Capital at the Brink: Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism

The Rise of Corporate Publishing

In 1932, when Random House sought to legally publish Ulysses in the United States, it was Bennett Cerf, one of the co-owners of the publishing house that contacted the Irish novelist. After receiving Joyce’s consent to publish, Cerf had a copy of the book sent from Paris to New York, and then arranged for customs officials to seize it at the docks so that he could prepare for a court battle over it. Ten minutes after Judge John Woolsey of the New York district court delivered his verdict that the book was not legally obscene, Cerf had the typesetters at Random House working on Joyce’s masterpiece. [4]

To many, Cerf, who co-founded Random House in 1925 with Donald Klopfer, and whose press also published Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote, and John O’Hara, is one of the heroes of American publishing. Though Joyce’s book had been published some ten years earlier by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, because it was banned in the English-speaking world, Joyce did not profit from it until Cerf stood up for it in court. The legal publication of Ulysses by Random House finally allowed Joyce—rather than the Ulysses bootleggers—to reap more of the financial rewards of its publication.

In hindsight—and from a less flattering perspective—moves like Cerf’s acquisition of Ulysses and the building of a top-tier list of authors by his press can be seen as laying the groundwork for the rise of contemporary corporate publishing. That is to say, it foreshadows a publishing world where Simon & Schuster is a subsidiary of CBS, and HarperCollins is owned by News Corporation, the multimedia conglomerate founded by Rupert Murdoch; where twelve publishers out of approximately 85,000 account for almost two-thirds of US trade and mass-market book sales [5] ; where 90% of active publishers account for less than 10% of total book sales; [6] where Random House alone accounts for over 13% of all US book sales and has world-wide sales revenues of almost 2.4 billion dollars; [7] and where Random House alone almost sells more books than 58,795 US trade and mass-market publishers combined. [8] How did this happen? How did it come to be that a few publishing corporations now control the majority of book sales in the United States? And what does it mean for the 58,795 “small” presses that reside in the shadows of corporate publishing giants like Random House?

In the case of Random House, by the 1950s, the co-owners began to worry about what would happen to the company if one of them died. Cerf said, “Donald and I knew that the real value of the company had increased each year, but nobody knew by how much.” [9] He continued, “If its value was too high, how could the survivor afford to buy the other half, and how could the widow of the one who died raise enough cash to pay the estate tax?” [10] Worries about the future of their company if one of them died led Cerf and Klopfer to sell 30% of their stock to the public in 1959. “From then on,” writes Cerf, “we were publishing with one eye and watching our stock with the other.” [11] “Instead of working for yourself and doing what you damn please, willing to risk a loss on something you want to do, if you’re any kind of honest man, you feel a responsibility to your stockholders,” wrote Cerf. [12]

Going public opened the door to expanding the business, which it did shortly after going public by acquiring both Knopf [13] and Pantheon. [14] Soon Time-Life took an interest in merging with Random House—a deal that eventually fell through when it became clear that the US Department of Justice would most likely oppose the merger on anti-trust grounds. [15] In 1965, however, Random House was sold to RCA for 40 million dollars, at which point Cerf stepped down as president. Cerf said they accepted RCA’s offer because “it was one of the great corporations of the country.” [16] And who would disagree—the sale even allowed one of RCA’s writers, Truman Capote, to become one of its recording artists, releasing an album of readings from scenes from In Cold Blood in 1966.

By the time Random House was acquired by RCA, it was a much different publishing house from the one where Cerf wrote to Joyce about publishing Ulysses. Further acquisitions and mergers followed including its sale in 1980 from RCA to S.I. Newhouse, a wealthy businessman and owner of a range of television stations, newspapers, and magazines, to its sale again in 1998 to Bertelsmann. [17] Today “Random House” consists of over 60 imprints, divisions, and groups in the US and UK alone—with one of the imprints of “Random House” called “Random House.” [18]

