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By Root 1481 0

book business follows the rule. As early as the 1960s, major corporations, many of them defense contractors including IBM, ITT, Litton, RCA, Raytheon, Xerox, General Electric, and Westinghouse, invaded the textbook business. Since then film and telecommunications companies, even as they fell prey to larger industrial corporations, had themselves been feeding on publishers. Bowker’s Books in Print lists nearly 26,000 publishers but Bagdikian estimates that there are 2,500 or so that actually publish a book or more a year. Yet just six companies take in over half of the total book-sales revenues—Paramount (what was Snyder’s Simon & Schuster; Ginn & Company); Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (Academic Press); Time Warner (Little, Brown; Scott Foresman); Bertelsmann, A.G. (Doubleday, Bantam, as well as RCA Records and Arista); Readers Digest Association; and Newhouse (Random House, The New Yorker).18 Five of these are involved in other media including television, two in filmmaking directly; one—Time Warner—is simply the largest media corporation in the world, as well as the second largest cable company and among the largest publishing companies.

The trends are similar across the Atlantic where Bertelsmann in Germany, Murdoch’s News Corporation in Australia and England, and Hachette in France have become planetary Goliaths in a world without many prospective publishing Davids. Bertelsmann once was a German publisher, much as Honda was a Japanese motorcycle manufacturer. Now, with its formidable megalith marker in New York’s Times Square, it runs book clubs in England, publishes American magazines like Parents, owns Doubleday, Bantam, and Dell, has taken over the Literary Guild, and is active in records through its RCA and Arista labels. Along with seventy-four magazines around the world, France’s Hachette (which controls nearly a third of French-language books published along with Paris Match) publishes the Encyclopedia Americana, controls the largest distributor in the Spanish-speaking world, and distributes newspapers and magazines in Germany, Britain, Belgium, and the United States.19 I have already described the one-man media octopus that is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, Ltd., and will only add that in the context of print, in addition to HarperCollins and partial interests in Viking, Penguin, and Reuters, it controls two-thirds of Australia’s newspaper circulation, one-half of New Zealand’s, and a third of Britain’s. Murdoch also happens to be the world’s largest distributor of video-cassettes—from which an increasing majority of film profits derive and on which the viability of his publishing interests increasingly depend.

When books become a niche category for media octopi like Murdoch or Viacom with commercial entertainment tentacles and political information (news) tentacles and television tentacles and publishing tentacles, but no civic or literary torso, the future of the word and the civic and literary cultures it supports becomes extremely uncertain. When words are subordinated to pictures (film, television, or videocassette) whose producers are indentured to profit, democracy is unlikely to be a beneficiary. Imagine (not hard today) a court in which pictures are the only arguments: will there be the possibility of justice? Imagine a debate conducted in the flashcard imagery of MTV: can there be deliberation? Imagine imagination without words: does it ennoble or debase? Or simply cease to exist? Imagine an ontology, a science of the real, conceived in cyberspace: reality itself is transmuted into a virtual cousin, a species of the extant consisting in equal parts of pretense, illusion, and deception. Virtuality displaces reality, and Plato’s Cave, where flickering shadows dancing on a smoky wall are our only clue to the “real,” becomes the whole of our world. Words open the soul’s window to ideas and the discourse of words is how we grope our way to conversation and, when conversation can be stripped of its inequalities and hidden hegemonies, how we eventually become capable of cooperation, of common life with others,