Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for publishing ethics
What’s in a book that I should buy it?
There’s a trick to the question asked in the post title. It lies with the verb. It should be “read”. But it isn’t. It’s “buy”. Why? Because to read a book, one by and large has to buy it. Reading is intrinsically bound up in the economic cycle. It is a fact not lost on Italo Calvino in If on a winter’s night a traveller. There are as many ways to buy a book as there are to skin a cat. Charles Lambert on the Guardian book blog describes a delightful, idiosyncratic method of buying books in Italy 30 years ago that was akin to visiting your grocer:
“Customers were served by an assistant behind a wide bare wooden counter. They would tell the assistant what they wanted and he or she (usually he) would disappear into the back of the shop, wrap the book exquisitely in sheets of pre-cut paper and tie it with ribbon.”
As Nehemiah & Blake was reading this, it struck that this is not dissimilar from buying a book online from say, Amazon. You go to Amazon in the same sense Lambert once might have gone to his book-grocer: if you don’t know the book you want, you don’t go there. Then you buy the book, Amazon goes to its warehouse to find and wrap it, and then dispatches it to you.
The advantage for Amazon over the book-grocer is, as Robert McCrum recently pointed out, that Amazon is a global book-grocer that has united a global book market and changed the way books are marketed, and hence the way books are bought.
But what’s in a book that I should buy it? And is it to be found in a book trade that functions as a signifier of the market economy? In such an economy, the book is a commodity and a statistic on a logistics database set up to ensure the most cost-effective production with the largest possible profit. A book’s content is irrelevant in all aspects but perhaps in its ability to make a sale. As to what sells however, is a very imprecise science. Selling books then is a system of probabilities. Some forms of content, because of a proven genre- or author-driven track record, present book publishers with higher percentage odds. The greater the number of high-percentage books published, the less room for risk to be taken on perceived low-percentage books.
The first thing that is in a book to make me buy it then is low risk. Low risk for the publisher in terms of securing a profit on the book, and low risk for the reader, whose reading enjoyment has a higher probability of being satisfied with a book that conforms by and large to established convention. The publisher desires the money in order to publish more books. The reader desires value for pounds spent, and thus relies on the publishing industry to provide that sense of money being well spent.
As books are seen as commodities by the market economy, those working within the requirements of the market economy take up this definition for books. The OED defines commodity in two senses, one, as a raw or primary product that can be traded, like sugar, and two, as a useful or valuable thing, such as time. One might add to this definition, a product that is ubiquitous and affordable to almost all, such as a computer, or car. Thus the book in developed societies has become a cheap, ubiquitous raw, primary product of inestimable value and use.
The second thing then that is in a book to make me buy it is its social equivalence to food. In fact, the food trade and the book trade are almost synonymous: 2-for-1 battery-farmed chickens at Tesco = 2-for-1 battery-farmed books at Tesco; an organic, free change chicken at Waitrose = An “original, free-thinking” book from Waterstones; your weekly veg box ordered online = your monthly shopping cart from Amazon, etc etc. Of course, the organic/mass-farmed, free-range/battery-farmed debate has yet to deliver its verdict on whether there is a significant difference in nutrition. But the growing problem of obesity in Britain, the environmental issues, the food miles, the rich/poor divide in the affordability of quality food, the education about food, the school dinners all make for interesting comparison when applied to the book trade: the growing problem of illiteracy, the environmental impact of publishing, the rich/poor literacy divide that streams our children into varying levels of education, and the role of books in schools. The difference is that the food industry’s role in the politics of food has been pushed high onto the media agenda. The book publishing trade’s role in the politics of reading remains by and large a small in-house debate. And as far as I can account for, very little has been done, compared to food, to raise the awareness of what role the publishing trade plays in perpetuating a cycle of unsustainable pulping and paper-manufacturing that in turn leads to entrenched forms of poverty in countries where these processes take place.
Moreover, if the book is a commodity, then it will not go unnoticed that many current commodity prices are sky high – gold, copper, oil, food. So is paper, and that means books will continue to be dearer. When that happens, major companies seek to offset rising commodity prices by driving down labour cost so that they can continue to pass on discounted prices to customers. Which in turn means, more higher percentage books at supermarket prices with supermarket quality at the expense of human quality of life for those who work in the physical production of books. This is not to mention the environmental impact of books.
The thesis behind mass production has always been that it is cheaper to make more than less, even if you sell less than you make. This is particularly true of book publishing, where there are always returns. James Bridle of booktwo.org estimates that for some publishers this return rate is as high as 50 percent. He notes that:
“half of all books printed in the UK are never read. And they’re not redistributed either, but returned to the publishers or otherwise disposed of, usually pulped or simply placed in landfill.”
On top of this, Bridle quotes David Reay, an environmental scientist who estimated that “in terms of its contribution to global warming, UK publishing in effect puts an extra 100,000 cars on our roads.
On the basis of all this then, it would at least appear that there is not much in a book that would make me buy it: not much in the way of risk-taking content that might force me to reevaluate my position on the world and its goings-on; nor much in the way of that would alleviate those goings-on. To conclude, Nehemiah & Blake concedes that much of this essay is an oversimplification of the book publishing industry, and that there is much afoot in the way of confronting these issues. The purpose of this essay is simply to put forward a perspective on the issue in the hope that it will contribute to the ground swell of seeing the publishing industry radically interrogate its own wheel in the hope of it being sustainably re-invented.
