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Today, most of the books that shape our culture are adapted to other media, which expands their influence. Magazine serialization put Ronald Reagan’s memoirs in more hands than did the publisher of the book. More people saw Carl Sagan on television than have read his books. Stephen King’s thrillers sell spectacularly, especially in paperback, but more people see the movie renditions. Books have a trickle-down effect through other media, their impact being felt even by people who cannot or do not read them. Although people are more in touch with other mass media day to day, books are the heart of creating the culture and passing it on to new generations.
When most people think about books, fiction and nonfiction aimed at general readers come to mind. These are called trade books, which are a major segment of the book industry. Also important are textbooks, which include not only schoolbooks but also reference books and even cookbooks. There are countless ways to further dissect books, but textbooks and trade books are the major categories.
The most visible part of the $24 billion a year that the U. S. book publishing industry produces is trade books. These are general interest titles, including fiction and nonfiction, that people usually think of when they think about books. Trade books can be incredible best-sellers. Since it was introduced in 1937, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit has sold almost 40 million copies. Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Gone with the Wind has passed 29 million. Most trade books, however, have shorter lives. To stay atop best-seller lists, Stephen King, Danielle Steel and other authors have to keep writing. Steel, known for her discipline at the keyboard, produces a new novel about every six months.
Although publishing trade books can be extremely profitable when a book takes off, trade books have always been a high-risk proposition. One estimate is that 60 percent of them lose money, 36 percent break even and 4 percent turn a good profit, and only a few in the latter category become best-sellers and make spectacular money.
Although the typical successful trade book best-sellers can be a spectacular moneymaker for a few months, a successful textbook has a longer life with steady income. For example, Curtis MacDougall wrote a breakthrough textbook on journalism in 1932 that went through eight editions before he died in 1985. Then the publisher brought out a ninth edition, with Robert Reid bringing it up to date. This gave MacDougall’s Interpretative Reporting a life span of more than 60 years. Although textbook publishers don’t routinely announce profits by title, Interpretative Reporting undoubtedly has generated more income than many trade book best-sellers. Textbooks, the biggest segment of the book market, include reference and professional books, college textbooks, and elementary and high school textbooks and learning materials.
Professional and reference books Dictionaries, atlases and other reference works represent about 10 percent of textbook sales. Over the years the Christian Bible and Noah Webster’s dictionary have led reference book sales. Others also have had exceptional, long-term success that rivals trade books. Even after Benjamin Spock died in 1998, his Baby and Child Care, introduced in 1946, kept on selling. Total sales are past 50 million. Next on the list: The Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook .
College textbooks College textbooks sell in great numbers, mostly through the coercion of the syllabus. Although textbooks are written for students, publishers pitch them to the professors who order them for their students. Students, although the ultimate consumer, don’t choose them, which may partly explain the hard feelings students have toward textbooks.
El-Hi books Learning materials for elementary and high schools, known as the el-hi market, have unique marketing mechanisms. In most states, school districts are allowed to use state funds to buy books only from a state-approved list. This means that publishers gear books toward acceptance in populous states with powerful adoption boards. If the California adoption board is firm on multiculturalism, textbook publishers will take that approach to win California acceptance. Multiculturalism then becomes a theme in books for less influential states in the adoption process.
serialization：连载
thrillers：恐怖小说（或电影、戏剧等）
paperback：平装书
atlas：地图集，地图册
coercion：强制，强迫
syllabus：教学大纲，课程提纲
If you’re under the impression that reading is a dying art, think again. The top publishing companies in the world prove that reading is still a booming business by pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars every year, regularly topping what they made the year before.
It’s no coincidence either, with film franchises like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games popularizing their novel counterparts, big publishing companies have really cemented their relationship with mainstream audiences. It’s kind of funny to think that movies can help expose people to reading, isn’t it? Well it’s true, and some of the biggest publishers in the world have been able to benefit from this interesting relationship in spades.
But movies aren’t the only reason that publishing companies are thriving these days. Sometimes a book alone can be so amazing that a company can pull in thousands of new readers, seemingly overnight.
But you might be surprised to learn that it’s not only the fiction/nonfiction publishers that are raking in the dough. Some of these companies make a killing by creating published work for business professionals, medical experts, scientists, and educators across the globe. Let’s go ahead and take a look at what’s so special about these companies.
