I was catching up on Twitter this evening, and I ran across a particular tweet from @grammargirl. (You can find her over at Quick and Dirty Tips) She said this:
Wow. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has temporarily stopped acquiring manuscripts. Their editors aren’t buying books.
She linked to this article over at Publisher’s Weekly. If you don’t want to read the article (Come on. It’s short.), the key line is “PW has learned that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has asked its editors to stop buying books.”
I’m a big fan of books. I read a lot of them. I buy a lot more of them. Some day, I would like to write one or two. I’ve been watching the publication industry for a while, because I would like to get into it in some capacity, and I have never heard of a publisher putting an entire hold on buying books. Spokespeople at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are saying that the move isn’t indicative of anything too sinister, but how can it not? While I’m sure the publisher has a vast store of manuscripts it has purchased not (yet) published, but if a publisher stops buying books, it creates a stagnation in thought.
Think about it: no new books are coming in, so new books will stop going out, and while there are tons of books out there, and no one could ever read them all, publication of new and ever-improving ideas is a must for the development of culture, philosophy, or really any other facet of life. This move by Houghton Mifflin really has me concerned, even if it is being called a “temporary” situation. This is a dangerous precedent for them to have set.
I recently learned one of the more popular tech magazines is stopping print circulation. (Sound the death toll…) For PC Magazine, this is surely due to the fact that Technology news is almost always faster and more accurate when found online, (sources considered).For printed/bound material, it’s a little related.For non-fiction, publishers have to compete directly with online sources – which is a tough nut to crack! Free is very tempting to consumers.
Fiction works are probably in a slump due to the slowing economy. Readers have a few options to save money: libraries, used bookstores and bookstore reading (why do bookstores have such comfy chairs?!). All 3 of these hit publishers right in the pocketbook and make it harder for them to dump capital into obtaining new works.
Just like the coffee industry, where customers must choose between high priced, triple mocha, double foam, cinnamon vanilla latte with a splash of crack cocaine or just a cup of Joe from the break room; the publishing industry also has consumers choosing between paying full price for a book for a day or two’s worth of reading or waiting a week or two and getting it free from the library, spending a couple days hanging out in a bookstore, or saving some change and buying it used from some poor sap that paid cover price. (Hmm, is that a run-on?)
I think it’s hard times all around and no industry is immune. They’re all just having to cut back and prune – new growth will be here by “Spring”.
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Tommy: The difference, though, is that with coffee or magazines, or what have you, the number of possible outlets is rather large. With academic writing, the number our sources one can trust is really limited to the publishing companies or peer-reviewed journals. What’s really bad here is that information will stagnate. That’s not going to happen with tech news and the like because of all of the outlets. Academic writing needs more outlets, but the anonymity of the internet makes it difficult to become trustworthy enough to be a terribly valid academic source, and that’s extremely unfortunate.
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