper. As more money becomes available to spend on educational materials produced by publishers, it is only natural that there will be closer scrutiny of the quality and effectiveness of these materials. Less attention will be paid to esthetic values and more to the results obtained from use of the materials. If we invest in a publication, what educational payoff can we expect for our investment? To many publishers this seems a harsh standard, but it is the standard that society has a right to expect when it decides to invest large sums. Both education and the materials used should be judged on the rigorous standards of any investment is the return satisfactory? Let me now turn to the second trend that I want to discuss, the shift from teaching to learning. From long before Socrates until our own times the teacher has been the core concern of education. The educational process has been focused on the act of teaching, and most of the arrangements of edu- cation have been made to facilitate teaching. But now we are slowly coming around to another belief. Perhaps learning is really the core concern of education. Perhaps the educational process should focus on the act of learning. Perhaps education should be planned to facili- tate learning. Some of the implications as well as the visible aspects of this shift from teaching to learning are discussed below. When the em- phasis is on teaching, it is desirable to have students in groups, their size being primarily a function of the kind of teaching and of the mode of communication. In a learning- oriented educational environment, however, the emphasis is on the individual learner. A large mute group of thirty, or three hundred, or whatever number is inappro- priate, because in any group toward which a single teaching message is directed there will be a range of response. Some will not get the message. Only when the emphasis is on conveying a message to each individual can individual learning be certain. When I attended elementary and high school, all of the seats were securely fastened to the floor. They still are in many schools. All of the seats faced front, toward the teacher. The teacher ranged the front of the room, at the desk, by the blackboard, sometimes standing at the head of a row. The whole physical arrangement of such a classroom was designed to facilitate the act of teaching. Or consider the university lecture hall with its podium in the front and arcs of seats arranged so that every student faces the teacher. In a large hall with hundreds of seats focused on the teacher's podium, can 65 there be any doubt about where the emphasis in education is? It is obviously on teaching. But in other parts of the university there are carrels or tables around which the seats are placed without a focal point. We are be- ginning to see new arrangements for individual study. The focus of such facilities and arrangements is obviously the act of learning, rather than the act of teaching. In most modern elementary schools, furthermore, the desks have been unfastened from the floor. Many schools have individual study carrels and other facilities that promote individual learning activities. When the emphasis is on the act of teaching, it is obviously most efficient to have rigid schedules to which the movements of students are geared. These schedules insure that groups of students gather at the appropriate time in the appropriate place to be taught. We all know that learning does not take place in this way. We do not learn in rigid time blocks. We cannot begin learning when the bell rings and stop when it rings again, although it is easy to begin and stop teaching when bells ring. In a number of colleges and universities there is greater emphasis on independent study, on having the learner allocate his own time in terms of the needs of the learning experi- ence. Most such programs are experimental, but they are widespread. The high schools are just beginning to experiment with flexible scheduling. It is too early to tell whether the time is ripe for this idea, but it is obviously necessary if learning is to replace teaching as the focus of the schools. Elementary schools have been much more flexible about time. In the elementary classroom, good teachers have routinely permitted individual students to work independently at their own pace. In the kindergarten one youngster may paint for ten minutes, while another youngster paints for two minutes, cuts for twenty minutes, and just stares into space for ten minutes. There is great individual flexibil- ity. For still younger children there is almost a completely flexible independent schedule for each individual child. Perhaps that is why most of the available research indicates that the bulk of learning occurs at a very young age. Perhaps we learn best then because we are free to schedule our own time in relation to the real needs of the learning task at hand instead of being scheduled by outside forces to suit the convenience of the teacher. Intertwined with the emphasis on teaching has been the emphasis on enculturation. If the purpose of education is enculturation, then it is clearly not desirable to permit each individual learner to learn what suits him. Enculturation demands that the act of teaching be emphasized, for only by emphasizing teaching can there be assurance that the key aspects of tradition, custom, law, mores, and so forth are correctly transmitted to the next generation. With enculturation as a primary purpose, the act of teaching becomes the central core of education. 66 I believe our society is beginning to doubt the value of encultur- ation as a goal of education. A more practical goal in today's world is preparation for change. Society is beginning to see the importance of preparing each individual to cope with rapid and unpredictable change. To cope with change the individual needs skills and attitudes that are quite different from those needed for entrance into the es- tablished culture. The skills and attitudes needed for change must be learned individually. If we seek to prepare children for change, we need to shift the emphasis of our educational process from what is taught to what is learned. Through much of the history of education, a primary purpose has been preservation of the past. Perhaps this is the same thing as enculturation. This focus on preservation of the past has made the teacher the central figure, and indeed only a great teacher can build the images and convey the values that make the past seem relevant to our own times. But the focus is changing. Gradually society is accepting that education's major role must be to prepare individuals for the unknowable future, and this inevitably shifts the emphasis to the learner. What counts are the skills, attitudes, and knowledge that will serve him for a future that will inevitably be different from the present. In the past, education concerned itself with imparting to students a fixed body of knowledge. It was easy to conceive of the student as an empty bucket to be filled up with knowledge. Between empty buckets and pourers of knowledge, there is no question of status. The one who pours must be the focus of our attention. It is still often tacitly assumed that there is a body of knowledge to be poured into the minds of students, and hence we tend to see teaching or pouring as the key function. In many schools, knowledge is now recognized as a shifting, changing thing. In these schools, the focus is on process, on learning skills and learning processes, rather than on teaching as such. Skills learned by the student to cope with changing knowledge are seen as much more important than specific bits of knowledge. Let me now shift gears. In the old days, there was a real but unspoken chasm in school between "us" who sat at the desks and "them" who stood at the front of the room. Teachers were beings apart and we took pride in seeing how much we could put over on them. But what happens in some of today's classrooms when the teacher does not stand at the front of the room, but sits in a circle with the students ? What happens when the learning process involves discovery and it quickly becomes obvious that the teacher is dis- covering along with the students ? What happens to the unspoken war- fare when the teacher acts as a helper in the learning process rather than as the fountain of knowledge and discipline ? Perhaps some of the zest of making spitballs and sailing paper airplanes is lost. My 67 own children seem to be more serious than I remember being. But they also seem to have learned a great deal more. In the elementary classroom particularly the role of teacher is changing rapidly. Authoritarianism is on the way out. It served well when education emphasized teaching. The teacher naturally fell into an authoritarian role, for did not society accord to the teacher the wisdom, knowledge, and power, as well as the responsibility, for the educational process? Now, however, in many schools, the teacher is seen as the orchestrator of learning experiences. He is not the fount of all knowledge, but rather he assists the learner to find the best sources of information and to pace himself and to evaluate his own progress. A teacher's role is in this way focused upon learning. In the past, schools emphasized competition among the students for grades, or gold stars, or praise. The basis for competition was to see who could absorb and regurgitate the largest proportion of the information presented by the teacher. Competition was seen by the teacher and by society as a way to motivate youngsters. The new education emphasizes cooperation. Whatever compe- tition among students may do for the ego of the teacher, it has been proven to be harmful to students. Competition does not facilitate the learning process nearly as much as cooperation, which reduces ten- sion and motivates greater efforts than competition. Despite the commonly accepted myth that competition is the way of life in the real world, almost all of us spend almost all of our time in cooperative activity. We are cooperating with our fellow workers on the job, co- operating with our family on home- centered tasks. Cooperation is a much more useful and meaningful and widespread mode of life than competition. In a learning- oriented educational system, competition will not be considered a prime motivator. What is one to do about grades ? They have been a part of the competitive system, usually symbolizing the proportion of the teach- ing retained and regurgitated by the student A grade of "A" has indicated that a student is able to give back between 90 percent and 100 percent of the material presented by the teacher, whether or not it is relevant to the student or even true. We have arbitrarily deter- mined that the ability to regurgitate less than 50 percent of the mate- rial taught is unacceptable, and we mark such a memory performance with a failing grade. What counts for the teacher is the amount of his presentation that the student gets. What counts for the learner is something en- tirely different, namely his progress from the point at which he started learning. In some schools, report cards have become prog- ress reports that really do try to give the student objective informa- tion about his own individual status and rate of growth. It seems clear that this type of grading if it can be called grading at all will become more and more widespread as the shift from teaching to learning continues. 68 Another aspect of the competitive, teaching- oriented system has been the existence of the normative test. The normative test is one which compares students with each other. This kind of test is ex- pected to produce the so-called normal or bell- shaped curve of scores. Normative achievement testing is an extremely important part of the typical schools. It is a big business, too. But the typical normative test is only a sophisticated measuring device of teaching- oriented education. It is really not very important to know that a student is better informed about certain facts of history than 75 per- cent of the other students who have taken the same test. The impli- cation of such information is that the test actually contains information that all students must be taught. Such a test serves the teacher's ego by separating those who have memorized the teacher's presentation from those who have not. But the normative test does not inform the student directly about what he does not know or only partially under- stands. The normative test is not a diagnostic guide to future learning activities. In a learner- oriented educational system a different testing program is needed. I like to call the tests in such a program *yes- no" tests. They are often called task analysis tests. If the task is to add two plus two correctly, then the test can simply analyze whether or not the student can perform this task. There is a clear-cut cri- terion. Such a test produces either "Yes, the student can add two plus two correctly," or "No, the student cannot add two plus two cor- rectly." From such tests comes the diagnostic information by which the individual learning process can be directed most productively. This type of test can be embarrassing to the teacher. When the teacher has presented the information that two plus two equals four, and ten children score at the low end of the curve on a normative test, the teacher normally takes comfort in the thought that these children are dumb, stupid, disadvantaged, or otherwise unable to absorb that which has been taught. The task analysis test, however, implicitly assumes that everyone can learn the task. If ten children have not learned that two plus two equals four, there is likely to be a deficiency in the way this information has been presented. The fault now lies with the teacher and not with the student. It is now up to the teacher to take steps to present the information in some other way to these ten students so that they learn to perform the task correctly. In my mind such an orientation is wonderful. One of the most heartening days of my life