Random House is a perfect example of the effects the rise of a ruthless new form of market capitalism that activists and scholars have been warning us about for years. “It reifies and glorifies the reign of what are called the financial markets,” comments Pierre Bourdieu, “in other words the return to a kind of radical capitalism, with no other law than that of maximum profit, and unfettered capitalism without any disguise, but rationalized, pushed to the limit of its economic efficacy by the introduction of modern forms of domination, such as ‘business administration,’ and techniques of manipulation, such as market research and advertising.” [19] Moreover, Random House’s recent merger with another of the largest publishing houses in the world, Penguin, is only further evidence of the continuing ruthlessness of this new form of market capitalism. [20]

On October 29, 2012, a day that will go down in neoliberal publishing history infamy, the two largest trade-book publishing corporations in the world—Random House and Penguin—announced that they will be merging. If approved by government regulators, the new Penguin Random House will account for about one in four books sold worldwide. Worldwide revenues from this new publishing company will be in the neighborhood of 4 billion dollars. However, the annual revenues of Penguin’s parent company are even larger. [21]

Pearson, the UK corporation which owns the Penguin Book Group, is by far the largest publishing corporation in the world with annual revenues of nearly 8.5 billion dollars. It has 41,000 employees in 70 countries, and publishes over 4,000 fiction and non-fiction books per year. Pearson Education is the source of 75% of its revenues, whereas the remainder are divided between Penguin (18%), and the Financial Times (7%). [22]

Though roughly a quarter the size of Penguin, Random House is the eighth largest publishing company in the world. Owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann AG, Random House had annual revenues in excess of 2.2 billion dollars in 2011. However, with revenues in excess of 3.8 billion the previous year, one wonders what role this revenue loss played in their merger with Penguin. [23]

To put these revenue and publishing numbers in some context, remember that of the 85,000 publishers in the Bowker database, twelve of them account for almost two-thirds of US trade and mass-market book sales—and now one of them will account for one-quarter alone. Also recall that the annual revenues of Penguin Random House will be more than the combined revenues of 58,795 US trade and mass-market publishers, that is, over 95% of all US publishers. [24]

This enormous financial and market-share advantage has created a lot of concern—and both companies are working hard to contain it. Markus Dohle, Random House chairman and CEO, who will assume the position of CEO of the new combined publishing company, wrote to his Random House colleagues that he aims “to retain the distinct identities of both companies’ imprints.” [25] Distinct identities? Who is he kidding? That world was lost when Random House went public and started swallowing up publishing houses back in the 1960s.

It bears remembering that both Random House and Penguin have already absorbed much of their competition over the past fifty years. In the United States alone Random House includes the imprints Alfred A. Knopf, Anchor, Ballantine, Bantam, Broadway, Clarkson Potter, Crown, Delacorte, Dell, Del Rey, Dial, Doubleday, Everyman’s Library, Fawcett, Fodor’s Travel, Golden Books, Harmony Ivy, Kids@Random, Main Street Books, Nan A. Talese, One World, Pantheon, Random House, Schocken, Shave Areheart Books, Spectra, Spiegel & Grau, Strivers Row Books, The Modern Library, Three Rivers Press, Villiard, Vintage, and Wellspring, and Penguin Book Group includes Ace, Alpha, Avery, Berkley, Current, Dial Books, Dutton, Firebird, Frederick Warne, Gotham, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, Grosset & Dunlap, HP Books, Hudson Street Press, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Jove, New American Library, Penguin, Penguin Press, Perigee, Philomel, Plume, Portfolio, Price Stern Sloan, Puffin, Putnam, Riverhead, Sentinel, Speak, Tarcher, and Viking. Add to this list the UK imprints of both companies, and the combined Penguin Random House company will result in over 100 different imprints in the US and UK alone. The only distinctive difference that will come out of this new company are its profits—which will be the largest ever by one company in the history of trade publishing.

There is also worry that authors will lose more of their creative autonomy and will be reduced even more to merely equations or numbers by the new mega-corporation. To assuage this fear, Dohle wrote in the same letter that “authors remain the center of everything we do” and that “creative autonomy” “will be a defining hallmark” of Penguin Random House. [26] It is one thing for Dohle to say it, but quite another to realize it in a publishing environment where capital—not creativity—is the prime directive, and where autonomy must be cleared by the accounting office. Of all the things in Dohle’s letter, the least controversial is his claim that the other defining hallmark of Penguin Random House will be “great resources.” We know what this will mean for shareholders, but what will this mean for authors, agents and readers?

