The Future of Publishing
by Joseph J. Esposito, President
Encyclopedia Britannica North America

Editor's Note:
The following is excerpted from a presentation made at the Flair 
Symposium on the Future of Publishing, November 11-12, 1994, at 
the Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas.

When publishers try to anticipate what their future will look 
like, they have to take into account such things as competing 
media, discretionary income and time, the changing nature of the 
professions, literacy, new competitors such as Microsoft and TCI, 
and the Robinson-Patman Act. With this many variables, a linear 
predictive model simply won't work.

But we have to start somewhere. Let's focus on the book industry. 
The most important thing to be said about the book industry is 
that it is very small. The total sales of U.S. book publishers 
last year were about $20 billion. That may sound like a lot of 
money to a starving author, but in the scheme of things, it is 
minuscule. Twenty billion is about the cost of 23 Stealth bombers; 
it is about equal in size to the U.S. sausage industry; in fifteen 
years, the Microsoft Corporation has grown to be about one-fourth 
the size of the entire book industry; $20 billion makes books 
smaller than AT&T, IBM, and several oil companies; if the entire 
industry disappeared tomorrow, I'm not sure the Department of 
Commerce would notice.

Not all books are created equal, of course. I will make the 
assumption that the attendees of this conference are primarily 
interested in works of intellectual merit. That's a small number 
of dollars. From the $20 billion total we have to subtract $6 
billion for books for schools and public libraries and another 
$2.5 billion for books for higher education, which are essentially 
secondary material. The professional segment, which is small but 
highly profitable, publishes books of little interest outside a 
narrow field. That leaves university presses, which are tiny, and 
general consumer publishers. The consumer segment, depending on 
who's talking, is about one-third to two-fifths of the total 
industry, and includes such categories as mass market romances, 
celebrity biographies, and children's books. We can all play snob 
and decide which trade books are serious and which are fluff. Is 
Anna Quindlen high brow or middle brow? How about John Updike? 
However, I don't think that is productive. What is clear is that 
the books serious readers care about constitute a tiny portion of 
the whole, perhaps $500 million and certainly not more than $1 
billion. At $500 million, that is 2.5% of the total industry and 
.0078% of the gross domestic product. The future of publishing is 
not so much bleak as it is small.

The various segments of the book industry will move into the 
future in different ways. Professional publishing has already been 
seriously impacted by digital media, especially online services; 
that trend will accelerate. But whereas current professional 
information services are large in scope, in the future such 
technologies as distributed processing, client-server 
architecture, and of course, the Internet, may reduce the critical 
mass necessary to get into the online game. I anticipate we will 
see more professional publishers in the future, not fewer.

School publishing will be exactly what taxpayers want it to be. 
Educators are excited by the prospect of interactive instructional 
materials, especially products that are delivered online, but the 
fact is that the hardware isn't in place to make this possible and 
no one seems willing to shoulder the cost. It could be that the 
future of school publishing depends largely on the political 
prospects of Al Gore. If an information superhighway is built, and 
ifQ a big ifQ it extends into the schools, we can expect to see 
the traditional textbook market give way to materials produced in 
multiple media: some print, an online component, videotape, and 
especially for younger children, hands-on learning materials, 
which are called "manipulables" in the trade. These innovative 
instructional materials will be part of an overall retooling of 
the classroom, an important part of which will be the training of 
teachers. Our company has bet heavily that teacher training 
increasingly is going to be the responsibility of publishers. Thus 
the future of publishing in the schools may involve the packaging 
of the entire classroom experience. From there it is a short jump 
to publishers opening up their own schools.

So, for publishers, the word "future" is a plural. But what of the 
future of intellectually distinguished works? Will this segment 
find its own path to the future, or will it piggyback on the 
developments of other segments? Let's break this segment into 
three parts and take a look.

First, stepping away from books for a minute, we have academic 
journals. This category is dominated, at least in terms of 
dollars, by three or four publishers that concentrate in the areas 
of science, technology, and medicine. This segment, as we know it 
today, was essentially invented by the late Robert Maxwell, whose 
entrepreneurial insight was that libraries would pay almost any 
price for premier publications. He was right, and he was hated for 
it.

The backlash against Maxwell's paradigm is getting stronger, and 
with the aid of electronic publishing over the Internet, there is 
a reasonable chance of restructuring journal publishing by the end 
of the century. The critical drivers in this area are universities 
themselves, who may begin to assert more control over the 
publication of the research performed at their institutions. The 
copyrights to these works increasingly may come to reside at 
university presses, whose job it will be to manage Internet 
servers. As we go into the next century, journals publishing will 
be less profitable than it is today. It is an open question 
whether journals will flourish in an environment that is hostile 
to the creation of capital.

The second area is university press publishing itself. University 
presses nowadays do a lot of things; ten years from now these 
publishers may be very different. One thing is certain: the move 
by university presses into general trade publishing will disappear 
by the end of the century for the simple reason that they will 
lose money at it. My advice to university presses is: get out of 
this area now. The trade publishers in NY are very, very good at 
what they do, and it is naive to believe that a university press 
in Berkeley or Lincoln or even Cambridge can compete with them.

It is the scholarly monograph that hurts so much to contemplate. 
Does it have a future? Print runs for some titles are now down to 
as few as 500 to 700 copies; the market continues to contract. 
Inasmuch as there is a long tradition of subsidizing monographs, I 
am sure some titles will continue to be published, but the outlook 
is not good. Nor does electronic publishing seem very promising, 
for two reasons: the discursive text of a typical scholarly 
monograph works best in print, and in any event, it is the fixed, 
not the variable, costs that are undermining the monograph, and 
the fixed costs do not vary much between print and electronics. It 
is my view that the notion, dear to college administrators, that 
university presses can be self-sustaining is a pipe dream.

This leaves us with the quality segment of the trade book 
business. Here I am optimistic. Although the superstore chains 
such as Barnes & Noble and Borders are primarily being built to 
sell remainders and bestsellers, stocking a broad selection of 
books is important to their image. Good books will find their way 
onto the shelves. And they will continue to be published, both by 
small independent presses and by sneaky editors in the large 
commercial houses. There is also little reason to believe that 
interactive media will make any significant inroads with this 
audience (at least outside the workplace) because the closely 
reasoned text that they enjoy is precisely what digital media is 
not good at. For some time to come, we can expect books to be the 
thinking person's medium.

There is so much hype surrounding electronic media that it is good 
to slow down once in a while for a reality check. We have already 
looked at the myth that electronic publishing alone will destroy 
print, but perhaps more insidious is the idea that multimedia is 
somehow superior to text. If this were true, all music would be 
opera. Except for kids, most publishing will continue to be text 
publishing for the simple reason that words can do things that 
images and sound cannot. The text may be hypertext, and we may be 
seeing more and more of it on a computer screen, but the primacy 
of text is just about the one thing that publishers can count on 
in the future.

What is for me the most intriguing question, whose answer may not 
be known for 10, 20, maybe 100 years, is how digital media will 
change our understanding of what an idea is. A paragraph is a 
creature of the print medium Q obviously. But is the consciousness 
that creates paragraphs and thinks in paragraphs also a function 
of print? A closely reasoned argument proceeds step by step, word 
by word. Is such an argument an outgrowth of the linearity of 
print? I don't know the answer to that question, but what is clear 
is that if the future of publishing is increasingly going to be an 
electronic future, we will have to develop a poetics of new media. 
This is one publishing project whose time has come. The one 
outstanding question is whether we will publish it in print or 
electronic form.