of output in the United States and Britain and the scale and geographical reach of their publishing industries mean that these two countries have long had a dominant role in the international field of English-language trade publishing.6 6 On the rise of English as a global language, see David Crystal, English as a Global Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For further discussion of the global dominance of English and its implications for the shaping of publishing fields, see Thompson, Books in the Digital Age, pp. 41–3.
7 7 In 2002, around 215,000 new titles were published in the US and around 125,000 in the UK, compared to around 79,000 in Germany, around 70,000 in Spain and around 59,000 in France. (See tables 9 and 10 below for details on title output in the US and the UK. For details on title output in European countries, see Publishing Market Watch: Final Report, submitted to the European Commission (27 Jan. 2005), at http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/media_taskforce/doc/pmw_20050127.pdf) According to United Nations data, exports of printed books (excluding dictionaries and encyclopaedias) from the US in 2008 totalled $2.36 billion, and book exports (excluding dictionaries and encyclopaedias) from the UK totalled $2.15 billion; these figures were well ahead of Germany (total book exports of $1.5 billion), France ($791 million) and Spain ($755 million). Data available from http://data.un.org.
8 8 Analysing UNESCO data, Wischenbart found that more than half of all books translated globally are from English language originals, whereas only 6 per cent of translations go from all other languages into English; see Rüdiger Wischenbart, ‘The Many, Many Books – For Whom?’ (11 Sep. 2005), at www.wischenbart.com/de/essays__interviews_rw/wischenbart_publishing-diversity_oxford-2005.pdf. For a more detailed analysis of translations in Europe, see Rüdiger Wischenbart, Diversity Report 2008: An Overview and Analysis of Translation Statistics across Europe (21 Nov. 2008), at www.wischenbart.com/diversity/report/Diversity%20Report_prel-final_02.pdf. Further discussion of translations and bestseller lists in Europe and the Anglo-American world can be found in Miha Kovač, Never Mind the Web: Here Comes the Book (Oxford: Chandos, 2008), pp. 121–7.
9 9 The notion of the logic of the field is discussed in more detail in ch. 8.
10 10 The notion of publishers as gatekeepers of ideas is developed by Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin and Walter W. Powell in Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (New York: Basic Books, 1982), discussed further below.
11 11 The practice of allowing booksellers to return stock for full credit has a long history in Europe but was used rarely and half-heartedly by American publishers until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when publishers began experimenting seriously with returns policies as a way of stimulating sales and encouraging booksellers to increase stockholdings. In spring 1930, Putnam, Norton and Knopf all introduced schemes to allow booksellers to return stock for credit or exchange under certain conditions, and in 1932 Viking Press announced that orders for new books would be returnable for a credit of 90 per cent of the billed cost (see John Tebbel, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, vol. 3: The Golden Age between the Two Wars, 1920–1940 (New York: R. R. Bowker, 1978), pp. 429–30, 441). The practice of returns subsequently became a settled feature of the book trade and marks it out as somewhat unusual among retail sectors.
12 12 Coser et al., Books.
13 13 Thomas Whiteside, The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980).
14 14 André Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (London: Verso, 2000); Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
1 THE GROWTH OF THE RETAIL CHAINS
The dramatic transformation of the retail landscape has been one of the key factors shaping the evolution of the field of English-language trade publishing since the 1960s. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, bookselling in the United States and Britain was handled primarily by a plethora of small independent bookstores that were spread across the country, on the one hand, and a variety of non-book retailers like drugstores, department stores, newsagents and news-stands, on the other.1 The bookstores tended to cater for an educated and cultivated clientele – the so-called ‘carriage trade’ – while the non-book retailers, who carried books along with many other commodities, tended to sell books to a wider range of the public. Department stores in the US began carrying books in the late nineteenth century. Macy’s of New York began selling books in 1869 and quickly became one of the largest booksellers in the country.2 By 1951 it was estimated that department stores accounted for between 40 and 60 per cent of all retail trade book sales in the US.3 Books were attractive for department stores to carry because they were regarded as prestigious, aspirational goods. They appealed to the cultivated tastes of well-to-do customers, adding an aura of seriousness and respectability to the store and attracting the kind of customer who had money to spend.
From mall stores to superstores
The traditional patterns of the retail book trade – small independent booksellers on the one hand, department stores and other non-book retailers on the other – began to change in the US with the rise of the mall stores in the early 1960s. This development was linked to a major demographic shift that was taking place in the United States at this time, as the middle classes moved out of city centres and into the suburbs that formed the expanding satellites of American cities.4 With the migration of the middle classes to the suburbs and the rise of the automobile as the primary means of transport, the suburban shopping mall became the new locus of the American retail trade. In 1962 the Walden Book Company, which for many years had operated a network of rental libraries on the East Coast, opened its first retail outlet in a shopping mall in Pittsburgh. Four years later the Dayton Hudson Corporation – a company formed by the merger of two department stores in the American Midwest – opened the first B. Dalton bookstore in a suburban shopping mall in Minneapolis. In 1969 the Corporation bought the Pickwick Bookshop in Hollywood, together with other Pickwick outlets, and in 1972 the two operations were merged to form B. Dalton Booksellers. By 1980 there were more than 450 B. Dalton stores located in shopping malls across the United States. Waldenbooks also expanded rapidly during the 1960s and 1970s; by 1981 Waldenbooks had 750 sites and claimed to be the first bookseller to operate bookstores in all 50 states.
As it turned out, the 1970s were the heyday of the mall-based bookstores; in the