A major fear of course is that reduced competition between Random House and Penguin will result in lower advances and profits for authors and agents, and fewer publishing options for writers—now that the two of the Big Ten are One. Both Dohle and John Makinson, who is slated to become Chairman of the new company, and who is currently Chairman and CEO of Penguin, try to calm these concerns. In fact, Makinson writes in his letter to the global Penguin Group that “exactly the opposite will happen,” namely that the “publishing imprints of the two companies will remain as they are today, competing for the very best authors and the very best books.” [27] But again, it is hard to believe that the merger will result in more choices and more competition in the book industry. So are we really to believe that the imprints of this company are going to compete vigorously against each other for titles? I don’t think so but let’s hold off on this question for a moment.

Make no mistake: this merger and other mergers like it are not about protecting creative autonomy or bringing about more opportunities for authors and options for readers. Rather, it is about maximizing profit in an industry that is rapidly changing. In fact, it may be more about the digital transformation of the publishing world than anything else. And the competition may not be from within the publishing world, but rather from the distribution and sales world.

Amazon reports that it sells 114 e-books for every 100 printed books. [28] And it has been predicted that it will soon account for 50% of US trade sales in all formats. [29] Dohle’s letter indirectly confirms their worries about the challenges presented by Amazon when he says that the merger “will accelerate our digital transformation, while ensuring a strong future for print.” He also says that it will put them in a better position “to provide copyright protection, and to support our authors’ intellectual property.”

There is no doubt that the publishing industry has been forever changed by the rise of neoliberalism. This form of unfettered capitalism, says Bourdieu, “sets up as the norm of all practices, and therefore as ideal rules, the real regularities of the economic world abandoned to its own logic, the so-called laws of the market.” [30] While it has its roots in the classical liberal economic theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, it is more closely associated with the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. As a consequence, it has resulted in among other things, the rise of authoritarianism, the suspension of civil liberties, the privatization of public spaces, the upward distribution of wealth—and in our case, the disfigurement of the book publishing industry. Again, as Henry Giroux succinctly puts it, “neoliberalism is an ideology and politics buoyed by the spirit of a market fundamentalism that subordinates the art of democratic politics to the rapacious laws of a market economy that expands its reach to include all aspects of social life within the dictates and values of market-driven society.” [31] The case of publishing is yet another sad chapter in the subordination of social life by neoliberalism—as the books that we read are an integral part of it.

To be sure, there is no aspect of the publishing world that has not been affected by its economic control and cultural domination of the market. What though does the rise of neoliberalism and corporate publishing mean for the 58,795 “small” presses [32] that reside in the shadows of corporate publishing giants like Penguin Random House? Is their position any different than it was before Random House went public and was purchased by RCA or merged with Penguin? And what is the effect of the rise of neoliberalism in the publishing on fiction writing, reading habits, and bookselling? Is writing for Cerf and Klopfer any different than writing for Rupert Murdoch or RCA? These and related questions go straight to the foundation of book and creative writing culture in America and have a significant impact on the shape and future of our critical and creative legacies.

The Aesthetics of Profit

The rise of neoliberalism has forever changed mainstream fiction writing, reading habits, and bookselling in America. Writing fiction in the age of corporate mega-publishing is now more than ever a business affair, not a creative one. In Acts of Resistance, Bourdieu writes “neo-liberal ideologues want us to believe that the economic and social world is structured by equations.” [33] In terms of the publishing world, they likewise want us to believe that it too is structured by equations.

Now that reading habit data can be tracked through data mining of e-books, publishers can determine everything from how long it took you to read a page to specifically what you read. [34] What then will stop them from feeding this data back into their publishing equations to determine things like the economically optimal narrative aesthetics? How far are we from aesthetics being more than just influenced by market-fundamentalism, but rather determined by it? After all, this and other data determined the books stocked by the fistful of chains that dominated the national landscape (though, see below, where it got them). Using data now to determine the shape of narrative seems like a logical next step.

