Photo by L. Carper |
Donald Lamm Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Photo by L. Carper |
Page 5 of 10
At the university most people distrust the market and see it as a threat to intellectual life, but part of what I'm hearing and seeing in your writings is that a publisher must respect both intellectual life and the market. How have you reconciled those two and maintained the integrity of both, a respect for the market but also a respect for the integrity of ideas?
Well I think a lot of it has to do with the Norton connection to universities across the country, such as the connection to the University of California. As long as we know that audience, we can publish a book with a safety factor built in. The hardcover edition may not be a world leader in sales but we know that there's a second stage which is the paperback. If we have gauged accurately, that paperback will go on to become virtually a textbook in college courses. Now, the unhappy part of that today is that professors are much, much more reluctant to assign books supplementary to textbooks. And as their reluctance builds up, our sales go down and so does the possibility that these books, which I often call crossover books (I claim I invented the term, but it's of no consequence), can travel into trade or general bookstores and really have their payout, often a substantial payout, as paperbacks that are bought by students.
So you're suggesting that to the extent that you focus on the market, it's really a part of the process of keeping the life blood of the publishing business going by identifying target groups that will make the whole process possible.
Well, certainly, Harry, there's a good deal of that. If publishing really were a science, we would know more than we really do know about individual markets' (sub-markets, if you will) demand for particular books. Oh yes, you always know that there's a demand for cookbooks but does that mean that if you put out the tofu cookbook you have an automatic success because there are 873 devout vegetarians in America? I think the answer is no. There have to be a lot more ingredients involved in your selection than simply hypothesizing or even pretending that you have an accurate count of interest collectivities in the population.
One thing that has been very important for publishing is knowing that the libraries are out there to buy the books. That is a more troubled relationship than it has been in the past.
It's certainly not the librarians' fault, but it is the fault of the institution itself which is changing so rapidly. If you look at the stacking of expenditures in libraries, of course the largest single component is, as it ought to be, salaries. And the second component is probably plant and equipment. But in that "equipment" comes some very expensive items known as computers, and the whole collection of supports to computer systems that have to be purchased by libraries. When we come down to what is unfortunately called "print-ware," certainly in academic libraries the serials, that is periodicals or learned journals, come much higher than books in the pecking order. So books are the residual, when it comes to purchases, of library expenditures. And that residual does not go very far any more.
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