in education was the one when I realized that the IQ, as measured by IQ tests, was not fixed and immutable, as I had been taught in college and graduate school. What joy to find that we really did not know any limits to the ability of human beings to learn. What a challenge to find that the responsibility for pro- ducing student progress could not be evaded by blaming poor per- formance on an unchangeably low IQ. The day that the IQ came 69 unstuck was for me the day that I began to recognize that teaching as the core concern of education would be replaced by learning. The real impact of this change has not yet really been felt by educational publishers. Few colleges or universities operate so as to emphasize student learning. Whether it is a vast freshman course or a small graduate course, it is likely that a standard textbook will be assigned that closely follows the oral presentation made by the pro- fessor. The entire emphasis will be on the act of teaching. But some of our newest colleges are changing. By many differ- ent means, they are emphasizing learning. In such colleges the mar- ket for the standard basic textbook is substantially altered, and a much larger market for books and other instructional materials is provided. But for the publisher who has tailored his operations to the production and distribution of basic textbooks in large lots, this new type of college is most unsettling. And when it uses computers and videotape machines and micro-image storage and retrieval, and many other technological devices which seem to reduce the market for books, the publisher looks even more askance. In only a few of our high schools and elementary schools has this shift to learning had much impact. The effects on publishers are yet to come. The number of schools that have reorganized their curricula and practices is small, and even for these, the restrictions of state and local adoption and purchasing practices make it difficult to move away from the standard basal textbook. But I believe the trend is unmistakable. An educational system focused on learning requires much more sophisticated diagnostic devices. It must accurately pinpoint the exact status of each student and more effectively indicate the activi- ties that will produce learning. It requires a tremendous diversity of materials, which must be responsive to the individual student's most effective learning mode and to his style and pace of learning. There must be materials which proceed very slowly and carefully to help the student who is having difficulties, and there must be materials that go beyond anything we now have in permitting students to follow their interests. This means that the library as a learning center must be ex- panded tremendously. And it means that the publisher must devise ways to supply the materials in a manner that is economically feasible for publishers, authors, libraries, and tax-payers. From what I see today, none of these groups is entirely ready for the kind of expansion in service to learning- oriented education that is demanded. By and large, publishers have been reluctant to change their long- established habits, founded on a teacher- oriented educational system. These habits, based on building a standard product for simultaneous use by hundreds of thousands of students in thousands of classrooms, have a strong economic basis. Mass production, mass 70 distribution, and mass consumption have made the educational pub- lishing business quite a profitable industry. Publishers, by and large, are reluctant to change when they have a good thing going. But change is being forced upon them from the outside. There are scores of projects going on in universities, in school systems, and in regional educational laboratories aimed at producing instructional materials for use in learning- oriented programs. These new projects are a very serious matter for the educational publishers, for they represent a separation between the publishing industry and the most forward-looking educational innovators. If this separation persists, it will have drastic consequences not only for the publishing industry but also for education. If the publishing industry does not attune itself to learning- oriented education, it will leave the field to government- sponsored publishing efforts which are likely to evolve into government- controlled publishing programs. Then the natural conservatism of the politician will replace the creativity of the researcher in deter- mining what shall be published. Publishers are not likely, in the long run, to be as conservative as congress. I believe, however, that there are a number of educational publishers who recognize the current trends in education and who are hard at work producing instructional materials that will meet the needs of a learning- oriented educational system. The two last points I shall discuss are teacher militancy and the classroom of the future. The trend to teacher militancy will have an important impact on the future. Recently thousands and thousands of teachers went on strike. It was a very visible manifestation of deep dissatisfaction with pay, prestige, and power. Teachers force- fully demanded higher salaries, more prestige and status, and more power in determining what happens in the schools. By and large they won a major portion of their demands, but I predict the strikes will be more wide spread in the future. In the short run, teacher militancy will retard the shift to a learner- centered school. In the short run, the one to two percent of the school budget presently allocated for instructional materials will be eroded as some part of that money is shifted to pay increased teacher salaries. In the short run, the teacher will become even more dominant in running his classroom as he sees fit. But in the long run, the result will be substantially different; teachers cannot expect to be true professionals, compensated at truly professional levels, and not be evaluated on performance. Tax- payers and school boards will not be willing to pay every teacher with the same education and length of service the same salary, no matter how good or how bad his performance. Merit ratings and merit pay seem to be an inevitable consequence of the professionalization of teaching brought about by strikes. 71 The idea that there should be one professional teacher for every thirty students is going to be killed as well. We have established such an ideal ratio for $6,500-a-year personnel. It is not likely to be prac- tical for $12,000-a-year personnel. Greater specialization of function is coming with the introduction of teacher aides and other para- professional personnel. We may ask a $6,500-a-year man to wipe noses, collect milk money, and check hall passes, but it seems un- likely that we are going to want to use the time of a $12,000-a-year man on such low- level activities. We will employ more differentiated and specialized personnel in the schools. And this will bring about a situation where the highly-paid professional will be responsible for the learning activities of several hundred children and for the supporting activities of a team of para-professionals. However, it is unlikely that there will be enough people available to fill all the requirements for sub-professional work. Medicine has already found that the nurse, the nurse's aide, the lab technician and other sub-professionals are in extremely short supply. The response to this personnel shortage must be automation and a greater depen- dence on devices, instruments, and materials prepared and installed by outside organizations. In the long run, the publisher will have an opportunity to play a much greater role in education and get a larger share of the educational budget because of the forces that have been made visible by the teacher strikes. Now, what about the future ? Learning will take place at home, but the major learning ex- periences will still be in schools. Although the school day will prob- ably begin and end at fixed times it is likely to be longer than it is now. However every student may not attend for the full time. The school may well be open at least eleven months of the year, and many schools will be open during the evenings for individual study by stu- dents and by adults in the community, as well as for various group recreational, educational, and civic activities. Much of the student's school day will be self-paced, without rigid schedules and time blocks, although there will, of course, be certain scheduled events, for group activities are desirable and these need to be scheduled. Each student will be assigned to a teacher- counselor. In addition, he will have an individual study carrel or module. At some place there will be a computer terminal to which he can go for a variety of purposes. The student must check at fre- quent intervals on the point he has reached in learning, where he has come from, where he is going, and what alternative routes are avail- able. The computer will store and present this information. It will also store a continuous record of the student's progress in every area from the moment he came into the educational process. Test data, information on the student's physical condition, socio-economic factors, and all other information that might be of importance will be stored in a data bank. 72 Other computer data banks will store learning activities. These learning activities will be geared to specific tasks, to the attainment of specific knowledge, skills, or attitudes. The use of these activities will be likely to produce measurable behavioral changes in the desired directions. In fact, the learning activities will be chosen in terms of their proven ability to produce measurable or observable changes in behavior. The learning activities stored in the data bank of the computer will be graded in terms of the level of difficulty and separated in terms of the learning mode to which they are directed. They will be classified as group or individual activities, either teacher- or self- directed. These learning activities will form the core of the cur- riculum. There will be such an extensive bank that each student will be able to follow his own personal course of study based on his own needs and capabilities. I do not believe that most or even many of the learning activities presented to students in the future will come directly from the com- puter to a teletype or video screen or other computer output device. A large percentage will be found in the conventional media, and the printed word will probably provide the greatest source of learning activities. The computer is quite likely to direct the student, when asked what is the appropriate learning activity, to turn to chapter twelve of his textbook. I believe that students will continue to read books; they will also see films, listen to tapes or records, study pictures, and even listen to lectures. But the learning activities will be tailored to the specific learning needs of each individual student. After each block of learn- ing activities, he will be tested or observed to determine if his per- formance or behavior has been changed. For example, in the case of arithmetic number facts, the results of a test presented by the com- puter may be fed back into the computer for entry into the student's data bank. An analysis may then be given to the teacher- counselor if action seems necessary to improve the student's performance. If the learning activities are to promote good citizenship, for example, the computer would provide the teacher- counselor with a checklist of observable behavior patterns that indicate good citizen- ship. Observation would determine whether or not the student ex- hibits the behavior associated with good citizenship, and analysis by the computer would determine whether or not he had made progress, and if not, what additional learning activities might be appropriate. A major task of both para-professionals and the teacher- counselor will be to praise, reassure, support, encourage, and take a personal, warm interest in each student. This should be more pos- sible with the greater individualization of instruction. The teacher- counselor may not be talking to thirty students all day, but it is quite likely that he will be able to talk privately and personally with each 73 student every day. I believe that even five minutes a day of personal conversation is worth more than five hours of group lecturing. Some of our best schools already have the kind of learning cen- ter that will serve students. It is merely an expansion of what our best school libraries have always been, and its heart is its book col- lection. The collection is certainly not restricted to textbooks; any book which can make a contribution to a student's learning is a likely prospect for the learning center. It will also include video screens hooked into a video tape library. There will be computer terminals for drill and for other kinds of learning activities. There will be objects and recordings, and all kinds of other materials and machines available for learning. Most of them are already developed and can be observed in use somewhere today. The activities of the student in the school of tomorrow will certainly be changed. There will be much more individual work. Much more flexibility of time allotment. Many more kinds of learn- ing activities. A continuous record of student progress. A much greater emphasis on the realization of individual potential rather than on conformity to group norms. Although their activities will change, students will adjust quick- ly. The teacher's activities will change just as much, but a good many teachers are going to find it extremely difficult to change to meet the new requirements of their profession. Extensive programs of re-training will be needed. Changing the average teacher from lecturer to counselor will take a lot of doing, but I believe that once teachers recognize the opportunity that this change affords, they will respond. Such schools are beginning to be developed, some in old build- ings; some in