Nearly three-quarters of active publishers in the US have annual revenues between zero and $50,000; roughly another twenty percent put their annual revenues between $50,000 and one million dollars. In total, these figures represent the annual revenues of almost 60,000—or 95%—of US publishers. [35] Considering the large percentage of publishers with annual revenues less than 50 thousand dollars, it could be argued that small press publishing populates the national landscape though corporate publishing controls it. How else can you describe the difference between a Penguin Random House that will now produce one in every four new books and a small press like the Fiction Collective Two that only publishes six books per year total?

One might argue that what separates a corporate publisher from a small press publisher is that the former want people to buy books, whereas the latter want people to read them—or even believe in them. In a way, the American political landscape mirrors the publishing landscape. Namely, a case could be made that political power is concentrated among the wealthiest 5% percent of our nation, whereas the remaining 95% dominate in numbers. Whereas in American politics wealth yields a disproportionate amount of political power, in American publishing, capital yields a disproportionate amount of market control.

The great myth of American publishing is that it is controlled by aesthetic values. This might have been the case years ago when the Random House of Bennett Cerf pushed to publish a novel which opens with the line “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” It is not the case when its contemporary neoliberal instantiation outbid itself to publish the next novel of the author whose first novel began with the line “At the first gesture of morning, flies began stirring.” [36] Yes, outbid itself. Which is either like tripping over your own shoelaces—or tripping over the outstretched foot of the editor in the cubicle next to you.

The novel that got Random House tripping over their own feet was a first novel whose hardback sales in the late 1990s had exceeded 1.6 million copies. Such things capture the attention of market-driven corporate publishers—“At first gesture of a market, calculators began stirring.” Based on what is said to have been a one-page proposal, one of Random House’s 60 imprints, divisions, and groups offered an advance of over five million dollars to the author. However, not to be outdone by one of their co-division rivals, another division of Random House offered over eight million dollars. [37] The name of the novelist and whether the advance paid off for Random House are irrelevant to the conditions that they exemplify: the effects of neoliberal-based decision-making in the publishing world. [38]

A climate of publishing where the advance for a second novel exceeds by eight times the annual publishing revenue of 95% of American publishing houses—or roughly 60,000 publishers—presents a sad state for American letters. If Random House was willing to offer the author of this second novel an eight million dollar advance, one can only imagine how much they were willing to invest in marketing the book. That is, for example, in purchasing mainstream media interest in this author and their work as “essential summer reading” or buying national distribution support to ensure that “the next great American novel” is available for purchase in your local Wal-Mart or Borders. To say that hearing this book news over and over again in major media outlets, and seeing this book prominently displayed in every big box bookstore in America doesn’t affect reading habits and impact sales would be naïve. However, to say that it fashions reading and buying behavior would be closer to the truth.

American publishing in the age of neoliberalism is controlled by markets, equations, and calculators—not aesthetic value, literary contribution, or scholarly impact. The more that mega-publishers invest in large market fiction and avoid small market fiction, the more that aesthetic innovation and narrative diversity will flourish among small presses. In the neoliberal climate of corporate publishing, it is not surprising to see a rise in small press publishers devoted to diversity and innovation—and a widening of the financial gap between small presses and the corporate giants. Moreover, even among the big house publishers, one is beginning to see more capital distance among them.

Of the 4,000 publishers that have annual sales over one million dollars, less than twenty percent have annual sales over fifty-million dollars [39] —and only 12 have annual sales over 150 million. [40] And among the Big 12, the twelfth largest has only one-tenth of the sales of the largest. This kind of concentration of publishing capital entails a type of power akin to that held by the Bush and Kennedy families in American politics. Again, that Random House alone sells more books than 76,500 US trade and mass-market publishers combined and that the newly merged Penguin Random House will only increase this number is as much a cause for celebration among writers as is the fact that McDonald’s serves more hamburgers than any other restaurant in America. So, would you like to supersize that novel?

