Death of the Book

Elizabeth Sifton wrote an essay entitled "The Long Goodbye" published in The Nation on June 8, 2009 in which she traces the problems of the book industry over the last thirty years. Sifton sees the difficulty of the industry as founded upon several disparate and converging elements. First, the business of books, Sifton tells us, was always based upon a very meagre profit margin. Any one disruption can spell near disaster. In the last twenty-thirty years, publishing has faced the shrinking budgets of both public libraries and libraries associated with institutions of learning, years of excessive advances, not based upon any real world understanding of what books might earn, and certainly not enough to help sustain the long tail, has led to the present situation of layoffs and closings. (Lynn Neary, NPR's All Things Considered, reports that Random hous has frozen acquisitions, salaries and made many layoffs). In addition to these problems, the collapse of print media that once touted books is having a deleterious effect.

In addition, Sifton discusses the consolidation of the publishing industry into megapublishing houses over her career. In the course of the transformations to big business, Sifton argues the literate leaders she knew early in her career who understood the day to day world of good books and the unpredictable nature of a best seller have ceded place publishing houses led by business people only interested in big books and big profits.This consolodation of publishers is also mirrored in the system of distribution. Book stores are less and less frequently independent, more and more frequently mega industry chains--like Borders and Barnes and Noble. These stores too, are primarily interested in the one big thing.

Sifton suggests that these trends are only exacerbated in the present digital age, by people who want content to be free so that they may more easily profit from it. People, she argues, who have little understanding and no love of what books provide a nation. Sifton's essay ends quite pessimistically. She suggests that she doesn't see the business model now in place as being in any way able to resurrect, fix, change the publishing industry and bringing back the world of books.

See: Neary, Lynn. "Book Industry Enters Shaky Chapter"
All Things Considered December 5, 2008

Sifton, Elizabeth. "The Long Goodbye: The Book Industry and Its Woes" The Nation June 8, 2009.