A Pioneer Gazes Ahead

Features

A Pioneer Gazes Ahead John F. Baker -- 1/1/01 *Jason Epstein--editor, entrepreneur, skeptic of progress--eyes the book business* "Jason Epstein," says the jacket blurb on his Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future (Norton; Forecasts, Dec. 22), "has led arguably the most creative career in book publishing during the past half century." An extravagant claim for someone thought of by many simply as an elder statesman at Random House. But consider... It was Epstein who, in 1952, triggered the trade paperback revolution that changed the face of publishing when he launched Anchor Books at Doubleday. Epstein, again, seized the opportunity, during a newspaper strike in 1962, to create, in the New York Review of Books, a biweekly book review journal that was more than a match for the one it temporarily replaced, and which flourishes to this day and has even been imitated in London. Epstein, over a "phalanx" of martinis at the Princeton Club with Edmund Wilson (all ordered and consumed by that sturdy critic) laid the groundwork for what became the Library of America, an authoritative, scholarly and beautifully made uniform edition of the works of our finest authors. Epstein, again, in the mid-1980s conceived The Reader's Catalog, an early attempt to make a huge range of books widely available to readers lacking access to large bookstores--and a precursor of the kind of access now offered by Amazon.com and other online retailers. Epstein meets PW in the kitchen of his spacious apartment in the old downtown Manhattan police headquarters building, where he seats himself, a burly, white-haired figure in shirtsleeves, at an expansive table. These days, Epstein works mostly at home. He g s into Random House only one day a week to attend editorial meetings, and claims to be no longer involved in "building the list, or anything like that." He is still the editor for a handful of star authors, including Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow, Peter Matthiessen and Toni Morrison--"people I've had a long relationship with, people I know who depend on me." He still looks occasionally at submissions, steers things he finds interesting to younger editors, but in general is dismissive of his Random role: "I give odds and ends of advice, but they can get along fine without me." On the issues raised in his book, which grew out of a lecture he gave as the first of a planned series sponsored by publisher W.W. Norton at the New York Public Library, Epstein is much more volubly engaged. For a start, he was by no means persuaded that there was a book in his talk, but Norton's president, Drake McFeely, urged him otherwise. The initial lecture also became an article in the New York Review, which he followed up with another piece, on electronic publishing and its possibilities, which in turn became a second lecture. Then all was tied together into a book. About his career as a publishing entrepreneur, Epstein has a ready image. "It's been like the pearl growing in the oyster. If I get irritated enough for long enough, I get stimulated to do something." Everything he's done has come out of a passion for books and their role in human life. "They're attempts to recapture the past, make sense of it." He remembers the great Eighth Street Bookstore in Greenwich Village, dead these many years, and how its wide-ranging stock, most of it available only in high-priced hardcover, opened his eyes to the possibility of cheaper reprints of quality books. Thus was Anchor born, the predecessor of Vintage, Perennial, Owl, Harvest and endless other lines of quality books well bound, designed and printed, and priced, when they began, at only a couple of dollars. "If I hadn't thought of it, someone else would have." As for the creation of the New York Review, "this was a time of the transformation of literary magazines, and the Times then seemed so out of touch. We wanted to do long, thoughtful pieces by people who really cared about the books they were discussing." It would not have been possible, he says, without the devoted efforts of Barbara Epstein, his wife at the time, and Robert Silvers, then an editor at Harper's. When Robert Lowell and his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, came through with the money--$4,000, borrowed from Lowell's trust fund--the Review became a reality. About the way the Library of America has developed, he is not entirely happy, although it has performed many of the functions Wilson had originally envisaged for it. But Wilson became engaged in a running battle with academics, and thence with its federal funding, and Epstein thinks the administration of the Library has become top-heavy, with far too much going to board salaries. "It's a disgrace the way it's run." He still wishes its operation could be entrusted to one of the great university presses, free of the pressures of private funding. The Reader's Catalog, though it failed in its stated purpose of making a huge range of books widely available to "people like me in high-rent districts who didn't have access to great stores like the Tattered Cover, Powell's and Northshire Books," was a necessary move toward codifying and making known the backlist, which, as Random's Bennett Cerf had once unforgettably remarked, was "like picking up gold from the sidewalk." Extrapolating a Future Epstein is convinced that in the electronic future he foresees for book ordering and distribution, "one element seems indispensable: a vast multilingual online mother catalogue of all the books available anywhere in the world. It would be wonderful if some great foundation or some collection of universities, or perhaps even a giant corporation, perhaps Bowker?