The Decline and Fall of the Bookstore

One of the more visible signs of neoliberalism in publishing has been the decline of independent booksellers—and the corresponding rise of the book superstore. While corporate publisher mergers, market-based editorial decision-making, and multi-million dollar author advances are less visible to the general public, huge book megastores—often near boarded up independent bookstores—are a part of the American landscape. Book superstores are as common now to American strip malls as Wal-Mart and Target, and in some cities are even found among luxury stores such as Louis Vuitton and Tiffany’s.

Fifty years ago, three quarters of trade books were purchased at independent bookstores. Thirty years ago, competition from mall bookstores slashed this number in half. The meteoric rise of superstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders cut this number in half again five years ago. [41] What’s not to like about cappuccino machines, cozy leather chairs, and a mountain of the Tom Clancy novels? But now it seems even the megastores have overreached their rise.

One half of the contemporary book-superstore dynamic duo recently filed for bankruptcy. It seems that while everyone did enjoy the cappuccino machines, cozy chairs, and free reading materials, this didn’t necessarily translate into the actual sale of books. And while Borders’ recent filing for Chapter 11 might be sweet revenge to those who ran and loved the independents, don’t expect a renaissance of the independent bookstore. Consumers increasingly prefer to shop for books online, where they can find big discounts and take advantage of immediate download.

The demise of Borders only strengthens online bookselling giant Amazon, which again will soon account for half of all US trade sales. To get a perspective on this number, consider that only five years ago, all of the superstores and chains in the US combined only accounted for 45% of the US book retail market. [42] Soon Amazon alone will be responsible for half of all book sales in the US—with and without cappuccino.

If there is a silver lining to this development, at least Amazon makes available many more small-press books than Borders and its corporate companions—and easily fills your order for a title by Raymond Federman or Cris Mazza. Shopping at the chains never did that (I make a habit of looking for my favorite innovative and small press authors in every bookstore I visit). Much like Random House, whose transformation from premier literary publishing house to market-fundamentalist mega-corporation can be linked to its going public and its corporate takeover by RCA, the metamorphosis of Borders from darling of the independent bookstore world to its pariah can be associated with its purchase by another large corporation—in this case, Kmart.

In 1971, Tom and Louis Borders opened a small bookstore in the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Its success over the years encouraged the owners to open a second store in 1985 in nearby Detroit. When this store did well, they opened others. The stores were known throughout the Midwest and Northeast for their wide selection of new titles, but Borders stores retained their roots as academic booksellers. At any Borders, one could find piles of bestsellers alongside thousands of individual copies of scholarly titles—something unusual at the time for a bookstore chain. Kmart, renowned for its “blue-light specials” on underwear and soap, acquired Borders in 1992, and merged it with Waldenbooks, the mall bookstore staple that it had acquired in 1984. The merger, called Borders Group, went public in 1995. [43]

While the acquisition of bookstore chains by a department store might sound strange, it seems fitting given that at one point department stores in the US were among the leading sellers of books. Shortly after they first starting selling books in late nineteenth century, department stores likes Macy’s of New York became national leaders in book sales. And by the early 1950s, it has been estimated that between twenty to forty percent of trade books were sold by department stores. These businesses favored books in their inventory because they were believed to raise the class of the store, and appealed to a more cultured—and wealthy—clientele. [44]

One of the consequences of this corporate merger with Kmart was that Borders Group started closing many of its Waldenbooks, and opening up more Borders superstores. From 1993 to 1994 alone, Borders went from 44 to 85 superstores—whereas Waldenbooks was reduced by nearly 60 stores during the same period. [45] And Borders was not the only bookstore increasing its number of superstores at the time: so too was Barnes and Noble, which had bought the other mall chain bookstore staple, B. Dalton Booksellers, in 1986. By 2006, the number of Borders superstores rose to nearly 500 in the US alone—often in prime locations such as on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile or Market Street in San Francisco. But Borders’ fall has turned out to be faster than its rise. [46]

To be sure, Borders Group’s failings were not just about books. A poor real estate strategy, over-investment in music (another anguished industry), and inefficient inventory management contributed to the decline. When the company filed for bankruptcy on February 16, 2011, Borders hadn’t been profitable for five years. In 1994, Borders Group operated almost twelve hundred bookstores. Just before filing for bankruptcy, there remained one half that number—and another thirty percent were set to close. [47] Fittingly, the vacant shells of these large stores in prominent locations like Michigan Avenue in Chicago are as much a visual reminder to all who pass by them of the shortcomings of market-fundamentalist-based decision-making as are the piles of remaindered book-mountain titles. These vacated stores are a highly visible sign of the emptiness of neoliberal practices in publishing.