Pearson is far and away the leader when it comes to publishing on a global scale. Their motto is to “help people make more of their lives through learning.”They achieve this by creating learning based products, and they have several online learning tools to show for it. Schools and colleges use their products all across the United States, solidifying their first place listing here.
Based in the United Kingdom, Netherlands, and the United States, Reed Elsevier has four main divisions: science, medical, legal, and business. Most publishing companies have nothing on Reed Elsevier’s database for science and medical research. They’re the lead providers for those subjects, and aim to help practitioners across the globe in the acquisition and application of the knowledge they seek.
Thomson Reuters focuses on business and professionals rather than education or fiction/nonfiction. They even split their divisions similarly, with devoted to the following: finance and risk, legal, tax and accounting, and intellectual property and science. Thomson Reuters is founded on the principles of independence, integrity, and freedom from bias. This no doubt led to them getting a perfect score on the Corporate Equality Index, rated by the Human Rights Campaign itself.
After the merger between two of the biggest book publishers in the world, Random House and Penguin, Penguin Random House becomes the world’s largest publisher, ahead of book publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and Simon & Schuster in size. With only five major publishers left, the book industry will get much more traction against distributors, such as Amazon, traditional bookstores and ebook retailers (Kindle Store, Nook Book Store, Apple’s iBooks Store).
Wolters Kluwer stands out on this list because it focuses solely on professional genres, as opposed to educational or fiction/nonfiction ones. More specifically, they focus on four categories: tax and accounting, legal and regulatory, financial and compliance services, and health. Their content is aimed at helping professionals in those fields by providing actionable advice written by experts. With a huge revenue, 19,000 employees worldwide, and operations in over 40 countries, Wolters Kluwer certainly earns its place as the fourth biggest publishing company in the world.
Based in France, Hachette Livre is among the most diverse publishers out there. In French, Spanish, and English markets they publish for nearly all genres. They’ve got a wide array of authors under their belt, such as: Tina Fey, Stephanie Meyer, Jon Stewart, Tom Wolfe, Malcolm Gladwell, and many more. Its diversity is nothing short of amazing, and it certainly pays off, with the company recording impressive revenue every year.
Calling Grupo Planeta a publishing company wouldn’t do it justice; it’s really more of a “communication”company. Not only are they the leading publishers in Spanish and Latin markets, they also dabble in newspaper (La Razon), television (Grupo Antena 3), and radio stations (Europa FM). They’ve also published bestselling author Dan Brown’s book “ Inferno ”for Spanish reading audiences.
McGraw-Hill is an “education comes first”publishing company. They’re all about connecting those in the educational field with high quality products that aid in learning. To do this, they have two main divisions: one for college level students and one for elementary thru high-school level students. Two of their core-values are diversity and inclusion, which they make clear by employing over 6,000 people worldwide, no doubt a crucial element in their earning.
Holtzbrinck is a German-based publishing group that sells in over 138 countries. The majority of their income comes from their three “Macmillan”publishing divisions, which cover “education”, “learning”and the more general “publishers division”—basically fiction and nonfiction. They make about 14% of their income off of business information and newspaper projects, according to their home website.
Scholastic is the publisher of classic series like Animorphs and Goosebumps . More recently, they’ve had great success with the popular Hunger Games and Harry Potter series as well. They lead the way when it comes to publishing and distributing children’s books, even offering a mail-order service in schools, which makes it easy for young readers to order. Some of its revenue was given away in awards and scholarships during their yearly “Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.”This gives thousands of students the opportunity to practice their skills and earn some money for winning, and fosters the same love of reading that supplies the company’s revenue.
counterpart：副本，配对物
cement：巩固，加强
controversial：有争议的
far and away：无疑地，显然地
Today, the publishing business is in turmoil. For 500 years, the methods and practices of book publishing remained largely unchanged, but today the industry finds itself faced with the greatest challenges since Gutenberg.
These challenges are the outcome of two processes. On the one hand, the publishing business has been transformed beyond recognition by a set of profound social and economic changes that have been underway since the 1960s, resulting in the publishing landscape we see around us today: a handful of large corporate publishers based in New York and London and owned by large multimedia conglomerates; an array of powerful agents who have become the unavoidable gateway into publishing for writers and would-be writers; and a retail landscape dominated by a dwindling number of retail chains, mass merchandisers and Amazon.
