Greed in the Literary World: A RantNov 21 '04 (Updated Feb 10 '07) Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Books
The Bottom Line Forget Barnes & Noble. Go to Half-Price Books or your local used book store and support them!
I don't like Barnes & Noble. I never have and never will. Not only is their selection second-rate, but their prices are godawful. Of course, publishing trends in the last few years have dictated that books, no matter what they cost to print, need to be pricey, not for the author, no, but for the publishing house. Everyman's Library might say, " Everyman, I will go with three, and be they guide, in thy most need to go by thy side," and the Modern Library might claim that they "provide the world's best books, at the best prices," solely, and I mean SOLELY, in the interest of spreading knowledge, but we all know they are in it for cash. Random House, Doubleday, and Penguin Books are businesses, not anything else. Same with Barnes & Noble. They don't care about the ubiquity of knowledge, only the selling of their books. Of course, I am not naive enough, even if I am still in high school, to think that a company can be run any other way, but come on.. All new hardcovers are close to twenty dollars, and while some may see that as justified, considering the price of publishing hardcovers, one of those new big softcover books (you know the kind) costs about fourteen dollars! Well then, buy a paperback, some will say, but the fact of the matter is, a lot of books never make it to paperback these days, including those by authors like John Updike, Philip Roth, and Michael Chabon. Updike and Roth ONCE were published in paperback form, but now they are restricted to hardcovers or the $14 softcovers. Of course (I know, I'm repeating myself), the primary reason for this is due to the fact that not as many people buy Updike, Roth, or Chabon as, say, Stephen King, Danielle Steele, or John Grisham, so the sole printing of fourteen buck softcovers is justified in that the less people buying a book equates to a more expensive book... Right? If so, that must mean that the more people buying a book means a cheaper book. The law of supply and demand.. blah blah blah. Let's compare some prices, though. Dover Publications, a publishing house primarily known for its cheap editions of classics, has A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man for $2.50. If one goes to Barnes & Noble and looks under J in the General Fiction section, they'll find the Penguin Classics edition for $9.00, or the Everyman's Library edition for $18.00, or the Barnes & Noble edition for $7.00. It is highly unlikely you will find the Dover Thrift edition. Let's try another book. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev. If you check the shelves at Barnes & Noble, you'll likely find only the Penguin Classics edition, costing $11.00, the Signet Classics paperback edition, costing $6.95, or the Barnes & Noble edition, $5.95. You might also find an Oxford's World Classics edition for $8.95. What you won't find is a Dover Thrift edition costing $3.50. I know, I know, they are trying to make money, so they don't put the cheapest edition of a book (say, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka published by Dover Publications and costing $1.50), they put the most expensive book (editions of The Metamorphosis costing $5.95, $6.95, $7.95, and even $13.00) on the shelves. It is marketing, right? The fact of the matter is, though, these authors are DEAD and in their graves, meaning that there are no fees to pay to the author, which means all that is left is the amount it costs to publish the book which, as you can tell from my comparisons, can be as low as $1.50 or as a high as $13.00, depending on how greedy the company is. Even when the author is alive, the amount of money they make off each book is measly compared to the amount made by the publishing house. And, keep in mind, these publishers select books solely on their salability, so while they may reject a recent book like Life of Pi, winner of the Booker Award and bestseller, five times due to the dubious nature of its salability, they will jump all over a potboiler or novel that was written in the exact vein as those by King, Koontz, Nora Roberts, Steele, Tom Clancy, et cetera, et cetera. In fact, it is only when they take a chance with most books the world regards as good or even classics that we see these books on the shelf any other time than posthumously. If it were up to the majority of publishing houses, and not to a few select editors who see something really good in a book the publishers would otherwise reject, we wouldn't have many of the great novels we have today, due to the fact that the authors wouldn't be able to support themselves, ergo, they starve with only a small body written in comparison to the elephantine one they otherwise would have written. I don't know what my point is. It seems as if the world of literature is clogged by greed, and