So what now for the independent booksellers? The difference between the book superstore and an independent bookseller ends with the common trait that they both stock and sell books. Whereas independent bookstores are defined for their eclectic and idiosyncratic inventories, mall bookstores like B. Dalton and Waldenbooks, and superstores like Barnes and Noble and Borders are characterized by the consistency and homogeneity of their inventories. While each independent bookstore makes its own inventory decisions, department stores and corporate chains have a few people making purchasing decisions for all of their stores.

The recent rise of chains aimed to simulate the appearance of high-end independent bookstores by having rows of beautiful bookcases with ladders alongside plush chairs and gourmet coffee, but in the process destroyed the aura of the bookstore. By regulating and standardizing the appearance and stock of the corporate bookstore in the same way that McDonald’s regulates and standardizes its appearance and menu, they in effect deconstructed the notion of the bookstore they sought to emulate. Just as independent restaurants don’t look alike or have the same menu—let alone food that tastes exactly the same—independent bookstores don’t all sell the same books or look alike. That’s the beauty of independence.

Browsing an independent bookstore for the first time can be an unsettling experience. The unfamiliarity with the layout and organization of titles, and with the stock itself, lends an element of adventure. At their best, independent books are unique assertions of aesthetic tastes. Mass market chain stores, however, sacrificed adventure for familiarity. Their over-reliance on bestsellers and reluctance to embrace valuable backlist titles led to a homogenizing of offerings. But now even this strategy is failing.

As the industry undergoes a painful contraction, booksellers and publishers will need to reexamine their relationship in a changing market. It’s unfortunate that a number of jobs will be lost, and that there will be fewer places to physically browse for books. But perhaps there is a positive element for small-press authors. Perhaps with the decline of the mass-market chains, the lure of “big” books for quick bucks will be somewhat lessened. Perhaps booksellers and publishers will reinvest in a long-standing relationship of developing authors and promoting backlist titles, as they did before mass merchandising changed the process. Well-written manuscripts from lesser-known authors might have more of a voice in an environment less dependent on mounds of bestsellers. And who knows, writers and readers just might benefit from some of the recent failures of corporate publishing.

The Disappearing University Press

If the fall of the decline and fall of corporate and independent booksellers has been one of the more visible signs of neoliberalism in publishing, then one of the least visible signs is the gradual fall and disappearance of university presses. Of all of the consequences of neoliberalism in publishing, this is the most devastating to academic culture. While there are only just over 130 university presses in the United States, these presses are the lifeblood of scholarly publishing in the United States. [48] The scourge of neoliberalism in higher education has led to a spate of downsizing and closures. The latest university press to face closure is the publisher of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes and The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Starting July 2012, the University of Missouri Press began to phase out operations. [49] The press, which was founded in 1958 by a University of Missouri English professor, William Peden, has published approximately 2,000 titles over the course of its history.

Eclectic in its reach, the press has an impressive catalogue [50] that includes offerings in women’s studies, African-American studies, creative nonfiction, journalism, and American, British, and Latin American literary criticism. It serves its region with series such as the Missouri Biography Series and Missouri Heritage Readers Series, and American letters in general with series such as the Mark Twain and His Circle Series and the Southern Women Series. The press’ catalogue is deep and rich, and holds gems for both the serious scholar and general interest reader. In addition to the seminal collections of Emerson and Hughes, my own recent favorites are Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (2007) and Ned Stuckey-French’s The American Essay in the American Century (2011). [51]

One of the measures of a great university is the strength of its press. Press strength is determined by its catalogue, and its catalogue by the choices of its editors and the impact of its authors. Still, not every prestige indicator is marked in this direction. For example, the existence of a great university press is neither sufficient nor necessary for membership in the prestigious Association of American Universities. Last year, University of Nebraska, which operates one of the best university presses in the country, was ousted from the AAU; and Georgia Institute of Technology, which does not run a press, was recently admitted. The University of Missouri will neither be ousted nor even punished by the AAU for closing its press. The AAU criteria favor competitive research financing, not competitive catalogues; faculty in the National Academies, not award-winning university press titles.

