Sensitivity Readers, Hobbled Book Reviews, Mega-Corporate Mergers, and Four Other Reasons American Publishing Went to Hell

An inquiry into the decline of the publishing biz.

A few months ago a magazine asked me to write about why the publishing industry was dying. They didn’t end up posting it, so I thought I’d do so here.

I don’t relish that the industry is having a hard time. The last hundred years or so of book publishing in America has been a glorious thing. But, just like mass literacy, it was an effect of technological and economic conditions—not something that could just go on existing forever for its own sake. 

Let’s take a look at eight proximate causes for the industry’s troubles—keeping in mind that final cause is simply technological change.

1. Amazon

It’s odd to recall that Amazon’s initial benefit to its users was that it offered rare and hard-to-find books. In the early days it sold backlist titles, i.e. those still in print but not being actively shopped to stores. Such books were not in a high enough demand to make it profitable for individual bookstores to stock them and sell them regionally. But when the market share expanded to the entire country, suddenly this list of unloved books became profitable, and Amazon did readers a service by providing them at discount prices.

But things have changed. Today, the ills of Amazon are the ills of all large-scale software-as-service products in general. In its infancy such a company’s aim is to acquire as many users as possible. In its youth its aim is to continue doing this while beginning to turn a profit. In its maturity its aim is to prevent its customers from leaving, squeeze as much profit from them as possible, and cut out as many of the middle-men (i.e. vendors) as possible. 

Today Amazon’s book-related products include a monopoly on discovery, the world’s largest book distribution system, and a publishing arm, Amazon Publishing, which has signed best-selling authors such as Dean Koontz. Amazon’s incentive now is to sell you the books that give Amazon itself the highest profit margin. Of course that means books Amazon has itself published. But it also includes a complex calculus such as whether the book is cost-effective to ship, whether the sale of that book is likely to have network effects, and whether the sale of that book is going to do too much to help a competitor. (In 2014 Amazon froze pre-order sales and slowed distribution of Hachette Books titles after a conflict over e-book sales.)

However, the largest problem with Amazon’s book sales is more unflattering to readers in general than it is to Amazon. Like Twitter, YouTube, or Facebook, Amazon is incentivized to surface content that people want to see. On social media platforms, that means a viral item of text, image, or video. On Amazon, it means promoting a book that is already selling well. Eyeball space on Amazon’s homepage or “recommended” list is prime real estate, and the company, very logically, wants to use that space for promoting a product that the largest number of people will be likely to buy. This phenomenon was ably recounted in the 2023 Times article “What Snoop Dogg’s Success Says About the Book Industry.” The article failed, however, to bring the harsh conclusion into relief; namely, the dreaded algorithm is simply a reflection of the callowness of readers in general.

2. Sensitivity Readers

The very idea of that a sensitivity reader should have say over a writer’s words in a work of literature is self-evidently preposterous to anyone who has a proper conception of art. We can have many ideas about art but that it does and ought to have the power to wound has been central to it in the western world since the birth of tragedy. The notion, of course, is not restricted to the west. Among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, the ritual dance is so painfully moving to its observers that the observers in turn ritually burn the dancers who have caused them such pain. How has it come to pass that these philistines might decide what does and doesn’t make into a novel?

The larger movement, of which the rise of the sensitivity reader is but a sub-movement, is the creeping of society, broadly defined, into the realm of art—a realm which was briefly held to be inviolable by the great 20th century writers and publishers. This is what I call social creep. Asked by the Paris Review in 1955 about the ideal role of an editor, Vladimir Nabokov answered:

By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet!”

Compare that attitude with an editor’s recent incursion into a Don DeLillo novel. The question and answer are from an interview in New York Magazine:

Interviewer: Let me ask about something that’s not in The Silence, at least not anymore. In the first galley copy I read, there’s a scene in which a character is reciting disastrous events and mentions Covid-19. Then I was told there were changes to the book and was sent a second galley. Covid-19 was gone. Why did you take it out?

DeLillo: *I didn’t put Covid-19 in there. Somebody else had. Somebody else could have decided that it made it more contemporary. But I said, “There’s no reason for that.”