new. Computer systems are being developed and tested to take over the massive record-keeping job inherent in a school de- voted to individual student progress. Flexible scheduling, team teaching using para-professionals and the teacher- counselor concept, and the learning center with individual study carrels are all in use in schools today. Yet the gap between the best and most innovative schools and the poorest schools is huge. Only through a massive investment of funds and massive commitment to change can we begin to close this gap. Because of our national belief in education as our best investment, I think we will do what is necessary, although we may move slowly, uncertainly, and often with loud argument. This movement in education makes the future of educational publishing look bright. The old-line companies with their emphasis on the single basal textbook may founder on the shoals of change. The electronic giants with their glorification of hardware are likely to find that educating individuals is not a product of the weight of hardware just as these same companies are finding that winning a 74 ' war in Vietnam is not the product of the weight of hardware. But the educational publisher who keeps his eyes focused on the learner's needs, who is willing to develop and distribute the instructional mate- rials that are best suited to solving the individual's learning problems, and who further keeps in mind the importance of economy such a publisher will grow and prosper. In educational publishing, the most visible current trend is change. The major thrust of this change, as I have shown, comes from two areas. First, our society now views money spent on educa- tion as an investment, not as an expense. As a result a great deal more money is committed to education, and this increased spending in turn leads to further change. Second, the core concern of education is changing from teaching to learning. This emphasis on learning is having profound effects upon the organization of school activities, upon the activities of the individual learner, and upon the activities of the teacher. In the school of the future, as it is affected by these two major changes, there will be an important role for the educational publisher. A LIBRARIAN LOOKS AT AMERICAN PUBLISHING Edwin Castagna How does, and how should, a librarian look at publishing in 1967? As a minor customer buying a small part of the output of a large industry? As a fellow member of the nation's communications apparatus ? As one of the last of the Mohicans upon whom the tribe of McLuhanites is about to count coup? Is the librarian like one of a boatload of frantic voyagers in immediate danger of drowning in a roaring river of print loosed by publishers? Or may librarians and publishers be thought of as linked in a symbiotic relationship like that of the Egyptian plover and the crocodile? The plover helps the crocodile as lookout and oral hygienist. In return he gets the delicious leeches he finds along the crocodile's gums. Both partners benefit. However one describes the publisher -librarian relationship it is obvious we each have important functions in the series of processes from the writing of a book to its publishing, and on to its selection, acquisition and presentation to the reader. We share in the crucial responsibilities of maintaining our country's information network. In any successful partnership there must be assurance on the part of each member as to where the other stands. But the publisher is often more like a chameleon than like a crocodile. He appears to himself and to others in different colors at different times. In the pleasant book, Now Barabas by William Jovanovich, president of Har court, Brace and World, we find a number of those whimsical and self-doubting statements to which publishers are addicted: It is no doubt because the publisher can at once be regarded as a scoundrel by his authors and as an idealist by his bankers that he suffers a certain ambiguity over his own identity. . . . Millionaires have of late discovered that book publishing can be stimulating, especially if the mixture is at least four parts text- books to one part literature. Articles on books now appear in Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. * But after having said that, seeming to put publishing in the effi- cient camp of big business, Jovanovich writes: Of publishers it may be said like the English as a race they are incapable of philosophy. They deal in particulars and adhere Edwin Castagna is Director of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Balti- more, Maryland. 75 76 f easily to Sydney Smith's dictum that one should take short views, hope for the best, and trust God. 1 Sir Stanley Unwin, in his preface to authors in The Truth About Publishing, classifies his calling in a matter-of-fact way as he writes: Publishers are not necessarily either philanthropists or rogues. Likewise they are usually neither lordly magnates nor cringing beggars. As a working hypothesis, regard them as ordi- nary human beings trying to earn their living at an unusually diffi- cult occupation. 2 A more skeptical view comes from Eugene Lichtenstein, review- ing, in the New York Times Book Review for October 8, 1967, The Making of a Publisher: A Life in the 20th Century Book Revolution, by Victor Weybright. Lichtenstein gives the back of his hand, not too sharply, in these words: Most editors and publishers like to think of themselves as professional men, their endeavors essential to the cultural life of the nation. These are harmless conceits with just enough truth in them to sustain illusion and permit a necessary self-deception. The fact is, of course, that publishing is primarily a business enterprise and that editors are rewarded for their commercial acumen and successes. 3 In the last paragraph of his book, Jovanovich puts his occupation on a lofty plane: To publish is, of course, to make something known to the public. No part of publishing, whether its concern is with educa- tional or general works, whether or not its financial support is wholly private, should be made safe from the common gaze or free from common criticism. One can hardly exaggerate the influence of books in the national history or their pertinence to the contem- porary national experience. What one can do, and I suspect too many publishers are prone to it, is to be content that the impor- tance of books is obvious, their continuance is assured, and their permanence is inevitable, when, actually, any work that relates to the public interest must be constantly reappraised. One needs to ask, currently and repeatedly, what the public interest is and what kind of publishing, among other forms of education and of the arts, will advance and enlighten it.^ Remembering then, that the publishers "are not necessarily either philanthropists or rogues," that what they do "is primarily a business enterprise" and that "common criticism" is justified and expected, with the continuance of books assumed to be "assured" and their permanence "inevitable," let us look at publishing from the point of view of the librarian, keeping in mind "the public interest" and our symbiotic bond. 77 Some of the more obviously significant trends in American pub- lishing are the enormously increased output; the mergers and com- binations of publishers and of publishers with communications businesses such as television, electronics, computer manufacture, etc.; the publication of material which represents the ultimate in frankness about sex; and the increase in prices. Less obvious trends, but still of major importance to libraries, are the tendency of books to go out of print quickly, and the proliferation of small publishers who seem to pop up like mushrooms as the older firms gather together in gigantic concentrations. Also of importance to librarians is phys- ical quality of books, including binding, printing, and paper. I believe I would be remiss if I did not refer to the pricing practices of some publishers which have led to suits for the recovery of damages. This is a very tender area. Unless confidence can be reestablished be- tween libraries and those publishers who have violated the laws and overcharged the customers, many of us are likely to see the publisher as rogue rather than public servant. Another problem in publishing, if not a trend, which is of deep concern to librarians, is discussed in an article by David Wise en- titled "Hidden Hands in Publishing. "5 its substance is given in the first three paragraphs: It is rather remarkable that there was so relatively little public indignation when it came to be known earlier this year that for a decade, the United States Information Agency has secretly paid publishers and authors to produce books sold not only over- seas but in this country as well, bearing no government label what- soever. And it's more remarkable that it's still going on. First, a bit of history. The government has poured more than a million dollars into clandestine literary endeavor since the USIA program was launched in 1956. Some of the $1,027,899 was spent on the production of simplified books in English confined to distribution overseas, but the bulk of the money $570,850 of it went for the subsidization of U.S. publishers through the purchase of books "that would not be written or published for the commercial market without Agency encouragement. " In all, 104 titles were subsidized this way. Another $183,905 was used directly to commission authors or publishers to produce 46 manuscripts much in the manner of a short order cook whipping up intellectual cheeseburgers. ( USIA will reveal the titles of only seven of these tomes; why the names of some have been disclosed and others not is a mystery to which only USIA, presumably, holds the answer. ) Although it is said that these books were produced primarily for distribution overseas, in virtually every instance they were also sold by their commercial publishers in bookstores in the U.S., without attribution as government merchandise. 78 A Librarians feel a strong responsibility, not only for the content of the material they acquire for public use, but for its authoritative- ness and the motives in publishing it. The practices described by Wise are a serious barrier to gaining information on these points. What better way to spread a miasmic fog of suspicion to poison and obscure a relationship that should be characterized by mutual trust and confidence? Unless the plover can be sure of the crocodile's motives, the partnership will not be worth a leech. I do not know what defense, if any, publishers involved in the practices described, have to offer. Better than explanations would be assurance that the practice is irrevocably stopped and will not be continued. It may be said that publishers were just trying to do a patriotic duty for the government. I cannot accept that as an explana- tion. Whenever there is a sale there is a purchase. And it appears integrity has been bought and sold. There are other areas in which one wonders whether there is a trend or not. For example, how is publishing responding to special needs? Where are the gaps? How well are publishers reaching mar- ginal readers ? Scholars ? Students ? And what about the other side of the coin? Is there overpublishing in some specialized areas? And what about intellectual quality? Are the publishers actually bringing out for public scrutiny the best and most creative contributions in all fields of knowledge ? Or is the alleged business mentality that has been introduced into publishing a barrier for the dissenting, noncon- formist thought people of a democracy need to lay against the "con- ventional wisdom" if they are to enjoy real freedom of choice? During the three decades I have been reading the Publishers' Weekly, it has grown from a limp little piece you could slip into a good sized pocket until it is now often bigger than Time Magazine and gaining on Fortune. When it falls on the floor it is not with a whisper but with a thump. And no wonder. Because it now advertizes many and lists most of the titles published in the United States, and these have tripled since 1936 from 10,000 to around 30,000. It is true library staffs and budgets have also grown. But analysis of 30,000 titles, and the prospect of far more than that num- ber in the next few years, creates a serious problem for those who must in their book selection process carefully evaluate most of the material they acquire. When you add the increasing publishing output of the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth countries, and the rest of the world, it is clear the librarian's job becomes steadily more com- plicated and time-consuming. It is difficult for the smaller libraries, which are in the majority, and must be selective in their purchasing, to identify those books which are significant now and meaningful for the future. The implications are obvious. The publishers are not likely to restrain themselves and cut back to a "manageable" volume. So the 79 librarians must increase their numbers and/6r improve their methods for making intelligent selections. As to the mergers in publishing and the growing big business involvement, this is reflected also in the swollen Publishers' Weekly's listings of the stock price quotations of publishers. One of my col- leagues at the Pratt said: I believe the most important trend is the disappearance of the family publishing house and the amalgamation of publishers with electronic and industrial firms so that we are seeing the be- ginnings of the big combine in publishing as in other fields. The influence of this trend is bound to be far-reaching. Publishing is and has always been a business in which the profit motive has played a part, but publishers in the past have often published books they knew would have a limited appeal and probably lose money. With the trend toward bigger and bigger combines and greater emphasis on sales and wider markets in all parts of the country, the controversial or limited in appeal could easily be eliminated. For example, textbooks of American history for elementary and secondary schools designed to sell widely still virtually ignore the contribution of the Negro, in spite of the urgings of Negro leaders and some educators. Also, I wonder how much this trend is con- tributing to the slowness in meeting the need for adult easy read- ing materials. The market for textbooks for elementary school through college is assured with all the federal money pouring into elementary, secondary, and higher education, but that for adult basic literacy texts and supplementary reading is still not definitely defined, so publishing in this field is pitifully small. Some years ago, as he was leaving the Presidency, General Eisenhower warned the nation of the danger of control by the industrial- military complex. Now big-time science and research are full partners in the complex. Are we witnessing a concentration of power in the information industry which threatens public access to knowledge? I hope not. But if, following these mergers, more effec- tive computers are constructed, with the capacity to store and com- municate the pertinent facts in some important area of inquiry, with storage in the computer taking the place of conventional publishing and access to the information through remote electronic consoles, what happens to the library's function and responsibilities? Do we plug into the network? And on what basis? Will the public pay a very high price, as it now does for many of its public utility services which are operated as monopolies? It seems to me this crucial question of access to knowledge and information must be resolved by librarians and publishers working together in their roles as public servants and vendors of public services. 