that the only way to get around that would be to do what Virginia Woolf and her husband did, and open a publishing house of one's own and at one's own expense in order to ensure that good books are not overlooked. Today, though, that is like running as a third-party candidate in the presidential election. Not only would Barnes & Noble probably refuse to carry your cheaply made and cheaply priced books unless you raised the price and ensured that B&N itself got more of a profit for selling said book, they would probably, after reading the book and seeing its worth as a book instead of a manuscript, go to the author and offer them lots of cash if they would publish a B&N exclusive edition for the company. And what is a struggling writer to do but except? Nothing, meaning more high-priced books on the shelves and fewer and fewer editions that cost as they honestly should. It is a dog eat dog world out there, though, and such is to be expected. For someone like myself, though, who wants to be a novelist and plans on centering his life around the literary world regardless of his success at writing novels, it is a frustrating thing. I don't like seeing greed infiltrate my passion because it makes everything feel less like the easy going mysticism inherent in fiction, and more like the depressingly realistic world of economics, politics, etc. What is there to do, though? Part of me strongly desires to offer what I write over to publishers like Dover Publications that would market the book cheap. But what would that do for availability? A simple solution, I think, would be to stock book stores and other places with the book while ignoring the Barnes & Noble stores. What would that mean, though? It is such backwards thinking, and it does not exactly mean economic stability for me, or any writer who attempted to try and do such. It isn't simply submitting a manuscript until it finds a publisher who will market it, it means putting the manuscript in book form out there on the shelves before it is marketable. Would that mean it would not, in fact, reach more people, but instead reach less people? And what would that say? That the right way to go is the capitalistic way, which says that one needs to mark something up as high as possible so as to make a profit? And that that way will mean the book gets around to more people? I don't know, but historically it seems as if the opposite were true. After all, when Dickens went about publishing A Christmas Carol, he had it published in a very fancy edition for the holidays, and that the book sold poorly. But, when he published his novels in serial editions that cost a pence a piece, they were immediately spread all over England. It seems to me that the cheaper a thing is, the more accessible it will be made to the populace. I'm young, though, 18-years-old and I live down in Texas and have terrible grades in school. Maybe my suppositions don't make sense economically or in a humane sense.. I don't know. What I do know is that greedy publishers are currently dominating the literary world, that Barnes & Noble is a monopoly that steals business from places like Half-Price Books and other used book stores, and it bothers me that I can't do a thing about it but vent on a website. Such is life, though. All one can do is BUY USED BOOKS. There is a nearby book store by the name of the Book Browser, and it has the distinctive claim of being the largest individually owned used book store in Texas. They offer a massive selection and sell books for half the market price and allow book trading. Whenever I go down there with me dear olde mum, we always bring a fair amount of books, sometimes five and other times hundreds, and so when we check out, no matter what our amount of novels, we rarely pay much more than five dollars at the most. Used book stores don't always have a great selection, I know, but neither does Barnes & Noble. Say you are looking for a somewhat obscure novel, Envy by Yuri Olesha for instance, and try both your local B&N and used book stores. Chances are you won't find the book. So what option is there? Well, Amazon.com, another monopoly, but this one with a damn good selection. They have Envy alright, but for $9.71, which isn't bad considering the book would regularly cost $12.95. Still, isn't it supporting another big heartless business? No, not if you buy it used from an Amazon.com user. Then you are merely contributing to the cause. What I am trying to say is, there is an alternative to simply going out to your local B&N and doling out big money for books. Considering the lack of individually run publishing houses in America that ensure books are kept cheap as they should be, used books are the next best thing. So until someone out there gets the tenacity to push themselves into the market for books, we readers have are two options: used or new. That's how I see things now, anyway. Thank you for reading this rant.  |
| Read all comments (7)|Write your own comment |
|
Ads by Google
|
