BY BRENDAN WORK

In print | November 15, 2007

“Read a book.” It’s the call of every old fogey, every social prelapsarian who thinks our culture is headed to doomsday on a remote control. And even though that may not be true, grandpa has one thing right: the book is slowly becoming the vestige of a bygone era. But it isn’t taking a graceful fall — even as millions of Americans stop reading, the publishing industry isn’t giving them a reason to pick up the hobby again, much less saving face as a respectable institution. Instead, it’s rewarding quantity instead of quality, using book clubs to ramp up sales, and thereby allowing itself to be flooded, like its competitor the television, by mudslinging politicos.

The recent news from the New York Times is at first patently ironic: a cadre of conservative authors are suing their publisher, Regnery Publishing, for skimping them of their royalties by selling their books to book clubs at drastically reduced prices. With their worker protections in jeopardy, these authors - the same wackos who wrote such masterpieces as “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry” and “War Crimes: The Left’s Campaign to Eliminate the Military and Lose the War on Terror” - are resorting to the litigation process that conservatives claim to despise and turning their backs on the ideal of loose capitalism that allows their profiteer publishers to rob them of their royalties. It must smack of fair-weather free marketing to a conservative, and to a liberal observer, it’s just funny. But behind the irony of it all is the fact that Regnery Publishing is nothing out of the ordinary. The system in which it operates rewards cheap books and bestseller lists, $1 book clubs and bargain bins.

As near as one can tell, the economics of it are fairly simple: an average hardcover book sells for around $22. When sold through book clubs (like the Conservative Book Club in the above example) or other organizations that advertise steep discounts, it can sell for as little as $1. For an author, that results in about $3 to $4 profit per book versus ten cents. So why mass market at such low prices? It’s not to spread a product. One has to wonder why anyone would buy a book called “Sweet Jesus, I Hate Bill O’Reilly” (by Joseph Amann and Tom Breuer), unless it were in $1 book club deal. No, the impetus behind the book club is for authors - occasionally of the venomous political variety - to wangle a place on the bestseller lists. A spot on the New York Times Best Seller List, for example, can galvanize millions in further revenue, a highly prized label on the book’s cover and political influence in a society that equates sales with some philosophical, educational or intellectual value.

Could the inference be more misguided? The New York Times Bestseller List for nonfiction is chock full of smear attacks and mudslinging manuscripts from both sides of the spectrum: Justice Clarence Thomas’ wildly ideological “autobiography” takes the sixth spot, Valerie Plame assails the Bush Administration from the tenth, Ann Coulter hails from number twenty with the seminal “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans” and Paul Krugman’s “The Conscience of a Liberal” turns in at number thirty.

This is fully one year before the next presidential election. Most political authors enjoy great success during election year summers — like Swift Boat nutjob Jerome Corsi did with “Unfit for Command,” which came out August 2004. In other words, as the election heats up, we’re in for a brawl in the bookstore that bodes only ill for a publishing industry well outpaced by its competitors.

Books have already lost the battle. With television, music, video games and movies arrayed against the publishing industry, the impulse to increase sales by reducing quality and cost is futile. But more than that, it’s a disgrace to the literary tradition that the publishing industry should try to uphold. Keeping bulk-sale books (a la those snatched up and sold for pennies by book clubs) off the bestseller lists would be a start. But until the book regains its dignity, don’t expect me to tell anyone to read one.

Brendan is a sophomore. You can reach him at bwork1@swarthmore.edu.

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