80 Another trend in publishing which affects libraries, especially public libraries, but to some extent school libraries as well, is the publication of books which are explicit to the last detail about all matters pertaining to sex. In Roger Burlingame's Of Making Many Books: A Hundred Years of Reading, Writing and Publishing, a history of Charles Scribner's Sons, there is an amusing passage involving Maxwell Perkins, the famous editor. There is Perkins sitting "with a manuscript of Ernest Hemingway on his lap" in conference with Mr. Scribner: Perkins. . .explained that there were three probably unprint- able words in the script of The Sun Also Rises. "What are they?" Mr. Scribner asked. Perkins, who never uses a stronger phrase than "My God," and that only in times of great emotion, found that he simply couldn't say them. "Write them then," said Mr. Scribner. In his chicken-hand track, Perkins scrawled two of them on a memo pad and handed it to him. "What's the third word?" Mr. Scribner asked. Perkins hesitated. "What's the third word?" said Mr Scribner again, giving the pad back to him. Finally Perkins wrote it Mr. Scribner glanced at the pad. "Max," he said, shaking his white head, "What would Heming- way think of you if he heard that you couldn't even write that word?" Obviously we have come a far piece since that surprisingly bashful editor could not bring himself even to write a four-letter word. In 1967 publishers, as the song from Oklahoma says, "have gone about as fur as they can go. " When we have the complete works of Henry Miller; the Marquis de Sade; My Secret Life, than which there cannot possibly be anything more pornographic and which is referred to on its cover by Max Lerner as "a long-buried classic"; and the erotic manuals of India, China, Japan, and other sexy old civilizations ( not to mention the flood of paperback pornography which steams up the thousands of racks in bus stations, drug stores, and book joints where furtive men look for juicy bits) have we not reached the end of this road? When you have repeated all the four-letter words, all the sexual epithets, and given step by step instructions on all possible variations of the sex act, where can the pendulum go but back in the other direction? I am not complaining about the spate of erotic books. Frank- ness about sex has become part of our way of life and maybe it has made that way a lot healthier. And sex pays, whether sold in the flesh or in print. What we have now in sexually frank literature is 81 not only that which is indigenous to our own culture. We have the sum of all the pornography of all time available for acquisition. It is a tough practical and personal problem for librarians torn by the ten- sions caused by their own upbringing in a more repressed way of life and their wish not to be prudes or violators of The Library Bill of Rights. Their situation is not made easier by a practice of too many publishers, who try to make a book of questionable value acceptable by adding an introduction by a Ph.D. or M.D. Often these doctors turn out to be rather obscure, if not mythical. A recent cartoon pointed up the cynicism of some publishers. It showed two of them looking over a manuscript. One was saying, "The redeeming social value is o.k. But I'm not satisfied with the pornography." Interesting as are these hot books which fascinate, stimulate, worry and sometimes sicken us, let us go to another important area of concern. Since libraries are somewhere in the middle of the cycle which begins with intellectual creation and ends with use, it seems appropriate to think of our basic objectives and responsibilities in relation to our crucial position in this process as we respond to the publishing output. Most libraries share several common objectives. They aim to find, identify and collect what is relevant for their users. Then they attempt to organize it for convenient use. And finally the more aggressive among them try to stimulate and encourage the use of their collections so their communities of scholars and citizens may be informed, enlightened, prodded, disturbed, inspired, and de- lighted. In this process the use of the library's collections stimulates further creativity on the part of the users. If this is true it becomes appropriate for a librarian to inquire into the degree of excellence in the publishing output. The question of how well publishers respond to the needs of the library's public must be considered. And the question comes up of how well the pub- lishing output expresses the spirit and genius of the time. Since li- brarians like to consider themselves as channels of information and custodians of reservoirs of knowledge, it is logical to look at the publishing output to determine whether it represents a channel for new thought, innovative ideas, useful syntheses, and summaries of important fields of knowledge. Or does it represent a roadblock across the path of the creative questing spirit? For help in answering these questions and related ones I have consulted some of my associates at the Pratt Library. One of the most pointed responses came from two librarians with long experi- ence in the fields of business, science, and technology. Their memorandum, labeled "The Library and Publishing: Trends That * Cause Us Trouble," contains the following points: 1. Habit of publishers of "cashing in" on new "waves," crazes, fashions, for example: bonsai; ikebana; Japanese gardens; poodles; computer programming and data processing; weight 82 reducing diets; popular psychology and self-psychotherapy; hypno- sis; attacking doctors, medicine, and medical care in general; auto safety; air and water pollution; old automobiles. This practice puts a great strain on library budgets, tries the patience of book selectors, and clutters up library shelves, especially since some of this stuff dates quickly. 2. Senseless duplication of basic texts, while other subjects cry out for updated texts chemistry, physics, genetics, calculus, new mathematics, topology, set theory, college health texts, biol- ogy, electronic circuits, mechanics of materials, accounting. We end up with a plethora of new titles, all of which cover about the same ground. Every assistant professor who can push a pencil feels com- pelled to write up his class notes into a text and publish, thereby easing his transition into an associate professorship. What about possible agreement among publishers? 3. Many common, practical subjects are still overlooked by publishers in a hurry to "cash in." Examples: building book cases; laying floors and roofs; stair building; marble work; stone and marble cutting; garage building; putting in windows and doors (harder to find full details than one would think); practical con- crete structural work for the workers, not the foreman; how to manage an engineering office, a drafting room, a machine shop, in practical terms, and a number of other skills one must learn on the job or from the foreman. Telephone line jobs, gas and electric company field and line jobs, typewriter repair, blueprint making, telephone operator jobs. 4. Excessively expensive textbooks. They are handsome, but need they be so typographically beautiful and fancy? Costs to students and to libraries seem to have been forgotten. Students are not buying these books to keep forever, nor are libraries. 5. Proliferation and splitting up of journals. Three now exist where one was before. This is epidemic in the scientific and engineering fields. Prices are skyrocketing also. Too much overlapping, too little editorial scrutiny, perhaps too much free- dom of publishing. Need every little thought be published? Even medical men are complaining aloud about the mass of trivial stuff, and duplication, that gets into print. 6. Extreme difficulty in getting replacements for missing issues of journals, as well as indexes. Long waits, lack of suc- cess. Would you not think the publishers could automatically send indexes to libraries ? But they do not. 7. The vanity publisher who peddles the creation of some 10th rate specialist. Some examples: something "proving" Ein- stein and Freud were all wrong; new theories of the cosmos; the discoveries and life of "a famous specialist." 83 When such a book is the effusion of a local author, we are in for trouble. 8. Need for lower cost publications. However, in business, economic, and investment fields, it now appears as though every third title is published only in soft cover. Is the cost of issuing a hardback cover also too prohibitive? We hate spiral bindings. 9. Titles announced months ahead of publication and, after much delay, no further information as to definite date of publica- tion. Bookkeeping for both publisher and purchaser is difficult in this situation. After listing these nine troublesome areas it is not surprising that my associates concluded, "you can see that the book selector's life, like that of the policeman, is not always an easy one." Just for good measure, or maybe to rub it in a little more, they clipped to their comments a copy of an editorial from Medical Science for July, 1967, titled, "Lint- Gathering As An Academic Career. "7 From the area of the social sciences and history come the com- ments of another veteran member of the staff: Over the years many subject areas have been fashionable. 12-15 years ago, quantities of books came out on the problems of aging. In the late 1930' s and early 1940' s, the experts predicted the population would be stabilized by 1975 and the profile would be heavily skewed on the side of the older group. So the sociologists, the economists, the physicians, and the philosophers jumped on the band wagon and we had a lot of books, pamphlets, magazine arti- cles (not to mention whole magazines), documents, and serials. The predictions were not too long in being overturned and the age jump is now weighted in the favor of the young. At present, duplication is found in material on the disadvan- taged population. Where two years ago, there was a handful of titles, there are now over one hundred. Potential reorganization of Congress has brought out 10-12 books in the last few months, many of them repetitive. The assassination of President Kennedy produced dozens of titles, of which only a few are significant. Another general problem found in most subject areas is the frequent revision syndrome. Comparisons show little change but the trend grows. From the reference area come the comments of an experienced librarian and her staff. They are worth listening to: There are two publishing trends of concern to reference li- ^^ brarians. The first is the recent growth of reprint publishers. Reference materials are now available to libraries which only a few years ago would have been impossible to acquire. Prices are high, undoubtedly based on small printings. New library 84 collections, needs of established libraries, federal funds, etc., are all factors involved in pricing reprint books. There is also a sur- prising price variation among publishers offering the same material. Another area of concern is the form in which advanced list- ings of books appear in Publishers' Weekly, Forthcoming Books, etc. These indexes are now compiled by computers, and because of cost, each entry is kept to a minimum. It is often impossible to tell whether the book is a new edition, a revision, has been en- larged, is a reprint, a reissue, etc. I asked those I consulted not only to list their gripes but to comment on publishing services worthy of commendation. Singled out as an outstanding venture is the publication of the National Union Catalog, scheduled to begin in 1968. Plans call for 610 volumes. The British Museum Catalog, published between 1857 and 1966 in 263 volumes was mentioned also "a unique accomp- lishment and a tremendous contribution to bibliography" providing us "with an unparalleled index to the literature of the western world." I know this is beyond the scope of our concern, which is American publishing, but it is possibly an incentive for us now and then to look over the fence and see what big eggs are being laid there. From a knowledgeable librarian serving the general public with a popular collection come remarks on overpublishing for students: There are many paperback editions of classics and near classics with study guides and interpretations. These vary in quality. ... I think this a field overpublished as several different publishers may issue the same book with different notes and short, not particularly scholarly, introductions. This librarian also comments on the lack of publishing attention to the general reader when she writes: This seems to me one of the most neglected areas. It is true that writings of creative artists reflect the life of the times and all phases are to be expected and desired, but there are so few com- petent readable novels in a stratum between the experimental and the admittedly sensational. A publishing development all librarians applaud is that of bring- ing out good books in large print. The 18-point type used by Keith Jennison, Franklin Watts, Harper, and other publishers makes readers again out of many people who have given up because they cannot deal with 12-point or smaller type. These publishers are issuing mostly adult titles in excellent format. I hope they are successful and con- tinue to expand their output 85 An art librarian makes these points, all of which seem pertinent: 1. Examples of duplication during the past year or so: "World of Art Series," 14 volumes, Praeger; "Art of the World Series," 18 volumes, Crown; "Great Art and Artists of the World Series," 10 volumes, Franklin Watts; "Landmarks of World Art Series," 10 volumes, McGraw-Hill. 2. Needed reference works: Who's Who in American Music; the last edition was 1951. 