"The Crushing Power of Big Publishing" by Mark Crispin Miller, and "Gutenberg Unbound" by Tom Engelhardt, in The Nation (Mar. 17, 1997), 72 Fifth Ave., New York, N.Y. 10011.

A visitor to a Borders or Barnes & Noble umes on view and at all the people busily superstore, marveling at the thousands of vol-browsing and buying, might conclude that reports of the impending death of the book are much exaggerated. And with more than $20 billion in sales (a record) in 1996, including an unprecedented $5.7 billion for general-interest "trade" books, who could deny it? Answer: doomsayers Miller and Engelhardt, chairman of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and a consulting editor at Henry Holt and Company, respectively.

Once, contends Miller, publishers put money making dreck between covers "so as to subsidize the books they loved (although those books might also sell)." Today, however, he asserts, profitable trash "is not a means but (as it were) the end."

In fact, adds Engelhardt, anxious publishing executives "in their hearts...no longer feel that the book, as a freestanding entity, is sustainable." In the last decade or so, he observes, "computerization has transformed book production, billing, distribution, and bookstore management. With Amazon.com, the online bookstore, it has even changed the way books are bought."

In this new environment, says Engelhardt (whose 1995 book, The End of Victory Culture, was published by Basic Books, an arm of News Corporation’s HarperCollins until it was folded into the parent firm recently), publishing executives sense "that a book not plugged into a product or performance nexus, that cannot offer a companion movie or capitalize itself in the rush to buy face-out space in the superstores, or give a star performance that steps off the page and onto radio or television, will stumble into the world as if off a cliff steeply."

Aside from Norton (the employee-owned publisher of his own forthcoming book) and Houghton Mifflin, some university presses, and a host of minor outfits, Miller points out, America’s trade publishers today belong to eight huge media conglomerates, including Time Warner and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. In only one of these giants— Holtzbrinck, which owns Farrar, Straus & Giroux, St. Martin’s Press, and Henry Holt and Company—"does management seem to care (for now) what people read," he claims. All the other giants want their publishing arms to show profits of 12–15 percent, comparable to the margins in movies, newspapers, and TV—"but absurd for publishing," which operated for decades on an after-tax profit rate of about four percent.

Good books are going unpublished, or if published, unpromoted, Miller maintains. And despite the massive displays at the superstores, he says, new titles are given little time to win readers. Books often get only a few months on the shelf before they are shipped back to the publisher to be ingloriously "remaindered." The backlists of books kept in print are shrinking.

Defenders of today’s book business accuse the critics of "elitism," and maintain that the publishers are only giving the public what it wants. "If today’s giants are so good at selling to the people," responds Miller, why are so many of their books such duds? Returns last summer, he notes, reached or exceeded 40 percent of gross sales.