We might call this the revenge of the avuncular brutes. There once existed a cadre of editors and publishers who felt that an artist’s work must be held separate from the concerns of the market, because a work of art exists in its own world. Now, this strange belief is in fact true. But it requires dedicated priests to keep the idea alive. Now that that class of priests has died out, the idea, like all faded religious rites, seems rather strange and even provincial.

3. Mega-conglomerates

The publication of books has been at best a precariously profitable activity even in the best of times. The most recent of these periods was an era when mass literacy was on the rise while the television had yet to fully colonize the leisure hours of middle-class Westerners. This was the age that began, let’s say, with the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise and ended with book publishing’s “merger fever,” which began in the late 1970s and has reached its apotheosis today. 

Prior to Fitzgerald, American novelists did not expect to make serious money from their work. Writers like Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain had day jobs, or tried to drum up money through paid appearances in lecture circuits. (The poet Robert Frost, who was the master of getting booked for such appearances, joked that he was employed as a “Poetic Radiator.”) When Fitzgerald told his publisher he was expecting to sell 20,000 copies of This Side of Paradise, his editors at Scribner laughed him off and informed him that 5,000 was the best he could expect. (Today, 5,000 copies sold is still a decent total for authors of anything but the most heavily publicized books at the top of the list.) Then Fitzgerald sold out the first printing in three days and sold 49,000 copies total by the end of 1921. The age of the literary fiction bestseller was born.

From that point on, serious authors such as Salinger, Faulkner, Baldwin, Doris Lessing, Phillip Roth, and Updike all wrote works that simultaneously sold enough for the authors to live off while the authors maintained a sense of inviolable artistic integrity. Publishing houses were never the most profitable businesses; but they served a market need and were thus numerous and competitive. This was an era in which a small but robust office run by only a handful of perspicacious and dedicated staff constituted a publishing house. (Actually what a publishing house in that era most resembled in those days is a start up.) The high-brow publisher Knopf, for instance, began as Alfred A. Knopf, his wife Blanche Knopf, and two assistants. The company published Russian and French intellectuals and had its first bestseller with Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet. James Laughlin’s New Directions and Barney Rosset’s Grove Press were small houses focused on the literary avant-garde, but still came up with some hits.

These were small-time entrepreneurs, mostly investing (and often losing) their own money. Knopf was founded with a potion of Blanche’s inheritance; Laughlin mostly lost money until the 60s; Rosset got Grove started with bonds passed down from his investment banker father. In the early and middle parts of the 20th century none of this especially interested the world’s largest corporations. But in the 1970s media corps came to see publishing houses as potentially useful “loss leaders,” i.e. vehicles which may burn money but which are useful for bringing profit to other parts of the business. If Snoop Dogg has a new cooking show coming out, for instance, it’s great to put together a Snoop Dogg recipe book as a tie-in. This makes it harder for the average American consumer to escape Snoop Dogg. 

And so conglomerates scooped up publishing houses like they were pretty seashells for arrangement on a necklace. Today the “Big Five” produce over 60% of English language books. These houses are Penguin Random House (a subsidiary of Bertellsman, a German conglomerate that originated as the leading supplier of cheap paperbacks to the Wehrmacht); Hachette Book Group (a subsidiary of Lagardère S.A., an international group that brings you the best in publishing, casinos, and catering); HarperCollins (a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp); Simon & Schuster (a subsidiary of Paramount Global); and Macmillan (a subsidiary of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, which also produces innovative digital business technologies such as iClicker and Symplectic).

For now it seems unlikely that these corporations will relinquish their holdings in publishing. Many profitable products, such as vaccines and VR headsets, can be sold to billions as long as there exists global consensus throughout all media that all customers must have them. Controlling the book trade is in that case a minor price to pay.

4. Other Media

This is an obvious one. Television ate away at the leisure time of those who once read for fun, and video games, social media, and streaming television have eaten away at it even more. 

But there is a subtler way in which other media has asserted its superiority over the printed word: on many subjects you are more likely to find accurate information on YouTube or podcasts than in print.

In general an audio interview with an expert in a given scientific field and an able but not necessarily brilliant questioner will yield a better result than a book or long article—even from an excellent writer—on the subject. In interviews scientists, technologists, historians and policymakers can speak at length and without their words being molded by some bright amanuensis into statements more digestible or more politically correct. And while book reviews and the publishing apparatus as a whole aim to give the impression that no ideas are verboten, one simply has to point out the rage engendered by a book proposing the lab leak hypothesis—which is now considered uncontroversial, but was in 2021 considered volatile and in mid-2020 unpublishable—to see that the publishing world is ruled not be reason but by some of our uglier passions. 