3. Publishers' commendable issuing of material: There are now paperback editions of excellent, scholarly works on the arts, both reprinted classics and recent writings. There were few such a decade ago. College and university demand is the probable cause. 4. Manufacture: American publishers now make use of the finest facilities in the world, offering volumes with text printed in Holland, plates in Germany, etc. The only decline in the quality of the physical product is in the bindings some of which, from Europe, fall apart after one or two circulations ! Since children's librarians still acquire a greater percentage of the output of the literature in their field than do adult librarians, comments from a perceptive children's librarian should be of interest. She writes about "the flood of publisher's library binding net price books," and says: The tendency of most publishers is to make titles available only in library binding after the first printing. Two very alarming effects are: the extreme limitations of available juvenile titles for book store trade, and for the library it means trade editions are not available (which in many instances are more desirable) and a disproportionate amount of book funds is burned up in net price library bindings. An interesting trend is the publication of children's books originally published in other countries. Margaret McElderry, juvenile book editor for Harcourt, Brace, was a leader in this. The whole field of the American picture book for children has developed since 1928 when Wanda Gag's Millions of Cats marked the beginning of a trend that has blossomed into a very important part of juvenile book publishing. The art encompasses a wide range traditional, realistic, modern, stylized, woodcuts, collage and abstraction, the latter being the least successful so far. 86 As with adult books, children's books reflect the times. For example, there are books on economic and social problems affect- ing children. The first "problem" book was Doris Gates' Blue Willow published in 1940. Since then the trend developed dispro- portionately, but within the past ten years it has leveled off. "Problem" stories have appeared for children of all ages and from the majority of publishers; romance for the adolescent and young teenager. The first such title was Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly in 1942. The trend has grown and continues. There is ex- pansion of the "problem" book to include the emotional; acceler- ated emphasis on science fiction and science; and a more recent trend to include grim realism. Limited vocabulary books for beginning readers commonly known as "easy-to-read" are coming out. Basically this trend started with the nearly simultaneous publication of Little Bear by Else H. Minarik and The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss in 1957. Again the majority of publishers of children's books have gotten into the "easy-to-read" swing. This trend came about through an expressed need for books with some originality in story and artistic worth in illustrations. Some have been successful, others not. As you know, along with the great work children's librarians are doing in expanding the reading public, young adult librarians have also been busy with excellent results. Here are the observations of one of the best in the country. After listing books by James Baldwin, Claude Brown, Sammy Davis Jr., Lorraine Hansbury, and Gordon Parks, this librarian writes: Youth do read about the Negro and not just Negro youth. However, the book about the Negro does much to stimulate reading among a large segment of the public who formerly read very little. They like the strength of the authors just mentioned. The books stimulate, inspire, and develop compassion among white readers. In 1952 Scribner's stuck out their neck when they published Two and The Town by Henry Felsen. Libraries walked on eggs when it came to frank presentation of pregnancy out of wedlock. I remember a big argument about it at the 1952 New York ALA Convention. Most libraries rejected it or put it "behind the scenes." Even the first Pratt staff review said: "Obviously a problem such as this does exist, but Letters to Jane and Toward Manhood offer more to teenagers than a story of this type." For- tunately, the Y Coordinator overrode the original decision and the title was bought for all agencies. I remember a phone call which came to a branch library concerning Two and The Town. The Y librarian had given the book to a 9th grader and had visions of the irate mother or father's complaint about this story, now considered very tame. The parent had a few words to say, but in a different 87 tone than was anticipated: "How wonderful that such a book was available for my son. ^and she commended the librarian on her book selection and common sense. Sometimes librarians are too timid and parents more progressive. But the publishers shied from this subject for years and even now tread with care. My Sweet Charlie by David Westheimer could classify under books about the American Negro because it deals with the relation- ship between a Southern white girl (pregnant by a white man and cast out of her home) and an intelligent, educated Negro (on the run after killing a man during racial violence) who are thrown together in extreme circumstances and develop compassion for each other's situation. This book is readable, a little corny, and very human. Our good readers like it as well as the reluctant ones. Westheimer deserves an award for this book which I am sure has contributed to racial understanding. Factual books on sex education are of great importance for young people. We buy any which appear honest and clearly written. Love and Sex in Plain Language by Eric W. Johnson is the best we have reviewed in recent years. Still, the original reviewer was a little put off by the utter frankness and clarity of a book which was written for 6th graders and up. I believe we convinced her that it was just these points which made the book valuable. It has a lot to say to adults who possibly do not know all they think they know about sex. Among teenage girls sympathy is prevalent for polio, cancer, and cerebral palsy victims, brain damaged children, lepers, the blind, the deaf, the deformed, and most recently, the psycho- logically disturbed. The publishers have obliged with many such titles, both fiction and nonfiction, too many to name. But the out- standing one is John Gunther's Death Be Not Proud, and a recent star is Hannah Green's I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (a teenage girl, a schizophrenic, in a mental institution). Books of high interest and low reading level appear all the time. So far Pratt YA collections have bought very few because our regular trade titles run a wide gamut in difficulty say 4th grade and up and generally are less condescending than most special series for readers with reading difficulties. However, this is a trend and we follow it with interest. My chief criticism is the dullness of most of these. I am still not convinced that a public library should stock them unless the demand for them is more obvious. In addition, this young adult librarian found teenagers respond- ing with varying intensity to long or short-range trends in the publi- cation of "psuedo Gothic novels," science fiction, fantasy, man's inhumanity to man as exemplified in The Fixer by Malamud and The Diary of Anne Frank, spies and intrigues, and man against nature as in Kon Tiki and Piccard's Seven Miles Down. 88 t I have placed before you my thoughts and those of some of the ablest librarians I know. Our responses to trends in American pub- lishing are probably not surprising. There are undoubtedly significant trends we have not commented on or even recognized. But what has been said, I believe, does show that we publishers and librarians have a big budget of common problems on which frank discussions are needed. Children's librarians have set an example others might follow and profit from. The children's librarians are in a close and friendly relationship with children's editors. There is an ongoing fruitful ex- change of ideas which, over the years, has helped make the publica- tion of children's literature and the profession of children's librarian two admirable aspects of American culture. Since we are in a symbiotic association with each other, we should make the most of our common purposes. These are the identi- fication of the significant intellectual contributions of our time, their careful preparation for use, and the organization of a distribution system assuring broad and easy access to knowledge and information. This will make possible the further enrichment of life through the creative stimulation that comes from the printed word and will come from any improvements on print that are developed. If we do those things we will have a long and happy association before us. Our species will not become extinct and we need not fear replacement by others better adapted to survive in a world of potentially disruptive change. Let us be instructed by the cooperative example of the Egyptian plover and the crocodile without being too particular about which is the plover and which the crocodile. REFERENCES 1. Jovanovich, William. Now Barabas. New York, Harper & Row, 1964, p. 7. 2. Unwin, Sir Stanley. The Truth About Publishing. London, Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1947, p. llT~ 3. Lichtenstein, Eugene. "Shakespeare and Spillane," The New York Times Book Review, 72:24, Oct. 8, 1967. 4. Jovanovich, op. cit. , p. 215. 5. Wise, David. "Hidden Hands in Publishing," The New Re- public, 157:17-18, Oct. 21, 1967. 6. Burlingame, Roger. Of Making Many Books. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946, pp. 73-74. 7. "Lint- Gathering As An Academic Career," Medical Science, July 1967, p. 64. BOOKSTORES: A MAIN DISTRIBUTION AGENCY FOR BOOKS Louis Epstein I am neither a librarian nor a publisher, and the topic originally assigned to me, "Main Distribution Agencies for Books," is so vast that I know of no single person qualified to deal with the whole of it. However, one sentence in the invitation to participate in this con- ference put some limit to my assignment and gave me hope of being able to fulfill it; although, the invitation said, "you are particularly interested in bookstores, ... we feel that your experience and point of view qualify you to discuss this topic for an audience of librarians. " Those are the terms I accepted and those are the terms on which I must be judged. I am not an authority on book clubs except where they hurt the bookseller. I am not an authority on wholesale booksellers except where they are inadequate. I am not an authority on discount houses and price-cutting booksellers except to the extent that they are vultures on the main body of bookselling. I am not an authority on college bookstores except where they take advantage of their tax-free, rent-free status to compete with me. I am not an authority on library jobbers, nor on technical or specialty book stores. I do know some things about retail bookselling. And I am interested in practically everything pertaining to the book. It is worth remembering that librarians and booksellers are both at the final end of the book distribution system. They are the only ones in the system who face the ultimate reader across a coun- ter. They have problems in common. They each have to choose their stocks from the vast number of available titles, they each have the problem of adequately housing the publisher's product, and they each have to find ways and means of paying for their stocks, either from a budget or from a cash register. Both are directly affected by pub- lishing trends. I think that in discussing trends it is good to look back at the phase we are leaving in order to get a better realization of the phase we are going through and the phase we are approaching. A good start- ing point is provided by a report by O. H. Cheney issued in the de- pression year of 1931, entitled Economic Survey of the Book Industry 1930- 1931 1 and prepared for the National Association of Book Pub- lishers. The Bowker reissue of 1960, with an introduction by Robert W. Frase, 2 is still available. The lot of the bookseller as described Louis Epstein is the owner of the Pickwick Bookshops, Hollywood, California. 