December Blues

A couple of months ago, I stopped opening my investment statements. Then, a few weeks ago, I stopped reading the papers thoroughly because the general economic and business news was relentlessly bad. We all knew that publishing would not be spared; that feeling was palpable as early as last summer and certainly by Frankfurt—when, if one more person compared going to the lavish Bertelsmann party to “dancing on the deck of the Titanic,” I would have thrown him in the punch bowl. Still, while the news this week of massive layoffs and downsizing at Random House, Simon & Schuster, Thomas Nelson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was not surprising, it was, like any expected death, still a shock.

What's going on? What's happening? What does it all mean? These are the questions everybody in BookLand is asking and nobody seems able to answer. And I suppose I should be flattered that a number of people—some the same ones who last spoke to me of the Titanic—have called to say, “What's your take on all this.”

My take? My take? At the moment, my “take” is probably a lot like yours. To wit: I'd like to throw myself in that punch bowl.

Nonetheless, here it is: yes, this is a terrible time for all commerce, and we'd have been foolish to think that publishing—which, on the surface, at least, creates a less “necessary” product than, say, the automobile industry—was going to be spared. Never mind that publishing is so much smaller a margin business than most; because profits are always small, a downturn in sales of 4%, which would look like a merry Christmas in Detroit, for us is close to a disaster. Even realizing that some of the downsizing—particularly the Random House reorganization that offloaded Irwyn Applebaum and Steve Rubin—has been a long time coming, and might make some business sense even in a healthier market, doesn't diminish the shock value. Thanks to the sheer volume of bad news, the number of people affected and the strong likelihood that there are more layoffs to come, publishing now has its own Black Wednesday.

But dark as the day has been, I resolutely refuse to join in the old Titanic trope, as if we are going down. Yes, we may well be witnessing the end of publishing as we have come to know it of late —which is to say as a conglomeratized, overexpanded, highly leveraged industry, the kind of industry, it must be said, that so-called “real” book people have been complaining about for years. But I don't really worry, in the long run, about publishing itself. Because if there's one thing that history has shown, it is that when the dust settles there have always been stories, people to read them and people to produce and disseminate them. Whether those stories (and people) will be part of large corporations, whether the stories will be measured in pages or bytes, and whether there will be hundreds of thousands of them produced every year—well, that we'll have to see.

Of course, who knows what tomorrow's news flash might bring? I surely don't. Nor do I know which recently laid-off industry star is going to land where (though I expect they'll all land somewhere). But the suffering will be real as our dear business repositions itself. I feel most for those mid-level 40- and 50-somethings with college tuitions and retirement plans to worry about. It's particularly hard music to hear this time of year.

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