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By Richard Charkin | @RCharkin
A Long-Running Topic
In October 1992, I was fortunate enough to be dispatched to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a twelve-week “advanced management program.”
Richard Charkin
It was a long time ago and memories of it dissipate, but the two central themes were empowerment and globalization. These referred to empowering people to make decisions and how to recognize the benefits and inevitability of a more interconnected world of trade, culture, and beliefs.
Neither of these precepts was challenged. Yet today, we seem to inhabit a world in which people feel disempowered and the word globalization has become tainted by a charge of widening the gaps between rich and poor countries, damaging the industrial infrastructure of the West and leading to an extreme polarization of ideas.
Harvard Business School’s material sees globalization as “the increase in the flow of goods, services, capital, people, and ideas across international boundaries.” However, my Oxford English Dictionary included this quote from The Economist in 1965: “Between globalism and isolationism there is extensive middle ground.” I certainly hope so.
How Has Globalization Affected Publishing?
The major adult and children’s trade publishers now are international entities, to one degree or another. They all sell their books in English everywhere. They publish books from many parts of the world. They’re beginning to publish in multiple languages other than English. Their offices are staffed by people from multiple nations. They’re owned by German, French, American, British, or other entities.
Academic publishing has been “global” for decades but authorship has moved from predominantly European or US research centers to an Asian influx in nearly all scientific disciplines. Learned societies, often national, still play a major role, but even their ambitions are international. Ownership of the two largest academic publishers is German and Anglo-Dutch.
Educational publishing, by dint of national curricula, is only modestly international except when it comes to the digital platforms for delivery, testing, and ranking of students—and, of course, teaching English, the ultimate global language, which, after K-12, is pretty well universal.
Content Publishing Cannot Stand Alone
The two largest trade book retailers (Amazon and Elliott Management) operate across the world, Amazon more than the bookselling brands of Elliott, which include Barnes & Noble, Hatchards, Blackwell’s, Foyles, Waterstones.
“We’ve moved a long way from the days when the horizons of editors in London or Beijing or Santiago were a handful of post codes where their friends lived.”
Printers are operating in multiple locations, reflecting the wider demand for publication. For instance, RR Donnelley has facilities in China, India, Singapore, and the Netherlands in addition to its operations in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.
Ingram Industries has expanded from its Nashville base to be one of the major suppliers of distribution, technology, digital printing, and self-publishing. While holding to its Tennessee roots, it has embraced globalization with operations in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, and Asia.
And we can’t forget Apple, Microsoft, TikTok, Meta, and the rest, for all of whom the world is seamless.
Book fairs are sprouting up in many places, as are various media on which publishers rely for exposing their books to the general public. Some outlets moving from their home bases to the world are The New York Times, the Guardian, and Le Monde.
Literary agencies are no longer country-bound nor are other publishing service industries such as SAP or DHL.
There are, of course, theoretical and actual objections to the globalization of publishing. It reinforces the linguistic hegemony of English at the expense of language diversity, particularly overhanging minority languages. It challenges national literary and cultural publishing ideals. It makes it harder to manage a diverse set of business entities with different legal and financial structures.
That said, we’ve moved a long way from the days when the horizons of editors in London or Beijing or Santiago were a handful of post codes where their friends lived. Reflecting on the Harvard days again, perhaps globalization can only work hand-in-hand with empowerment, and with the consequent associated risks.
Globalization isn’t to everyone’s taste but it’s here to stay and we’d better buckle up and enjoy the ride.
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