89 90 in that report was not a very happy one; nor were the lots of the wholesaler, publisher and librarian any happier. Here is how it was. The book club was still only a very minor part of the book distribution system. There were few bookstores left in 1931, and of the few, hardly any were really solvent. Most librar- ians spent what little money was allotted to them at the local book- stores. Then, as now, the publishers and booksellers were at each other over discounts and returns. The competition for the few dol- lars the public spent on books was fierce. There was no knowledge explosion and no paperback explosion. There were no electronic bookkeeping machines, and there were no magazine giants publishing non-books. There were no pornographic books, except for a few which were kept well hidden and which were only for a select trade, and there were no children's books written by the selected word count system. There were no government sub- sidies C. LA. or otherwise to publishers, nor were there any to libraries, and Wall Street kept as far away as possible from the pub- lishing industry. The annual publishers' output was less than 10,000 titles and the Trade List Annual was very, very thin. I could oversimplify and conclude at this point by saying that all one has to do, to grasp the situation today, is to change all the pre- ceding negative remarks to positive ones. But how has the picture really changed between 1931 and today? It has undoubtedly changed greatly, but has the trend that changed all the negatives to positives really improved the main distribution agencies for the publishing industry ? As a trade bookstore operator I can see very little improvement. One would think that now, with the knowledge explosion and the resulting need for more books, with the immense increase in popula- tion together with the increase in education, there would be vast numbers of new book buyers. True, there are more books and more people wanting them, and money to buy them. There are now 250,000 listed in Bowker's Books In Print, and 40,000 titles listed in Bowker's Paperbound Books In Print. It is sad to relate, however, that of the quarter of a million titles listed in Bowker even the best stocked bookstore would carry no more than between 60,000 and 70,000 of them. Of the 40,000 titles listed in Paperbound Books In Print, no more than half a dozen stores in the United States would carry over half of them. The percentage of available books stocked drops very rapidly in the medium-sized bookstore, and drops to an infinitesmal percentage in the small bookstore. There are many reasons for this situation, some of which I will mention later. A list of the largest bookstores in the country reveals a re- markable fact. Kroch-Brentano of Chicago started early in this century; Barnes & Noble of New York is a very old name in the trade. Brentano's is another old and famous name; the firm went bankrupt 91 during the depression and has since had two different owners, the present one being Crowell-Collier, publishers and owners of the Mac- millan Company. The Scribner bookstore is owned by the publisher of the same name, as are the Doubleday shops. The Cokesbury chain is owned by a church organization. The Pickwick Bookshops started in the middle twenties. I make this listing to indicate the startling fact that, although we have gone through the greatest period of growth ever recorded in the publishing industry, there has not been the matching growth of large, well-stocked retail outlets. True, many of the stores mentioned have opened sizable branches, and many excel- lent medium- sized and small stores have opened during the publishing explosion, but in all they do not begin to match the growth of publishing. Of what avail is it to the bookseller to have 250,000 hard bound book titles and 40,000 paperback titles in Bowker, if he can buy rela- tively few at a discount big enough to allow him to make a profit? Or of what use is this vast assortment if the bookseller cannot afford the proper amount of good business space to house them ? Or if the book- seller chooses to stock up, can he afford to meet the competition of book clubs, discount houses, and direct selling by the publishers to the institutional market at discounts equal to and sometimes better than discounts offered booksellers ? Can he afford to meet the com- petition of department store book departments which carry only the top best- sellers and a thousand or two of the best- selling staple stock items? To cite one example: The Death of a President** was to have been to the bookseller the biggest bonanza of the century. It had more advance publicity, good and bad, than any book in my memory. Booksellers were urged to, and did, stock up to the limit of their credit. By the time the book came out the Book of the Month Club was offering it, along with two other best- sellers, for $1.00 to a new member of the club. Every discount house in the country offered the book at cost or less. The radio and TV news about the book was not about whether it was good or bad, but about the price at which it was selling. Needless to say, the bonanza turned into a fiasco. The book- seller was put to shame before his regular customers who had placed advance orders for the book; his sale of the book dropped to a small portion of what he had ordered, and the cost of returning the unsold copies ate away most if not all the profit on the copies he did sell. The knowledge explosion has created a vast number of scien- tific, technical and text books of which but few are available to the bookseller at a prof it- making discount. The bookseller who does get special orders for these books faces a loss on every transaction. The paperback book explosion, fused into the existing inefficient book distribution system, has further complicated the bookstore operators' problems. Space is not available to most booksellers to 92 stock a reasonably complete collection. The discount to bookstores on mass market books in most sections of the country is a dismal 20 to 30 percent, and the bookseller handling them makes no profit on his sales. Along with the knowledge explosion has come an explosion of publishers. The bookseller now must deal with hundreds which did not exist as little as twenty years ago. They may be very small or very large, but each has a different discount schedule, different sell- ing policies, different returns policies and different billing proce- dures. The unending, detailed paperwork is tremendously costly. Roysce Smith, of the Yale Co-op, in a recent editorial in Publishers' Weekly, 4 was quoted as saying that in a recent six month period in his trade book department he dealt with 505 different publishers, and in the textbook department with 365 different publishers; and that the book department, which accounts for only one-third of the total store business, accounts for 85 percent of the store's paperwork. Bookselling would be much more simple if the bookseller had a few adequate wholesalers from whom he could get his product, or even just a small proportion of his product. The entire industry, publisher and bookseller alike, deplores the lack of enough adequate jobbers. The few existing wholesalers carry only the major titles of relatively few publishers. They cannot afford to carry more because the discounts allowed them by the publishers are too small to enable them to make a profit. Some of the country's largest and best whole- salers such as McClurg, Baker and Taylor, Campbell and Hall, have become library suppliers, and practically ignore the retail bookseller. Most areas of the country have no wholesale book service at all. The bookseller's investment is in constant jeopardy. The books he buys from the hundreds of thousands in print may be wrong for his locality. The books he buys each season from the publishers' repre- sentatives, usually sight unseen, represent mere guesses as to their salability. The pressure to buy more and more titles is terrific. Some of the new combination firms publishing and electronics, or magazine and book publishing have introduced into the present distribution system a product and a type of selling totally unsuited to the main structure of the book trade. Much of it consists of non- books and the selling is on a slide- rule basis. If you are a large account the salesman has already been told to pressure you for a prearranged quantity, and so on down the line, by size of bookstore rather than kind of bookstore. The product offered is very often of an ephemeral news nature, hastily and cheaply put together. For example, within thirty days of the Israeli victory in 1967, bookstores were offered no less than a dozen Life-sized editions of accounts of the war. The text had appeared in newspapers and magazines before, and the illustrations were the same ones the public had been exposed to many times in magazines, newspapers and television. One or two such books would have been sufficient. 93 A great many of the products which publishers offer the retail book trade are unsalable. A great many are repetitive and imitative. Bookstores do not need six or seven different series of children's classics, each series composed of the same titles. Bookstores cannot sell the thousands of titles of minor fiction issued each year. Book- stores cannot sell children's books written primarily for the school library market. Bookstores cannot sell all the pornographic books issued today, even those of good reliable publishers. Bookstores can sell but a few of the hundred or more expensive oversized volumes which are issued each year for the Christmas book trade. The book- seller is induced and pressured to buy most of them. He sells but a few and is forced to return the balance for credit by a certain date. A costly process. And should he miss the date he is stuck with them for good. The process of order-filling has become slower since 1931, thanks to the electronic systems. Book-keeping procedures have be- come more complicated. Mistakes, such as shipment of wrong books, are much more frequent with the larger publisher who uses more sophisticated electronic systems of billing and stock control. Once an error is made in one of these systems it becomes an endless task to correct it. The larger the order the slower the service and the greater the number of errors. All these flaws in the system are costly to the bookseller. It is, then, no wonder that so few booksellers can cope with all these problems and still make a profit. A recent survey conducted by the American Booksellers Association shows that one- third of the booksellers included in the survey are operating at a loss, and up to 25 percent more are operating at a net profit which equals only a modest salary for their capital investment. We booksellers love our business. It is no wonder then that so little new capital is being invested in the retail book business, and that the greatest meaningful growth has been within those houses which had gained a secure foothold be- fore the age of the explosions. As I mentioned earlier, the bookseller and the librarian are the only ones in this distribution system who sell or service the immense product of the publishing industry piece by piece across a counter to one single person after another. It is a very costly process for the bookseller, almost too costly. Is there a better way? In the long history of book selling no better way has been found. I am sure that the publishers are seeking a better way as earnestly as the book- sellers are hoping for one. One thing is certain. Only a small frac- tion of the potential book buyers are buying books, because only a small fraction of the total product is exposed to them. 94 , , REFERENCES 1. Cheney, Orion H. Economic Survey of the Book Industry, 1930-1931. New York, National Association of Book Publishers, 1931. 2. Cheney, Orion H. Economic Survey of the Book Industry, 1930-1931. Introduction by Robert W. Frase. New York, R. R. Bow- ker Co., 1960. 3. Manchester, William. The Death of a President. New York, Harper & Row, 1967. 4. * One-third of the Sales, 85% of the Paperwork," Publishers' Weekly, 192:No. 6, p. 36, Aug. 7, 1967. THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY PRESS Emily Schossberger Fifteen years ago the conveners of a symposium on "Trends in American Publishing" would probably not have invited a representa- tive of the then rather esoteric and little known field of the university presses. For until a few years after World War II and certainly for the two decades preceding it, the scholarly publishers on university campuses were hardly considered legitimate, far less as presenting an important segment of the publishing industry which had to be taken into account. With the exception of a few Ivy League schools, plus Columbia, Cornell and Johns Hopkins, and a little later of the uni- versities of Chicago and California, the academic publisher was con- sidered woefully amateurish. Thus the industry could well afford to ignore the scholarly presses, or to use them as places to which they could refer authors whose manuscripts, they knew, would not be profitable to publish. The label "a typical university press book" was used to characterize the often ponderously written, jargon-laden and treatise- like manuscript which might later find its published form in a drab, badly printed hardback of forbidding and voluminous proportions. For in those pre- sputnik days the campus publishers were mainly concerned with issuing research reports and monographs, primarily destined for the specialists and the libraries in their fields, and of interest exclusively to the academic community. Al- though many of these influenced the course of research, only very rarely was a book published which was destined actually to change attitudes or to bring such new insights that a whole discipline was born and not many presses were as lucky as Chicago at the end of the last century when it published John Dewey. During the nineteen-thirties and forties, before the "egghead" had achieved his post-sputnik recognition, his writings were either neglected especially in the humanities or branded as smacking too much of the ivory-tower mentality. Professors' books, written mostly for other professors or students and researchers in their fields, were subsidized by the parent institution and