University presses are nonprofit enterprises. Though these presses may reach a level of financial self-sufficiency in their operation, they are by and large underwritten by their host universities. This is part of the investment of higher education. Most of the monographs produced by scholars have a limited audience—and very few make their publishers any money. However, their publication is still an important aspect of scholarly activity and knowledge dissemination.

The University of Missouri system afforded its press a $400,000 annual subsidy. [52] To gain a perspective on this figure and the value of the press to the university, one only has to consider that the head basketball coach at Mizzou makes $1.35 million per year—and the head football coach makes $2.5 million per year. [53] The interim director of the press makes just under $75,000—less than an assistant baseball coach. [54] The acquisitions editor makes just under $35,000—less than an athletic trainer. Closer to the cost of subsidizing the press are the salaries of the assistant head football coach and the linebacker coach/defensive coordinator, who each make just over $340,000 per year. [55] How does one compare a football season to a publishing season? Is an 8-5 season more valuable than 30 books published? [56] Is running a press worth losing an assistant coach or two?

In total, the University of Missouri employs over 17,500 individuals. Currently, the press employs 10 people though in 2009 it was nearly twice that number. The economic crash of 2008 forced many state universities such as the University of Missouri to reassess priorities and scale back. [57] Mizzou made their priorities clear: in 2010, the University of Missouri’s head football coach received a $650,00 raise. [58] Louisiana State University, another football powerhouse, slated its university press for closure in 2009. Somehow, this press survived the state budget crisis. [59] However, given that it is nowhere near as popular as their football team, I’m sure that it sleeps with one eye open, waiting for the day that university officials have to decide between a subsidy for the press—and a pay raise for the coach. Other presses were not so lucky. Eastern Washington University, Southern Methodist University, [60] and the University of Scranton [61] all closed their presses. And even the celebrated University of California Press tightened its belt by discontinuing a poetry series. [62]

University of Missouri administrators are said to be “hashing out ways to create a new and sustainable model to operate a university press.” [63] They also assure us that “any future press won’t look like the current operation.” [64] “We believe the publication of scholarly work is important,” said the president of University of Missouri. “We’re working very diligently on what” the new press “will look like.” [65] While there is no indication where the University of Missouri administration will go with this, the options here are limited. The most obvious, however, is to go digital. And here there is some precedent.

Though Rice University closed its traditional press in 1996, it reopened in its wake an all-digital press in 2006. According to a 2010 interview with Eugene Levy, who helped finance the revived press during his term as provost at Rice, the all-digital press was costing Rice $150,000 to $200,000 per year. “This was intended as an experiment,” said Levy. [66] Coming from the Andrew Hays Buchanan Professor of Astrophysics at Rice the word “experiment“ gains even more gravitas. Rice hoped to save money by not printing books. Comments Levy, “The hope was that, without the burden of having to maintain a print inventory, the press might sustain itself largely on revenues from print-on demand sales.” What the university found out was that there “are base costs that are irreducible”—“and that printing is only one of them.” [67] By 2010, it was determined that there would be no way to recover even the minimal cost of operations. Combine this with slow sales and a fiscal crisis—and the result is a failed experiment. Rice shut down its all digital press in the fall of 2010. [68] However, the decision was not without its detractors.

One of the board members—who wished to remain anonymous—commented that new models of academic publishing are not going to be derived from a sales model. “We’re moving to a different era of scholarly communication where it’s more accessible to more people, and where we don’t have to worry about commercial viability,” said the anonymous board member. Scholarly publishing is being killed by placing emphasis on commercial viability—“there is no commercial viability,” added the board member. [69] No matter what the form and how diligent the work, a university press requires resources. Just as it takes resources to run a successful athletic program, so too does it take an investment to run a university press. And comparatively speaking, the costs are negligible: an editor makes less at Mizzou than an athletic trainer, and even the assistant baseball coaches make more than the press director.

