Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century

Is publishing a cultural or commercial endeavor? Drawing on extensive data sets and applying the theoretical tools of both sociology and economics, this book examines the substantive issues, challenges, and problems confronting the diverse and in many ways fragile book publishing industry in the United States, and presents the definitive social and economic analysis of its current state and future trends. The authors specifically emphasize the consumer, college textbook, and scholarly publishing components as they analyze the cultural and economic structure of the industry in the 21st century. The book begins by charting the changes that occurred between 1945 and 2005, then goes on to examine industry specifics, strategies being employed for domestic and global competitiveness, the economics of publishing, and the impact of technology. Through in-person interviews and a broad sampling of people from every sector of the industry it examines the demographic trends in play. The temperature of the current publishing culture is presented in a chapter titled "I'm Glad I'm Not an Author..." The book ends by looking forward, highlighting the trends likely to impact the growth of the industry in the future. The tables provided throughout the book track the industry from 1945 until 2005, and give the reader a snapshot of the data year by year and category by category: bestsellers, average book prices, U.S. bookstore sales, average sales by category, and the demographic breakdown of readers. Forecasts of both units and revenues are provided for the coming years, 2005-2009. The thoughtful analysis presented here will be valuable to leaders in publishing as well as the scholars and analysts who study this industry.