issued in small editions a rather costly enterprise as many university administrators came to learn to their sorrow. Yet such publications were always highly prestigious and contributed to the standing of the university proper Emily Schossberger is Director, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana. 95 96 by making the intellectual endeavors of the faculty available in print. This was the original motivation for the establishment of a press on a university campus, and it is still firmly kept in mind by those re- sponsible for the publications coming now from many different uni- versity presses, and this at a time when every twelfth book published in the U.S.A. comes from a scholarly press. The press on campus used to be represented by a professor who "ran the press" on a halftime appointment and as an avocation, with occasional clerical and student help and whose editor, in addition to supervising the publication of the college catalogs and announcements, edited the occasional scholarly manuscript. In the 1920' s an informal group representing the then (and now) big university publishers got together; this was the nucleus of the Association of American Univer- sity Presses (AAUP) , founded in 1937, which soon tried to lay a few ground rules for the academic presses. One of these laid down that to qualify for admission to the association, a press had to have at least five full-time employees, the director (no full-time teacher running it on the side !) and had to show a close connection with the university administration. The minimum "yearly output" at that time was fixed at five books a year, with a scholarly quarterly which appeared regularly being counted as one "book. " When I myself en- tered scholarly publishing in 1940, there were twenty-eight presses represented in the AAUP compared with sixty- eight in 1967, in- cluding some associate members from outside the U.S., who are ad- mitted under much more stringent conditions. However it was other outside circumstances, having nothing to do with the quality of research or the willingness of the university administrations to support such costly ventures, which brought the shrinking violets of the publishing scene to long-deserved promi- nence. At the end of World War n, materials for book production became available again, but steep increases in costs for paper, cloth, labor, replacement of machinery in the printing plants and the like, greatly influenced the calculations of commercial publishers. They suddenly found that their break- even point in publishing a book had risen from 2000 before the war to 3,500 and over. This meant that they had to publish editions of 4-5,000 copies to be able to show a profit. And since fiction was in great demand after the war by a tired reading public seeking mainly escape, publishers concentrated on this field rather than on the non-fiction book, which even before the war had lagged greatly in accumulated sales figures and which some publishers had taken on only for respectability's sake. Thus during the late forties, an "information gap" suddenly opened up into which the university presses were to step, some of them eagerly, others rather gingerly. But it was then, in the late forties and early fifties, that a certain "retooling" took place in the scholarly publish- ing industry, with an attendant increase in the number of university 97 presses, each financially guaranteed by its own university. For the academic publisher still was able, at that time, to break even with an edition of 1,500 on the average scholarly book, taking into account the small staff (paid by the mother institution) , the small overhead, and the already hotly contested tax exempt status. Even though it was a rare university press which could actually sell 1,500 copies of a scholarly book in less than three to five years, the start of a greater demand for their kind of books, first triggered by the GI Bill of Rights, and later by the burgeoning enrollments, made it possible to continue publishing in spite of the rising costs, even though much of the advantage of subsidies was passed on to the "consumer" in the form of quite low prices. Thus it came about that the university presses slowly and cautiously began to venture into the field of books for the general reader and not exclusively for the specialist. They brought to this task, of course, the access they had always had to first-rate scholar- ship, but also a greater professionalism among the publishing per- sonnel who recognized that to be successful in the new and wider "market place" the "product" had to improve. Slowly, directors and editors from the commercial scene began to appear on university campuses and contributed enormously to the growing trend to pro- fessionalism. It was in those days that the University presses began to take a bigger hand in guiding their scholarly authors by helping them to break through the barriers of jargon and academic gobbledy- gook and by proving that well-digested scholarship could be presented with wit and grace, thus making the learned book interesting and often exciting reading. So it happened that some university press books became choices of the Book- of -the -Month Club, which was not only a shot in the arm for the fiscal officer of the press ( although much less than was often assumed) , but which was also a great help in focusing general attention on the university press and in dispersing the generally-held prejudice that a university press book was by its nature a dull book. During this decade it was not only editorial skills which were sharpened to help the academic author communicate and reach the audience of the well-educated reader beyond the campus: the begin- nings of a professional setup for distribution and sales were made, and again a leaf was taken from the commercial publisher's book. Increases in press personnel were in the fields of design, sales and promotion, and production; these people worked together toward making the scholarly "product" not only excellent in content, but also aesthetically and graphically attractive and economically competitive, as well as widely available. The techniques of advertising space and direct mail were explored and pinpointed, and commission salesmen, furnished with attractive seasonal and general catalogs, travelled the width and breadth of the continent to show the forthcoming 98 books to the trade and take advance orders, while direct-mail spe- cialists were busy informing the section of readers most likely to be interested in a book of its scope, content and availability. But it took a long time to break down the distrust and unhappiness of the retail bookseller about the university press book which "nobody knows about because of lack of information, whose catalogs are written in incom- prehensible language, which are never available at the time announced and are extremely expensive to handle because they do not carry enough discount to make their stocking attractive." Then, towards the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties, the academic publishers began to profit from the "informa- tion explosion" and from a new phenomenon in publishing, the atten- dant "paperback explosion" which enabled the presses to profit from the increased enrollments by reprinting standard works or their own backlists for a mass undergraduate audience which was assigned "collateral readings." With the increased stress on education on every level and the upgrading of education in general as well as the increase in enrollment, the university publisher, able to attract the best minds on and off campus, often found himself able to publish one book which returned a profit. This meant that it returned more than the investment of editorial time, plant costs, advertising, selling and warehousing a very rare phenomenon indeed for the average aca- demic publisher. But so-called "profits" on one book were being plowed back to enable the press to publish the scholarly book for a narrow audience which would never "carry its weight," the publica- tion of which, however, was a duty in order to fulfill the press's calling, the enrichment of scholarship. And as the business of edu- cation grew, the demand for books also increased and manuscripts from all over the learned world came in or were solicited, not merely those resulting from the research of the university's own faculty, to publish which the presses had been set up in the first place. Scholarship is international and interdependent and the scholarly press in America, in order to keep up, looked to other countries, mainly in Europe and Latin America, and brought out many scholarly works in translation. Thus, the University of Texas "hit the jackpot" for a little while when it issued Platero and 1, 1 the poems of Juan Ramon Jimenez, who later in the year distinguished himself by win- ning the Nobel Prize for literature. In the field of theology, for in- stance, European scholars beat a new path; first it was the French, then the Germans and Austrians, and now the daring Dutch whose works in translation are forging new ways of understanding by pre- senting the teachings of Christ in relation to modern life. In 1961, the University of Chicago Press, one of the first to recognize the need for introducing foreign scholarship in translation, brought out a classic, first published in 1939, a landmark in historical- sociological writings, the late Marc Bloch's Feudal Society. ^ That some of these 99 books turned out to be highly salable probably contributed to the myth that university press publishing had become profitable and was "encroaching upon the domain of the commercial publisher," a com- mon recent complaint. The fifties also saw a strengthening and increase in importance of the Association of American University Presses, which as early as 1949 had conducted a survey, the now famous Kerr Report, 3 about the organization and management, financial and otherwise, of the presses then belonging to the association. A secretariat was estab- lished in New York to conduct association affairs. A look at the list of committees, such as Membership, Advice and Assistance, Inter- national Cooperation, Education and Training, and Library Relation- ships, will give an idea of the scope and the work of the association, which a few years ago also founded the sister organization of AUPS American University Press Services, which issues the highly valuable Scholarly Books in America quarterly, a handy information and order tool for the whole academic world, especially the libraries; AUPS also supervises and often mans the exhibits at scholarly meetings- more than two dozen rate as extremely important ones to attend; at the moment, furthermore, AUPS is at work on a cooperative bibliog- raphy for high school libraries. The scope and interest of AAUP is world- wide, as the explorative travels of some of the directors to investigate African and Asian university presses well testify. The work of the association on behalf of the thorny copyright question in Congress is well known, as is its cooperation with other associations such as the American Book Publishers Council. The committee on standards and admissions watches carefully to insure that each new press applying for membership fulfills the established requirements; it sometimes takes several years from application to admission, until the investigators are completely assured that the press has continuous university support and that its publications are on a high level and issued at regular intervals. For still, even with all the attention paid to sales, distribution, and balance sheets, the most out- standing characteristic of a university press imprint is that it is safeguarded by a board of scholars who must pass on every manu- script submitted to see that it meets standards, whose only criterion is the value of the book, and whose only question is: "Does it make a contribution to knowledge?" This is why a press has to be supported by its university and carried as a department of the university; none of the financial considerations which usually color the decisions in commercial publishing houses should enter its decision- making. Increased sales have been due to a great extent to the information explosion and also to the many grants which until recently enabled libraries to be more lavish with their spending dollars. An example may be enlightening here. The University of Okla- homa Press, while always true to its calling to publish the original 100 product of scholarship, skillfully entered the "general book" market with the very product it was called on to publish: the gold found in its own backyard. This Press soon distinguished itself by issuing the Civilization of the American Indian, and by constantly publishing works in Western history, long before the vogue for such books made the "commercial" venture of its Western Frontier Library feasible. These books were brought out in a small format at reasonable prices; they treated the histories, personal and otherwise, of the settling of the Great American West and have been a great success. Oklahoma is a shining example of the successful university press: regional and particular, general and universal works, all distinguished by good scholarship and extremely high standards of graphic presentation. Although one may speak of a group of publishers when men- tioning the academic presses, there are almost no two that are sim- ilar in character or, as we like to say, show the same profile. Leafing through the Directory of the AAUP, which also contains the three Canadian presses ( Toronto, Presses de 1' Universite Laval and McGill University Press) and the one of Mexico, one is struck by the diversity of scope and size, by the difference in numbers of employees both specialist and clerical, which range from five to a hundred and fifty or more, and by the variety of "output" which ranges from seven a year (Tennessee, Vanderbilt, Brown, Miami, South Carolina) to: 1965 1966 1965 1966 Harvard 135 133 Columbia 91 79 Chicago 139 137 Illinois 37 42 California 