Antero Pietila
2008-04-30 07:00:00.0
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BALTIMORE -

It took me a while to recognize the real significance of YouTube, which has emerged as a truly important disseminator of information during this presidential campaign season. Then it hit me: We are witnessing an unprecedented decline of the written word now that cell phones have transformed America’s behavior patterns, giving almost everyone the capability of video recording and posting 24/7.

As this increasingly Internet-dependent nation talks more and unendingly posts videos, traditional newspapers are in trouble. So is the book publishing industry. I heard about this last week when a friend came to Baltimore for an academic conference.

This bearer of bad tidings sits on the board of a small but important New York publishing house, and he was in a shock. The reason: Financial woes at Borders Group are not only threatening the existence of America’s second-largest book merchandiser (under Borders and Waldenbooks names) but also the very way publishers have traditionally done business.

As part of its survival strategy in a nation where people are reading less and slashing their discretionary spending on books, Borders Group is drastically altering its business model. It has informed publishers that if new titles are carried at all, they will be returned after three months unless they sell. Borders has already shipped mountains of book cartons back to publishers.

“We are in a crisis situation,” said my friend, whose publishing house keeps an extensive backlist of older titles.

The Borders Group’s new merchandising policy is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In addition to moving backlist sales to the Internet, Borders is joining Barnes & Noble and Amazon, the nation’s first and third-largest booksellers respectively, in capitalizing on the latest hot publishing trend: Print on demand.

POD, as it is called, has been around for quite a white. Years ago, a Baltimore publishing house, Black Classic Press, was at the cutting edge of this phenomenon, producing obscure titles and new works on demand. Now the big bookstore chains want to get into the act, hoping to replace traditional publishers altogether.

No longer content with just selling books, they want to publish them. Printing digitized books according to demand would likely accelerate the changeover to e-books and other cheaper methods of production and distribution, including the Internet. That again would upend the whole contracting tradition, threatening the custom of advances and royalties to authors.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of titles are published in the United States. That might suggest commercial viability, but the opposite is true. Most of those books appear and disappear without any public notice, printed by vanity publishers taking advantage of advances in inkjet technology.

The business model of such vanity publishers depends on authors paying for the editing, design and production of their books. This is a big business. One vanity press, iUniverse, publishes more than 5,000 titles each year. They are sold on the Internet and through Barnes & Noble, an iUniverse investor.

IUniverse has spawned plenty of copycats. Authors pay cash to publish the whole gamut — from poetry to esoteric academic treatises. Unnoticed are plenty of basements and garages full of crates of unsold books by authors who fulfilled their dreams of getting published. Yet every now and then some vanity press author develops a cult following. One iUniverse book even reached the New York Times best-seller list.

Big bookstore chains now want to perfect that business model, aided by inventions that have transformed previously time-consuming and expensive production process to little more than digital printing familiar to every computer user. Print by demand is particularly attractive because it removes guesswork from publishing “surge” best-sellers, whose demand may be short.

Roll over, Gutenberg, an upheaval is coming.

Antero Pietila is a Baltimore Examiner columnist. Reach him at hap5905@hotmail.com.