The 9% decline in title output that R.R. Bowker estimates for 2005 is being viewed by most industry members as a needed correction to years of overproduction, though many said the drop isn't big enough and that the cutbacks—which are predominantly at small and medium-sized houses—are coming from the wrong place.
Jim Harris of Iowa City's Prairie Lights was disheartened to see that the drop in output was coming from the indie presses. "The decline in the total number of books being published is in itself not significant," Harris said. "But the fact the decline is most pronounced with smaller publishers is a problem. I don't care about the larger houses. What concerns me is that the smaller and medium houses are getting hit the hardest." Production from houses described by Bowker as "small-to-medium" and "medium-to-large" reduced their outputs by 10% and 15%, respectively, while the major publishers saw dips of about 4%.
The president of one of the country's largest houses, HarperCollins's Jane Friedman, said most everyone agrees that too many books have been published. "We look at the size of our list all the time," she said. Friedman said that, to be successful, publishers "need to get more out of the books they publish," by either selling more copies or by leveraging their content in digital formats.
A Simon & Schuster spokesperson said the company has trimmed its output in recent years. In particular, S&S has cut the number of general fiction titles it publishes while increasing the number of books aimed at targeted audiences (young adults, for example).
Dennis Johnson, founder and president of the New Jersey—based indie Melville House, said the numbers don't speak to his operation. "We haven't reduced our list," he said. "We went up last year and will go up again, slightly, this year." Overall, Johnson said he hasn't noticed cutbacks among his colleagues, either.
Rudy Shur, publisher of Square One on Long Island, said looking at numbers alone may be the problem. "Thinking that the more books you can produce will make more money for a publisher is neither bad nor good—it's stupid," he said. "For larger companies the reality of this thinking may have caught up with them." For micropublishers and self-publishers, Shur speculated, higher production costs have led to the decline.
Many booksellers said that while a decrease in production is positive, the numbers need to come down even more. Peggy Bieber, owner of the Aberdeen, S. Dak., Little Professor bookstore, was encouraged by the drop. "It's about time," she said. Bieber, like many other booksellers, believes publishers release too much, too quickly. "I think there's a lot of waste. Sometimes I read galleys, and I think, 'what were they even thinking?' And you know, if booksellers think that, our customers feel the same way."
Vivien Jennings of Kansas City's Rainy Day Books said she'd like to see the major houses cut back more. "[The overproduction] is evident to us, but I'm not sure it's comprehended at the corporate level," she said. "A lot of publishers still think, 'If we market this enough, it will happen.' " According to Jennings, the rush to publish shows in the final product. She notes that many of the galleys she receives are poorly edited. In addition, the flood of titles makes it hard to give books a chance to catch on. "Bookstores can't sit on titles too long; we keep ours longer than most, but I think in places where people are not handselling, something will have come and gone before it ever has the opportunity to catch the wave."
