The Business of Publishing

There is an informative discussion on the move from print publishing run by a high class culture to smaller companies being taken over by conglomerates in “An Archipelago of Readers: The Beginnings of Archipelago and International Publishing on the World Wide Web,” the typescript of a lecture given by Katherine McNamara at the University of Trier in 2005.

There is constant shifting of companies, where the big names, Random House, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Harcourt, and Houghton Mifflin, are buying and closing subsidiaries. The industry is quite incestuous with employees moving up the ladder by transferring over to competitors.

While most people might think of publishing, whether educational/academic or trade, as cultivated by the quality of writers and intellectual minds, it is forgotten, as McNamara reminds us, that publishing has developed into an industry and a business.

I mentioned it in previous blogs, but I feel the need to hit this point again. Publishers are businesses and for-profit.

Books are driven by the market, in textbook publishing this means having a close connection to educational trends and knowing what would be useful to professors.

In recent years, we’ve seen trade books published by the likes of Sarah Palin and Carrie Prejean, both former beauty contestants and both with by-lines (ps- these books are ghost written). However, because of the publicity surrounding both of these women in recent years, these books, not necessarily with any sense of quality-control, will sell.

The types of books that are out there, the price of your textbook, the information contained within your books, these are all factors controlled in an effort to make money.