Perhaps the solution is not to compare athletic salaries to press salaries but to treat university presses on the same level as athletic programs. Both are auxiliary operations subsidized by the university, and both play an important role in American letters. Perhaps we need to measure the scholarly impact of the books published by the press in the same way we measure the impact of the gymnastics or baseball team winning a game or their division. Or think of the cultural capital and prestige generated by the press as akin to the bowl victories or NCAA titles. And just as we don’t scrap athletics if one of our teams loses games or money, we shouldn’t scrap university presses if they don’t generate enough revenue to cover their operation. While it may not be the most popular decision for the University of California Press to take one type of book off of their list, if it makes their press more viable in some way, it is akin to downsizing or closing down a sport to make an athletics program stronger. Think of the $200,000 invested by Rice or the $400,000 at Mizzou as the cost of being a strong university—a cost that in the big picture is most likely a fraction of the cost of one athletic coach.

What does it mean when a university press fails? It means not that its authors are not successful or that its press was not run well. Rather it means that its university has abandoned part of its academic or scholarly mission: namely, supporting the publication of books that are the warp and woof of academic culture and democratic culture.

Conclusion

So, can neoliberalism in publishing get any worse? Is it possible that the publishing industry will soon mirror the auto and steel industries? Would a Big Three Book-Maker industry be good for authors and readers? The spate of recent mergers and acquistions like the one between Penguin and Random House indicate that we won’t have to wait very long to find out.

To be sure, the path for the world’s largest book publishers will continue to be bigger and bolder mergers. And soon, the publishing industry will probably need to be renamed the “infotainment” industry when suitors like Walt Disney and Time Warner come knocking. This is publishing in the age of neoliberalism. Again, a world, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, with “no other law than that of maximum profit.” It is “unfettered capitalism without any disguise,” writes Bourdieu, “a very smart and very modern repackaging of the oldest ideas of the oldest capitalist.”

Though Makinson, the new chairman of Penguin Random House, may try to make the case that this extreme concentration of publishing capital is going to benefit “creative and editorial independence,” and will allow them “to take risks with new authors,” don’t believe it. It will be about as much risk as the market analysis of radical capitalism allows—which won’t be much. I’m certain that a William Gaddis or Djuna Barnes would not get very far in the world of neoliberal publishing risk.

That being said, the rise of a corporate publishing monopoly opens a huge opportunity both for acts of aesthetic resistance by the small and digital publishing worlds. As the larger presses become more monolithic, homogenized and profit-driven, the smaller presses can thrive as sites of aesthetic and editorial heterogeneity. And direct access to digital distribution systems such as Amazon and recognition networks such as Facebook provide unprecedented support and visibility to publications that might have otherwise gone unseen in warehouses or small press catalogues. Let the Penguins of the world continue their march toward monopoly. In the end, however, it is most likely a march toward extinction—and a boon for small press publishing.

The missteps and failures of the neoliberal publishing regime are reasons to be hopeful that there will be a backlash to McPublishing. There is also a hopeful coda to the University of Missouri Press saga: public outcry over the announcement of the closing of the press resulted in a stay of execution for that press. [70] So there is hope that thoughtful critical resistance can result in a reversal—or at least a reprieve—in neoliberal decision-making in the publishing world.

In the end, it may be the acts of resistance of writers, teachers, and readers that determine the fate of neoliberal publishing. If teachers, for example, refuse to utilize the overly priced textbooks of corporate publishers that are re-released every two years in a new edition, this could help derail a very profitable aspect of the publishing industry; if writers, for example, choose to publish their work with small presses rather than corporate presses, this can help cut off the supply of their creative supply chain; if people vociferously refuse to accept the closure of university presses, this can perhaps change the behavior of neoliberal administrative decisions; and so on. The story of the growth of neoliberalism in publishing can become one of rise and fall more quickly if and only if we refuse to regard the fruits of our creative labors as commodities. This can be accomplished one author at a time through the choices we make relative to the intersection of our creative interests and our publishing needs. [71]