CORRECTED - Acrimony lingers as booksellers, publishers convene
Reuters Story - May 30, 1998 11:22
%RET %US %MUL %GB %PUB %ENT %DE %NEWS BTGGg.F PSON.L BGP BKS V%REUTER P%RTR
In CHICAGO story headlined "Acrimony lingers as booksellers,
publishers convene" please read in 8th graph .....Viking,
Dutton and Putnam; Von Holtzbrinck, which owns Farrar Straus
and Giroux .... stead of .... Viking, Dutton and Putnam; Von
Holtzbrin, which owns Farrar Straus and Giroux. (corrects
spelling of Von Holtzbrinck)
A corrected story follows
By Andrew Stern
CHICAGO, May 30 (Reuters) - The book business once seemed
simple: Books were written, published, sold and read.
But as publishers and booksellers met on Saturday for their
annual convention, the lucrative business of books appeared to
be increasingly complex and acrimonious.
Chief among the complaints -- at least those voiced by the
3,500-member American Booksellers Association -- was that book
publishing was becoming dominated by a dwindling number of huge
companies, most of them foreign-based.
"Fewer of these big publishing houses are competing for
authors, which is bad for authors and for booksellers," the
association's spokesman Ken Vlahos said, citing the potential
for less book diversity and competition on the publishing side.
The imminent foreign ownership of the three largest U.S.
publishers -- and five of the top 10 -- also "raises some
serious questions about the current state of domestic
publishing and the perpetuation of American culture," the
association's chief executive officer Avin Mark Domnitz said in
a recent interview.
Publishers dismissed the concerns about foreign ownership
as unfounded.
"We have had an overseas owner and it has not made one iota
of difference. This kind of anxiety always surrounds the book
business -- there is no real evidence that ownership of a
publishing company has any impact," said Stuart Applebome, a
publicist with Bantam Doubleday Dell, an amalgamation of three
publishing houses owned by German-based Bertelsmann
that recently announced its intention to buy U.S. industry
giant Random House.
Other large publishing conglomerates to emerge in recent
years are Pearson , the owner of Penguin, Viking,
Dutton and Putnam; Von Holtzbrinck, which owns Farrar Straus
and Giroux, St. Martin's Press and Henry Holt; and Time Warner,
which owns Warner and Little Brown.
Like the rest of the American economy, U.S. consumer book
sales are doing well, hitting a record $16.7 billion in 1997.
The market has seen booming sales of audio books as well as the
on-line mail order phenomenon led by fast-growing amazon.com,
whose sales quintupled last quarter to $87 million.
Last year's convention was marred by the absence of six of
the largest publishers who either boycotted or skipped the
show, depending on who one asks.
The publishers are back this year, after the settlement of
a 3-year-old lawsuit brought by independent booksellers who
charged the six publishers gave unfair discounts on volume
sales to the large chain bookstores. The publishers promised to
treat all booksellers equally and paid their legal fees.
Not altogether satisfied, a group of independent
booksellers in March filed suit in federal court in San
Francisco against the two largest bookstore chains -- Borders
Group and Barnes & Noble -- alleging they
bullied publishers into giving them discounts and marketing
premiums. That suit is pending.
"It's hard to take everybody's temperature. More and more
there's an awareness that we should start working together,"
said Pat Schroeder, a former congresswoman from Colorado who is
now president of the Association of American Publishers and an
author herself. "We all have the same goal: marketing books at
a time of heavy competition for discretionary spending."
"You have your billion dollar bookstores and your billion
dollar publishers -- the question is: where does the small
bookseller fit in?" Vlahos of the booksellers group asked.
While the superstores have been expanding and operate
roughly 2,000 U.S. sites, the number of independent booksellers
belonging to the association now number 3,500, down from 5,100
in 1993. The percentage of total U.S. book sales made by
independents have dropped to 19 percent in 1996 from 32 percent
in 1991, according to the association.
At the convention, renamed "BookExpo" and independently
owned by publishing conglomerate Reed Elsevier Plc, 40,000
attendees will peruse hundreds of booths set up on 300,000
square feet of exhibition space. Some 300 authors are on hand,
including big names hawking and autographing their new titles
such as Joyce Carol Oates, Jim Harrison, Robert Stone and
former presidential aide George Stephanopoulos.
Seminars for participants were designed to the address
industry concerns such as the frustratingly high rate of
returns to publishers of unsold books. One seminar was entitled
the "Returns Crisis: Solutions for the 21st Century."
But as complicated as the book business seems to have
become, Tom Wolfe -- the author of "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid
Test" and now his first novel since 1987, "A Man in Full" --
put it in perspective.
After an rambling talk to a convention-opening reception
Friday night, Wolfe said all he required was his manual
typewriter and the advice of Sinclair Lewis: Sit down.
"The book is a risky piece of technology," he told
reporters, then added that even after 80 years of electronic
media, the book remains. |
