Dysfunctional Book Pricing

Levi’s got an incisive post about what exactly "book industry" means and why the obscurity of this term makes it difficult to understand the pricing of books. Here’s a good bit:

• Confusion Over What the "Book Industry" Is

Three people may be trying to answer the question "Is the book business profitable?" and might never discover that each of them are talking about vastly different entities. One may be talking about the giant international conglomerates that dominate global book publishing: Bertelsmann, Fox/News Corporation, CBS Corporation, Holtzbrinck, Pearson, Hachette Livre. Another might be talking about the divisions of these companies that publish commercial fiction (mystery, fantasy, romance, juvenile, literary, etc.) and general-audience non-fiction in North America, while a third might be talking about the business of publishing literary fiction in North America (we’ll discuss the definition of "literary fiction" later). These three views of the business operate on such different scales that participants in these conversations become dizzy and confused and find no basis for agreement on even the most basic facts.

Here’s a quick litmus test that shows what I mean: close your eyes right now and name a company that publishes books.

If you said "Bertelsmann" or "Hachette" or "Holtzbrinck", you are thinking about global mega-corporations.

If you said "Random House" or "Simon and Schuster" or "HarperCollins", you are thinking about the USA-based commercial publishers which are divisions of the global mega-corporations.

If you said "Farrar Straus and Giroux" or "MacAdam/Cage" or "Soft Skull" you are thinking about literary fiction publishers, which may be independent (MacAdam/Cage) or may be imprints owned by larger entities (FSG is part of Holtzbrinck).

It can help to imagine these three viewpoints as three Russian dolls, one inside the other. . . .