Format and Function

Book Publishing's Final Frontier

Ninety years ago, there was only one book format, Hardcover.

Reading and collecting books was for gentlepersons. Bindings were hand sewn, the case materials made of beautiful leather, and the type meticulously embossed on each spine. There is a fascinating demonstration of the bookmaking craft of that era in the film adaptation of Jon Robin Baitz's play, THE SUBSTANCE OF FIRE. It's a good movie too. I'm finding myself having more and more in common with the paterfamilias of the story, played by Ron Rifkin.

Books were cherished and expensive treasures. The unit cost (how much to make one book) was high, but the market (wealthy people with disposable income) was willing to pay what publishers charged. A personal library was a class distinction. But when the global depression of the 1930s hit, book publishers took it on the chin. Something had to be done to expand the market.

Like most innovations, the answer didn't come from an industry study group or an expensive report commissioned from a business consultancy. Instead, the saving grace for the business sprang from one mercurial man's need to distract himself after a day of tiresome schmoozing on behalf of his father's company.

Allen Lane was the son of John Lane, the founder of the Bodley Head publishing concern. One day in 1934, he'd been dispatched to Devon, England, to visit with the firm's bestselling writer, Agatha Christie. After a full day stroking her ego, Lane waited for his train home. But first, he'd stopped at the station's newsstand, looking for something to read. He was appalled by the selection, primarily silly magazines and a few expensive hardcover reprints of Victorian novels.

On the platform, Lane looked around and noticed many men just like him, commuters on business with nothing but their own thoughts to keep them company on the trip home. Lane thought that if there were a vending machine filled with low-cost books made of paper, like magazines, all of these sad sacks could have something disposable to read on the train. Why not make a book that could be made cheaply and sold like a magazine?

A year later, Lane had had enough of apprenticing at his father's firm. He was especially appalled by Bodley Head's decision not to publish James Joyce's Ulysses, so he stormed out to set up his own publishing house. He had no interest in being traditional and naming the firm after himself. So, he called his company Penguin Books and put an image of a penguin on every edition so that the books became synonymous with his friendly and reasonably priced paperback concept. His first order of business was developing and installing a paperback vending machine at Charing Cross Road, Valhalla for book-loving folk worldwide.

 He called it a ""penguincubator.""

Penguin books became ubiquitous at train stations all over England and eventually the world. The paperback idea caught on quickly, especially in the U.S., when a twenty-three-year-old named Ian Ballantine opened Penguin's stateside office.

The new, second format was just the kind of innovation that would not only increase revenues but expand the book-reading intelligentsia. Penguins led to other mass-market paperback lines—Pockets, Bantams, Ballantines (Ian was much like Allen Lane and got fed up being an employee but had no problem naming the company after himself), Dell, Fawcett, Berkeley, etc.—and then, in 1952, legendary editor Jason Epstein launched high-quality trade paperbacks called Anchor Books for Doubleday Publishing. Epstein went on to run Vintage trade paperbacks for Alfred Knopf too.

With the right book, publishers could now sell a hardcover, followed by a mass-market paperback, and then to revitalize the title, they could re-issue the book in trade paperback years later.

Three formats. Three bites of the apple. Three ways to earn out an advance.

While Audio Books and Large Print formats evolved in the ensuing fifty years, their resultant global effect on the business was relatively minor. They were nice add-on income streams that often turned a terrible year into a "we can have a Holiday party year" but did not radically transform the industry's business model.

Of course, the game-changing format of the Twenty-First Century was the eBook.

Fifteen years ago, there was little excitement about reading a book on a screen. Then in November 2007, the Amazon Kindle e-reader was launched. It sold out in five and a half hours. The eBook took hold as Amazon priced eBooks even below what they paid for them from publishers. 

Let's not forget the courage it took Jeff Bezos to "lose money" on every title he sold to establish screen-reading. Every time I think through what he did, I'm astounded. Imagine how many people thought he was absolutely out of his mind to do such a thing? The decision changed the world. He wasn't just selling e-books or Kindle devices by doing what he did. Bezos cornered book publishing with that gambit, luring in the big publishing houses with "free money" and changing what books used to mean (bookstore buying) into what they mean now..."I'll get it off Amazon and save the trip."  

If not for Amazon, adopting the format would have taken far longer to become ubiquitous. Bezos trojan-horsed his way into being the most powerful bookseller ever...and then did the same thing with just about every other industry that could be digitized.

EBook purchases went through the roof when the iPad arrived in April 2010. Today, eBooks have settled into a two-billion-dollar market in the U.S. for traditional publishers (most of that is driven inside the Amazon marketplace) and make self-publishing a viable alternative for writers without entree into the insular and mercurial big five publisher oligopoly. Those billions are not even reported or considered "real" by the old-school publishers. They are, though.

The digitization of millions of books also enables and serves large language models like ChatGPT to learn the structure and organization of literary and scholarly communication.

What's next on the horizon for book publishing? Will the powerful Amazon/Google/Apple/Microsoft/Meta tail wag the dog again, and we find ourselves consuming algorithmic dopamine-stimulating narratives written by careless machines? Or is there some fire left in the old literary mutts like ourselves that level up narratives into ever-evolving transformational complexities? So much so that our children can tell the Real Story from the Manufactured Story?