Here's a nice report on the decline of book quality...from 1994:
http://articles.philly.com/1994-03-1...ook-publishing
Quote:
Is there a crisis in serious book publishing?
Many industry professionals have been saying so lately, especially since the "January Massacre." On Jan. 10, Houghton Mifflin, the distinguished Boston trade publisher, shut down Ticknor & Fields, a subsidiary imprint that specialized in quality literary books.
Later that week, Harcourt Brace, one of the most influential literary publishers, fired half its staff, including Corlies Smith, its widely admired editor-in-chief. Before the week was out, Paramount Publishing, which recently acquired Macmillan, said it would close Atheneum, another esteemed imprint.
For many publishing professionals, the combination of moves raised the question of whether Armageddon had arrived. Is corporate "conglomerization" - the driving force of the publishing world in the last decade, with its bottom-line values and lust for short-term returns - finally kicking in with a vengeance?
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Quote:
Crises, of course, beget panels, and panels on the "State of Publishing" are now everywhere - that is, if you think of Manhattan as everywhere (and publishing people do). On Feb. 28, about 400 interested parties crammed into a midtown auditorium to hear industry notables such as Harry Evans, the head of Random House trade publishing, discuss the matter. Evans galvanized the crowd by illustrating a point with some Random House sales figures, normally not released by the privately held company.
He disclosed that 29 Random House books listed by the New York Times last year as particularly notable lost nearly $700,000 collectively. Fortunately, he went on, that red ink was more than balanced by roughly $1.4 million in profit on two bestsellers he did not name. The message was clear: The ''commercialism" decried by many in the industry was the only thing keeping quality books afloat.
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Quote:
In the end, Glikes and Howard probably came closest to articulating a thought many pros in the hall seemed to share: that it is precisely in their desire to make profit, rather than in any failed wish to create culture, that conglomerates fail so badly when they venture into serious publishing.
"Frankly, I think a lot of corporations don't know a damn thing about publishing," Howard said.
Glikes, who has produced plenty of profit with high-impact political-policy books, called for better thinking in the industry on how corporations are governed.
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Sure, it's all the indies' fault.
They're the ones dragging quality down...
