Archive for April 17th, 2009:

One of the intriguing things about Europa Editions is what the New York Times has called its “frankly retro publishing model.”

But before we can appreciate how bold it is to be “retro” in publishing these days, let’s remember what happened to the industry, especially in the United States, during the 1980s and 1990s. Those were the days of infamy, when the independent institutions of New York publishing—Random House, Simon & Schuster, Harper & Row, Penguin, and others—were being swallowed up by massive international media conglomerates such as Bertelsmann, CBS, and News Corporation.

 

              

Suddenly book publishers, who were accustomed to seeing profit margins between 3 and 4 percent, were expected to contend with their conglomerates’ film, cable television, and other media subsidiaries, which typically saw gains of between 12 and 15 percent. Under this enormous pressure to increase their margins, and with financial and marketing people now weighing in heavily on publishing decisions, editors became consumed by the hunt for the next blockbuster book (think Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus). Meanwhile, they could no longer “afford” to publish a title that was projected to sell fewer than 15,000 – 20,000 copies, regardless of its literary merit. In effect, the business of printing books, which had long been guided by a cultural mission to make literature and ideas available to the general public, was surrendered to the great, equalizing jaws of the market.

Publishing veteran André Schiffrin explains how market theory transformed the industry in “The Corporatization of Publishing” (The Nation, June 3, 1996) and at greater length in his memoir, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2000).

So how does Europa reconcile its seemingly lofty cultural mission (to foster through literature the dialogue between nations and cultures) with the equally formidable task of turning literature in translation into a viable business venture in the United States? Looks like I’m still honing in on the answers . . .

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