139 143 Kentucky 12 28 Yale 80 108 Oklahoma 39 50 Princeton 78 104 There is a rich sprinkling in the middle category which until two years ago used to be between fifteen and thirty, and now has gone to between twenty and fifty. Most midwestern presses are in this group, among them Notre Dame with fifty-five (thirty in 1965 and twenty-seven in 1966) . Their geographic distribution comprises all four points of the compass with the heaviest concentration, of course, on the eastern seaboard. But there are now nineteen midwestern presses properly speaking, and about the same number in the South. There is Texas, really in a category by itself, with special interest in Latin America and many translations from the Spanish and Portugese on its lists. Louisiana State University made a name for itself early in the game by publishing its distinguished series of southern history; North Carolina is well known for studies in sociology and race relations, while Nebraska is interested in its own pioneer heritage, publishing 101 books on the history of the state and colorful pioneer accounts, but also with a strong list in the humanities as well as a series on the renaissance theatre. Iowa State has staked out its domain in agricul- ture, agricultural journalism and veterinary sciences, in which the school excels, and has only recently branched out into the humanities. Such a short run-down (it must be cursory because it is im- possible to examine and evaluate the lists of all sixty- eight presently represented in the Association) indicates clearly not only the variety and diversity within a group, but also the many and various profes- sional skills needed to produce, advertise, market and sell the many books which together give an impressive picture of our present state of learning and thus of our civilization. A quick examination of Scholarly Books in America, the bibliog- raphy of all books published by university presses four times a year, gives at a glance a survey of the many fields in which the academic presses publish: Agriculture and Animal Sciences; Art and Archi- tecture; Biology; Anthropology and Archeology; Business and Eco- nomics; Chemistry; Communication Arts; Education; Engineering and Math; Geography and Geology; History with its subdivisions of African, American, Asian and European, divided into periods; Law; Languages and Literature; Linguistics; Literary Criticism; Folklore; Poetry; Music; Medicine; Philosophy and Religion; Political Science; Psy- cology; Sociology; and reference books of all sorts. All the foregoing is history. It held true until a couple of years ago, but the picture has started to change slightly. Although the un- precedented upsurge of publishing, caused by the many government grants and funds for libraries and new schools, has carried away the university presses to the point where they have all had to increase their programs to keep in step with increasing enrollments and in- creasing faculty "output," the dawn of a new era is appearing, one which will cause not a few breast beatings and soul searchings. First there is the competition. Time was when the commercial publisher referred the author of a too serious work to the university press because the book would not sell. Now many commercial pub- lishers are in competition with the university presses. Recently, Doubleday has started issuing in paperback a series of essays on philosophers which, had it been intended for hardback publication, would deservedly have been called a university press undertaking. Similarly, the attempts by publishers to tie up paper- back rights to university press books, as in Atheneum's arrangement with Harvard, are another indication of this trend. Some of Notre Dame's academic books of rather limited appeal have found their way to the paperback lists of Simon and Schuster and World Publish- ing, and co-publishing with commercial publishers (for example, Notre Dame- Association, Chicago-Kegan Paul, Notre Dame-Methuen) has been customary during recent years. The established academic 102 author is exposed to a constant bombardment from the representatives of the commercial publishers who swarm on campus, tying up not only the promising textbook, but often an outstanding symposium which might contain the germ of future publication. They too have upped the quality of their products, and now provide competition for the scholar- ly publisher who cannot always overcome the lure of higher royalties and better distribution through a vast sales force by insisting on the distinction of a university press imprint. Thus university presses are far from being a threat to the commercial publishers of non- fiction, who only a short while ago bitterly complained about competition from the tax-exempt publishers. It seems, therefore, that the once-sharp line of distinction be- tween the scholarly and hence non-profit publishers and the commer- cial houses is beginning to get blurred. Still, the university presses have never forgotten their primary obligation to the world of scholar- shipto make the fruits of scholarship available to the widest possible public. Contrary to the opinion of most people, even the experts in the industry, a university press never makes money. If we sometimes hit on a book which returns a modest profit and it has to be one that is either picked up by a book club or, in paperback, prescribed as collateral reading for undergraduates the money is ploughed back into the next books which will certainly produce a loss. Picture an industry which pays an enormous overhead because its employees are, and must be, subject matter specialists; picture a "product" which is very expensive to produce, especially with the modern printing ma- chines now aimed at speed, and which needs a lot of handwork and special attention footnotes, foreign language, math and other special characters; picture an industry which produced such a product and it now takes at least nine months from manuscript to book slowly and in limited numbers; which publicizes this product at great cost; and which pays a premium ( 10 percent to 15 percent) sales commis- sion, and then has to slap an additional discount on its product which varies from 10 percent to 50 percent. And then tell me if such a business, which in addition caters to the few who do not belong to the affluent society, could exist and would be at all viable if it were not both tax exempt and subsidized. That university presses make a profit and therefore unjustly compete with the commercial publishers is a legend which bears closer scrutiny. No university press (with the exception maybe, in particular years, of Chicago and Harvard) has ever made money. First, even though the university "subsidizes" the salaries, running the press like a department of the university, the money has to come from some source. Ask any state university how much difficulty it has with the legislature defending year after year the appropriation for press salaries and offices. In addition, the production of books costs the scholarly publisher much more than the commercial one 103 who does not touch anything under a five thousand or seven thousand run, as recently testified by that astute long-time publisher, Bennett Cerf.4 In the private institutions, when money is forthcoming for the press it is usually budgeted after momentous decisions about which department is more important, and if there is ever a conflict between, say, the department of psychology which needs a new professorship and a subsidy for the press, it will be the university department which carries the day. Thus the university press administrator is con- stantly on the watch lest his budget be cut, and lest the deficit, which it is his duty to hold down to manageable dimensions, exceed what was grudgingly granted at the beginning of the fiscal year. Even when a press says it "breaks even" this does not include the overhead or the other costs of running a business, such as getting the merchandise from the shelf to the customer, but only means that the cash expenses of turning out the product are matched by the cash receipts of sales and other subsidiary income. All presses depend on grants for spe- cial series and on one-time help to get out a specific book, in addition to the university subsidy. But what publisher could stay in business if he broke even only on production costs? Who would pick up his overhead of between 33.3 and 40 percent of his expenses, based on rent, utilities, salaries, sales commissions, royalties, and so on? Indeed, a good case could be made for the fact that the university press makes it possible for a professor to acquire a reputation by publishing his (unprofitable) book so that the commercial publisher then can tie him up for a textbook on which both will make money. In the last two years another shadow has appeared, about which university presses might become wary. I am thinking of the marriage between soft-ware and hard-ware, between the electronic industry and the publishers; cases are too numerous to give more than one example, that of Harper and CBS. It seemed for a while that the enormous development in this sector, together with information storage and retrieval, might spell the end of big editions of university press books. However, the trend seems to be in another direction, primarily that of the faster acquiring of knowledge and, even more, of skills. Thus the scholarly publisher, who never depended on text- books, will not be hurt by this development, especially since few university publishers to the chagrin of Professor Shugg,5 director emeritus of Chicago and now director of the University of New Mexico Press publish in the sciences. On the other hand, the severe restriction of what could be called quality departments, within one of the most distinguished commercial publishers, Harper & Row, indi- cates that another gap may open which the academic publishers will again be called, and prepared, to fill. Librarians have repeatedly assured us that there will always be a need for the printed book, in spite of the burgeoning of audio- visual education. But again, two years ago, ShuggS suggested that academic 104 publishers would have to retool, that they had no right to impose the criteria of the literate humanist on the new scholarship which is de- pendent on the amassing of data and which has learned, and speaks, a different language. At that time he took issue with the university presses who seemed to neglect their duty towards the sciences, and he advocated that the university press should orient itself towards what Clark Kerr, at that time still president of the University of California, had called the "multiversity." But the promised and ex- pected government grants for new research which have been flowing so freely in recent years, and which of course have produced a lot of writing, are going to dry up, as will, unfortunately, the liberal help to the new and existing libraries. There may well be a slowing up of the process of publishing, because the leisure and the money to pro- duce new research, or new manuscripts, much of it funded by grants, will not be available much longer or not to the same extent. Inevitably academic publishers will feel this change, and many of them will have to pull in their horns, unless their administrations are willing to subsidize them to a far greater extent than is now the case. For the roaring optimism of 1966, which led everybody to make most sanguine forecasts for the future, is slowly giving way before a reality which is not coming up to even the most conservative ex- pectations. In the last two years, the smaller and middle- size presses suffered somewhat from the competition of their larger brethren, for the rush of new manuscripts went first to the Ivy League, whose presses showed a marked increase in the number of books published. There simply are not enough first-rate manuscripts to go around, even though a new generation of researchers, profes- sors and writers has sprung up which is producing more manu- scriptsthe academic motto of "publish or perish" is as valid as ever. Yet the picture will soon change, and those academic presses which have not expanded beyond their capacities or those of their universities' financial offices will be better off for the quick death of some of the easy money. Lucky the press which has a good back- list and can "live off" the older books while retrenching judiciously on the publication of the new ones, weeding out rigorously everything that is not first class. Yet in spite of these considerations, still more universities feel that they want the prestige of a press and per- suade themselves that there is room for more university publishing. They may come to a rude awakening, for hardly any administrator recognizes what a constant burden on the university budget a press will become. Yet in spite of all these varying and sometimes contradictory trends, I can envision a future in which the university press book, because it is visionary, because it brings the newest results of scholarship to the attention of those educated and to be educated, and precisely because it cannot be written and produced in a month but 105 needs years of gestation, will continue to be the most valuable tool for conserving our civilization. It will remain one of the outstanding exceptions to the rule, more and more visible as we go along, that intellectual life in the U.S.A. is being channelled by government and the banking industry. REFERENCES 1. Jimenez, Juan Ramon. Platero and I. Trans. Eloise Roach. Austin, Texas, University of Texas Press, 1957. 2. Bloch, Marc. Feudal Society. Trans. L. A. Manyon. Chi- cago, University of Chicago Press, 1961. 3. Kerr, Chester. The American University as Publisher: A Digest of a Report on American University Presses. Norman, Uni- versity of Oklahoma Press, 1949. 4. Speech by Bennett Cerf to the Chicago Book Clinic at the Lake Shore Club, Chicago, in November, 1964. 5. Shugg, Roger. "Report of the President of the Association of American University Presses, May 14, 1965." 30112062903346 1