On the other hand, the technological upheaval associated with the digital revolution is now having a major impact on the book publishing business. The digital revolution is disrupting many of the traditional practices of the publishing industry, opening up new opportunities and at the same time threatening to dislodge some of the players who have shaped the business of book publishing for half a century or more.
So where is book publishing now headed? Will the traditional print-on-paper book become a relic of a bygone age, a collector’s item to be found only in second-hand bookstores and garage sales, much like the old vinyl LP? Will publishers—and perhaps agents too—be displaced by a flourishing of self-publishing and by powerful online retailers like Amazon who can offer to publish writers’work on royalty terms that are much more favorable than those traditionally offered by publishing houses?
The truth is, no one knows the answers to these and similar questions. Many people have opinions but no one knows a thing. There is a great deal of apocalyptic speculation about the future of publishing but most of it is just that-speculation. The predictions of so-called experts—often expressed with a great air of authority—have turned out to be wrong. We are living through a revolution of sorts, and one of the few things you can say for certain about a revolution is that when you’re in the middle of one, you have no idea where and when it will end. However, as in the book Merchants of Culture , some short-term trends are easy enough to see.
First, Amazon will continue to grow as a retail channel, while bricks-and-mortar booksellers (including the bookselling chains like Barnes & Noble) will find themselves squeezed further and further, leading to more bookstore closures and downsizing on the part of the chains. In many ways, the bankruptcy of Borders in 2011 marked the end of an era, in the sense that the age dominated by the big retail chains, rolling out their superstores across America, is now over. We’re entering a new era when those retail chains that remain are in a much weaker position and where Amazon has become the main retail force to be reckoned with.
Second, publishers with weak balance sheets and companies that are highly leveraged will face growing financial difficulties, the pressures on medium-sized publishers will intensify and some of the large conglomerates will probably decide that the time has come to divest themselves of their trade publishing interests, which were always a very small part of their overall business anyway, leading to further consolidation in the hands of a small number of large corporations that remain committed to trade publishing and continue to see it as a worthwhile part of their portfolio.
Third, the decline of retail space in bookstores—the shop windows, front-of-store display tables and rows of bookshelves—and the decline of book review space in traditional print media like The New York Times will make it harder for publishers to get their books noticed, so the struggle for visibility will both intensify and become displaced, as publishers are forced to devote more and more of their marketing effort to the online environment, where they will hope to find new ways of bringing their books to the attention of readers.
Fourth, the shift from print to digital will continue, though the speed and extent of the shift will vary from one type of book to another and one author to another, and income from e-books and other forms of electronic sale will become an increasingly significant part of publishers’revenues, though exactly how significant is, at this point in time, unknown—maybe 20 percent, maybe 30, maybe 50, maybe more, no one knows.
Fifth, as more sales shift to digital and the sales of physical books decline, the large publishing houses will face growing downward pressure on their revenues, calling into question their ability to generate year-on-year growth and refocusing their attention more and more on the reduction of costs and overheads in an attempt to maintain or improve their profitability.
Sixth, the infrastructure supporting the traditional book supply chain—warehouses, sales forces, etc.—will come under increasing pressure, forcing publishers to scale back their operations and look for new ways to keep the physical supply chain going while at the same time trying to shift their organizations to a new way of doing business.
Seventh, small publishing operations and innovative start-ups will proliferate, as the costs and complexities associated with the book supply chain diminish, and threats of disintermediation will abound, as both traditional and new players avail themselves of new technologies and the opportunities opened up by them to try to eat the lunch of their erstwhile collaborators.
Beyond these short-term trends the picture is much less clear. In all likelihood the future of publishing will be a mixed economy of print and digital rather than a one-way shift from print to digital, and the most successful publishers will be those who are able to structure their businesses in a way that enables them to take full advantage of both.
Gutenberg：古腾堡（1400-1468，德国活版印刷发明人）
conglomerate：企业集团
dwindling：日渐减少
dislodge：驱逐
vinyl lp：黑胶唱片
apocalyptic：像世界末日的
leverage：杠杆，利用
proliferate：猛增
disintermediation：去中介化
erstwhile：以前的