This leads us swiftly to . . .

5. Book Reviews

It feels flinty to mention the shortcomings of book reviews—after all, it is doubtful that even the most brilliant book review would have changed the course of publishing history—but the fact is that overall these publications have failed to keep up with the times. Whereas much that is vital today in the world of letters is produced online or stapled together as an independently published book and sold exclusively on Amazon, book review insist on pretending that the scene has not changed for 50 years and the only books worth paying attention to are those officially sanctioned by the Big Five, academic publishers, and Big Five-adjacent indies (i.e. those with large distributors).

When Bookforum shuttered up in December, 2022, I joined the chorus of literati bemoaning the demise of a serious and intelligent publication about books. But as the remembrances came pouring in, I couldn’t escape a nagging feeling. While I found much to admire in Bookforum’s pages, I also found much that was puffed-up and uninspired in precisely the same way that pieces in similar publications might be puffed-up or uninspired. These were mostly ideologically driven pieces. Bookforum’s political slant—which one might term full scale luxury communist miserabilism, the belief that the only full scale luxury communism will constitute a good society, but that this is probably impossible and our attitude toward the future should be one of misery and fear of catastrophe—is pretty easy to find elsewhere. Not only the ideas but the writers of the ideas would be easy to track in other publications. I didn’t feel like Bookforum provided a unique orientation or performed a unique curatory service. If I was to be honest with myself, the fact was, I wasn’t really going to miss it.

Back in January 2021 I founded the Mars Review of Books to try to fix some of the ills enumerated above. We’ve had some great successes, including a viral piece from Tao Lin that certainly would not have been published elsewhere, and the formation of a dedicated New York City community around the magazine. But overall the experience has been a strenuous tightrope walk and has made me far more forgiving of what I perceived as the shortcomings of other book reviews.

Book reviews and other similar magazines face many obstacles aside from the fact that the number of serious readers is dwindling. At legacy magazines no one wants to stick their neck out to publish a controversial piece, owing to a well-founded fear that they may lose their job. Magazine prioritize events and merchandise because it is much more cost-effective to sell these things to consumers. They spend their time promoting social media rather than editing because very few people can even notice the difference between a well written piece and a poorly written one, whereas and old Joe can feel the power of a viral Tweet. 

It is tempting of course to pivot to the party line in order to find some institutional support (c.f. Vice); or, conversely, to pivot to full-on culture war bomb-throwing. I don’t intend to do either of those things, but I understand the pull, and I certainly don’t grudge anyone their grift. 

6. Insufficiently motivated patrons

Before the age of the mega-conglomerate, publishing houses were founded by wealthy scions, like the aforementioned Knopf, Laughlin, and Rosset. Before that, books were commissioned by monarchs. Marsilio Ficino’s landmark translation of Plato into Latin, for instance, was a Medici joint. Where are the patrons of today who wish to undertake such ventures? We see of course Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, or George Soros starting his own press—but these are ventures meant to attain political ends. What about a venture for the sake of glory? The fact is, we simply do not have any cultural consensus on what is glorious. So rich people waste their lives getting richer, rather than using that money to advance the cause of man or honor God. Sad! But this also means that the first billionaire to break this cursed streak will become truly glorious, and be remembered for millennia hence. 

7. Time

I will defer here to Roberto Calasso, the late, great publisher of Adelphi Edizioni in Milan. From an interview with the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Has e-mail disrupted your writing and your intellectual life?

CALASSO

It disrupted my life as a publisher very much because I used to rely on delays of the post and I can’t anymore. Agents now torture you by sending a PDF and giving you thirty-six hours to decide. In the past, you could easily take two or three months. Now you have multiple submissions, dozens of things to read all at once, manuscripts often by virtually unknown authors. And sometimes the very best things are there.

For the publishing of books to matter, there must remain at least some readers who have the freedom to read at leisure, without responding to every phone notification. I believe that this subset of people will continue to exist, but it will become smaller and smaller each year, and for book publishing to survive as anything other than a sham it will need to cater to their rarefied taste.