What role did books play in your personal life and in your family’s life when you were growing up? Did your parents or any adult read to you when you were young? Were you encouraged to read books before you went to school? Was there a period in your young life when you were an avid book reader?

What’s the last best book you’ve read? Why did you read it?

Where is the nearest bookstore to where you live? Do you ever order books online? What’s the difference between going to a bookstore and ordering books online?

Consider this:

Reading is one of the chief skills that children acquire; the lack of the ability to reader lowers one’s esteem in society. Parents read books to their children, not just to entertain them but to . . . what?

We live in a highly literate society.

Our society provides free lending libraries.

Our religion is tied to books – in Christianity scriptures are thought to be holy. “In the beginning was the Word.” God himself is likened to a word. (Gospel of John)

What are the qualities of a book that make them special? Why do we think so much of books – to the point of reverence sometimes?

• lots of information

• easy to handle

• permanence – which leads to credibility

How did the book develop

• Need to store information; pass that information from one person, group, generation to the next. But in the earliest societies we know anything about, the technology to do that was non-existent. We had to develop
• pen – something to write with
• ink – material for writing
• paper – means of storing the information; first “papers” were clay plates, then animal skin.

Then there was the problem of storage; once paper and its flexibility were developed, there came the idea of rolling it up in scrolls. But what is the problem with that?

In the first five centuries, there developed the codex (the form of the book we have today), but there were still many problems.

-- The main problem was duplication and distribution; there was no good or efficient way to duplicate a manuscript. People did the best they could – they copied. Copying manuscripts became one of the chief jobs of Christian monasteries during the first four hundred years after the deal of Christ, but there were many problems with this system: it slow and tedious; many of the copyists were illiterate themselves and did not know what they were copying; consequently, they made mistakes.

But the need for manuscripts grew. This period was known as the Dark Ages because of the upheavals of Western European societies, the lack of literacy, and lack of transportation, but people were realizing the need for stored knowledge. Universities, places of learning, were developing and beginning to flourish.

The printing press – the event of the millennium. 1450 A.D.

• Gutenburg

• separation of words and pictures

(example of Leonardo)

The development of the printing press was part of a movement by western civilizations that were breaking the shackles of the Dark Ages. As books and papers could more easily be duplicated and distributed, literacy rose. Civil order allowed travel and transportation, which then promoted commerce and economic development. The Reformation Movement (Martin Luther used the printing press to advance his anti-papist ideas) gave rise to the importance of the individual over the institution.

Books could expose people to new ideas, but there was also that feeling of “shared knowledge,” knowing that other people know what I know.

All of this, in a very short time, represented a new way of looking at the world. And the book was a key player in this development.

The impact of a book

Books are influential in our society. They often make us take a long and hard look at the things in our society that are wrong or that need correcting. This has been true for a long time.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; first published as a magazine serial in the 1850s; a work of fiction about a slave family. About two weeks before the last installment was published, it came out in book form and sold 20,000 copies within three weeks. During the next two months it sold 200,000 copies and more than half a million copies in the next two years. Historians say the book thrust the issue of slavery into the modern culture and helped make it a societal issue -- one over which the Civil War was fought.

What are some of the other books that have had an impact on society in this way?

• Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)
• Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904)
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906)
• Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965)
• Seymour Hersch, My Lai 4 (1970)

Business of books

• Categories of books

Fiction

Nonfiction

Textbooks

or

Trade books – books aimed at a general audience; industry distinguishes between adult and juvenile books; fiction and nonfiction are included; books sold in retail outlets

Professional books – books not aimed at a general audience but rather a specialized audience of common interests; not sold through retail outlets

Textbooks – divided into elementary-high school (known as el-hi) and college; type of book that you are very familiar with but chances are you don’t know how this part of the industry works

Religious/other categories

 

• Production and distribution/sales

Publishers – publishers take on jobs of producing books, marketing and distributing them; acquisition editors are those who make decisions or recommendations about what should be published; publishers typically take all of the financial risks but they also reap the greatest rewards; authors’ commissions range from 10 to 20 percent.

Bookstores – retail outlets that sell books

Facts:

• Between 150,000 and 200,000 new titles published each year

• 17,000 new titles in adult fiction

• 10,000 new titles in juvenile fiction

• average retail price for adult trade hardcover: $25-$30

• Net sales of books in 2004 -- $23.7 billion, up 1.3 percent from 2003
El-hi -- $4.3 billion
College -- $3.45 billion

Authors/authoring

How does a book get written and published:

• Begin with an idea

• Find a publisher (or an agent)

• Negotiate manuscript, deadline and royalty with publisher

• Manuscript delivery; editing; revision

• Publication

• Marketing; author involvement

 

Who reads? What do they read?

Trends in book publishing

• Consolidation of major publishing houses

• Decline of independent bookstores, rise of chains

• Increase in online sales

• New means of distribution; audio book, instant book and e-book

Questions?