Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [291]
The “instant” book had been created by paperback publishers to capitalize on a news event, like the many brought out immediately after the Israeli raid on Entebbe, in 1976, but “instant” books were now making news, which led, among other things, to a whole new relationship between book publishing and the press that was at once far more competitive and far more antagonistic. In any event, book publishing, so long as it remained small and relatively unprofitable as businesses go, had never been of much interest to the press to begin with—now that publishing houses had grown into major companies, often allied with even larger ones, as S&S was with Paramount, changes and events in the publishing business became legitimate news.
Until the eighties, most book publishers weren’t big enough to have anything interesting to hide, and any gossip worth printing would have been about the authors, not the people who worked in publishing houses. From the eighties on, publishing houses were growing and acquiring so fast that they nearly always had something to hide, if only from the financial press, while many editors and executives were getting more press than authors. Part of the reason why journalists began to pay more attention to book publishing was that it was neither far away nor a world apart, the way the movie business is; book publishing took place on the Boston/New York/Washington shuttle axis, and most people in book publishing were accessible, rather than walled off from the press by PR people. So long as somebody like Lee Iacocca stayed behind his desk, he was hard to get to, and any interviews would be with company PR men present to ensure that nothing controversial was addressed, but the moment he wrote a book, he was out there in the open, eager to be interviewed by anybody, if he thought the interview would sell books. In short, he was just like any other author, and you could ask him questions you could never have asked him otherwise and get answers, too.
The book, after all, has a totemic significance, and not only to the ancient Hebrews. Even today, when the role of the computer in education is becoming ever more significant, children in the Judeo-Christian scheme of things have it drummed into their heads at an early age that the book is something special, that books in general are worthy of respect, a good thing. People might not read them, but they respect them.
Somehow, books have managed to keep something of their sacred aura—misused, ghostwritten, edited until they scarcely bear any relationship to the original manuscript, sometimes so denuded of meaning as to call for a special category called “nonbooks,” shipped out by the truckload as “merch” (a category even lower than nonbooks), used as a political tool by aspirant or retiring politicians (the dreaded “campaign biography” being the lowest form of this category) and as a means of striking back at ex-spouses by celebrities, the book is nevertheless central to our culture in a way that nothing else—movies, tapes, newspapers, television, or magazines—can or, very likely, ever will be.
AS THE eighties gave way to the nineties, where once publishers had complained there were not enough stores in which to sell books, they suddenly became impossible to escape. The wholesale building of new stores in shopping malls put bookstores all across the country where few or none had existed before, and in just the place where people might be expected to buy them, if they were going to buy them at all. Soon superstores—close to the malls but in large buildings of their own—eclipsed the stores in the malls, while price clubs at major retailers offered best-sellers at enormous discounts.
The British and Europeans, who had always looked down their noses at American book-selling techniques and boasted that in France or Germany people bought far more books per person than in America, found themselves stumbling to catch up with the transformation of America’s bookstores into book supermarkets with bright lighting, discounts, floor displays, shopping baskets,