Merchants of Culture

This is a great book. John B Thompson successfully captures the middle ground between the academic thesis and the chat down the pub. It's serious stuff delivered accessibly.

Merchants of Culture: the publishing business in the twenty-first century. Polity, 2010.
Book details.

The book explains, for the publishing industry, particularly trade publishing, how we got here and why. It is a fascinating read and it explained things to me that I had never properly understood before.

1. The Growth of the Retail Chains. 
2. The Rise of Literary Agents. 
3. The Emergence of Publishing Corporations.

They are the first three chapter headings.
This book deals with the publishing business in the UK and USA, ie London and New York, the centres of the English language publishing industry. There are commonalities and differences and John Thompson addresses them both.
He continues the story with an analysis of the Polarization of the Field between the big corporation and the small press, with little in between, and then discusses the part played by Big Books and Extreme Publishing in the corporation business dynamic. For corporations, at the end of the day, it is all about the bottom line and delivering "growth" year on year. Imprints within big corporations pin their hopes on Big Books, in other words, on books they hope will sell in large quantities, and on Extreme Publishing, that is, bringing a new title to market very fast and reprinting very fast.
Chapter 7 is entitled Shrinking Windows and it recounts how opportunities for marketing books have diminished; less retailers, less time, more expense.
It was only when I came to Chapter 8 that I felt the pace begin to drag; that's page 291ff. That's some achievement! For three hundred pages the author had kept my interest without question. At this point there was some reiteration, inevitably, of what had gone before but, once through the back eddy, the stream picked up speed again fairly quickly. Chapter 8 is called The Wild West and it is about book retailing in the UK, particularly the end of the Net Book Agreement on prices and the rise of the supermarket as a power player in the business. Supermarkets demand, and get, very high discounts from the publishers, squeezing the publishers harder than they were already. The situation in the USA is different; there is a sort of gentleman's agreement enshrined in law which seems to stabilise the market to some extent. It is still tight but it is not quite as wild as it is in the UK but, then, the size of the market is so much bigger in the USA compared to the UK, so the pressures are bound to be different.
The last two chapters deal with The Digital Revolution and Trouble in the Trade and there is a Conclusion: Facing an Uncertain Future.
I've learnt a lot and I understand better how the market operates and what people involved in the book business might be thinking and why. I thoroughly recommend this book.