--could do it." The future opportunities for bringing customers together with the books they want are "fantastic compared to what we have now," says Epstein. "It's hard to imagine just how much better the system could be, based on what you see now--just as seeing a box kite contraption fly a few feet at Kitty Hawk didn't exactly give you a notion of the future of airline travel." The key to such a future, Epstein is convinced, is a giant consortium of publishers, large and small, who will get together to sell their books online, bypassing retail booksellers. "It's horrible, and I hate to say it, but conventional booksellers have no ultimate future. I can't imagine a world without them, but how will they fit in? I just don't know. There will always be something like a bookstore, and perhaps very well stocked smaller ones in remote areas may survive." The kind of consortium he imagines will offer the ultimate direct-to-the-customer sale, butalthough he sees it as inevitable, he has tried in vain so far to persuade publishers, including his own giant group, which he hopes might lead the way, that it is a necessary step. "They won't really say why they don't want to do it, but I think their main problem is that they can't imagine dispensing with retailers." He is adamant that "middlemen can't make it in the e-world," and that includes giants like Amazon.com and bn.com. "They can only compete by lowering the price, or by offering more expensive services, but since they're all offering the same product, it's not going to work. Jeff Bezos was here talking about it, sitting right where you are now, and I tried to show him why he'd never get the necessary margins." His convictions came out of his own experiences with The Reader's Catalog, where they had tried to sell the listed titles by mail order via Baker & Taylor. "We thought a 40% markup would make it work, but there were so many other expenses, warehousing, fulfillment and so on, that although we sold lots of books we weren't making any money." They did a second, updated edition of the Catalog five years ago, talked about putting it online, but decided there was no commercial future in it and auctioned off the right to use the annotated listings as the basis for online sales. Barnes & Noble won, and the service is still updated for them. It was then that Epstein had his conversation with Bezos, who also bid for it and was convinced that at a certain sales level he would cover his costs and make a profit. "He did not see," Epstein writes in his book, "that he was committed to an incorrect business model, one in which costs would rise in proportion to sales while margins would remain under constant pressure from competitive discounts and high service costs." Epstein sees the reader of the future buying books printed on demand rather than e-books--ordering by number from a vast catalogue of digitized texts, one book at a time, which is then downloaded and printed out via a machine at the neighborhood Kinko's or some other kiosk. "One day there'll be such machines, and such access, all over the world," he says. He d sn't see publishing online as a likely outlet for future authors, and thinks many of the e-publishing Web sites will either have to rethink their approach, as some, like MightyWords, are already doing, or will disappear altogether. "What will happen is that authors will develop their own Web sites, perhaps sponsored by their publishers, and then dozens of people with their own special-interest sites will be drawn to them, and see titles they want to buy." At that stage in the publishing evolution, Epstein imagines, there will be only three critical players beyond author and reader--editor, publicist and Web site manager, all of whose functions will be necessary to make sure that quality books are created and adequately made known." He is not concerned that an e-market will be flooded with worthless self-published materials, as some have feared. "People have a profound instinct for quality, and, yes, they can tell the good from the bad." Fiction authors have their own followings, who will latch on to their work no matter how it is published. In the case of significant literary novelists like--well, some of his own--their Web sites could be permanent, "like their reputations," and could announce each bo0k as it was ready. "Perhaps everyone who ordered the last title could get an e-mail announcing a new one." Epstein acknowledges, in his book and in person, that he prefers publishing the way it was 40 or 50 years ago, when he first got into it, "but there's nothing to be done about that." And, ironically in view of his excitement about future possibilities, he says he is "skeptical about progress. If I had my way, I would freeze the world at some point--maybe here and now, while I'm still around." A former Random colleague, Andre Schiffrin, also has a book, The Business of Publishing, out currently from Verso, and some reviewers have already linked his and Epstein's. What d s he think of Schiffrin's position that significant and socially critical books get abandoned, in the context of corporate publishing, in favor of superficial but salable fluff? Epstein says he hasn't read Schiffrin's book, "but if you look at it unemotionally, there are still plenty of good books being published today. The problem is what has happened to the retail business. They can't sit around and wait for people to find them. Shelf space is too valuable, so hardcovers are soon gone, and then the paperback settles into a sort of half-life. It's not the fault of conglomerate publishers, or evil people in silk hats. It's a problem involving real estate and its costs. Stores need turnover to pay their high rents, and the publishers have to supply it. Authors and agents have been the beneficiaries in all this, and publishers have been the losers." He is also quick to support today's editors, often criticized as being more concerned with acquiring titles than with the quality of their content. "I think we publish books with more skill and enthusiasm now than ever before, and many of the younger editors are very good at what they do. No, the problem remains one of shelf life, not corporate censorship or laziness." But he remains convinced, despite his passionate belief in the possibility of getting more people to buy more books, that "publishing is not a business but a vocation." There has never been a significant amount of money to be made at it, and there probably never will be. "Publishing is the most important thing in the world," he says, "but the only time people ever made much money at it was when they sold their companies. Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer--wonderful men, with a kind of courtesy and selflessness you just don't see today--never took money out of the business. I doubt if either of them ever paid themselves more than $30,000, $40,000 a year. They paid their people more than they got." In the end, Epstein's vision seems to be one of circularity, of an industry swollen beyond its means, which to prosper will have to return to its roots as a small-scale, specialist occupation. "Maybe," he muses, "history moves the way Yeats imagined--in spirals; the center remains the same but the circumference constantly changes. History may not repeat, but it ech s."