Image – Getty: Alena Kravchenko
By Richard Charkin | @RCharkin
‘I’m Grateful to Judge Pan’
One day while I was working at Macmillan, I was paid a visit by a former colleague from Oxford University Press, Byron S. Hollinshead. He was CEO of American Historical Publications and Macmillan had acquired non-United-States rights in a series of books entitled What If?Hollinshead thought we should be selling more copies and he was probably right.
Richard Charkin
We’ve all played the What If? game in our daily lives. What if I hadn’t sold that house for $100,000? What if I had taken that job in Philadelphia?
That memory sparks this month’s column on what might-have-beens in publishing. Do add your What Ifs?
But before moving on from Byron, there’s an unforgettable line from his speech on leaving his role as chief of the international division in order to move back to New York as president OUP USA.
He was a dedicated East Coast American and was thrilled to be going back. He made it
clear that he was equally thrilled simply to be leaving the city of Oxford itself —lousy weather, rotten
food, uncomfortable lodgings, and absurd university politics. He said he could identify only one benefit from his seven-year stay: ‘Oxford is a good place to wear out old suits.’
In 2009 with the imminent launch of the iPad. Apple wanted to sell ebooks on the iPad and began negotiations with large publishers (Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins). Their business model was based on an agency agreement in which the publisher would set the retail price and Apple would charge a commission—30 percent of the
retail price—for facilitating the sale.
It was complicated, messy, and raised all sorts of legal questions, and thus concomitant costs.
Other retailers using the traditional model were angered. There were competition inquiries. Goodness knows how much energy and money was spent. If publishers had simply said no, Apple might not have set up their bookstore but it hasn’t amounted to much and the Amazon market share has not been dented. We might have had a simpler and just as effective an ebook ecosystem today.
Or think of late 2022 when, after months of court hearings and depositions, Judge Florence Y. Pan in Washington blocked the acquisition of Simon &Schuster by Penguin Random House. What if the decision had gone the other way? Our industry would have an even larger trade publishing market leader. On the plus side, perhaps the new entity would have been more able to resist pressure on terms from an Internet bookseller (although even the massive PRH/S&S would be a minnow compared with their distributor).
‘Perennial Debates Facing Our Industry’
The other side of the ledger is bleaker.
A trade book operation of that size undoubtedly would have damaged the ability of all other publishers to compete for the best authors and titles. It would have been able to hoover up smaller publishers creating an ever more dominant market leader. The single largest publisher would have become a logistics and dat company, not a creative and entrepreneurial one.
Not everyone will agree, but I’m grateful to Judge Pan.
What if Pearson in 2017 had decided that Penguin, the Financial Times, and the Economist were not
worth sacrificing in its pursuit of US educational publishing assets? What if Reed Elsevier (now RELX/RX) had not sold off its consumer publishing assets? What if Springer Heidelberg had not merged with Nature Publishing Group?
What if there were no reproductive rights organizations such as CCC or CLA to offer an infrastructure for our industry to work commercially with GenAI companies to the benefit of authors, consumers, and copyright protection?
What if China had not signed up to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and had thus continued to
allow unfettered breaches of copyright in the world’s second-largest publishing industry? What if
China had been blocked from joining the International Publishers Association (IPA) and so participating in and contributing to the perennial debates facing our industry?
What if the Lang Law in 1981 in France which prevented heavy discounting of books from French
publishers had extended to imported books, particularly in English? —and similar laws elsewhere in
Europe?
These laws encouraged Internet booksellers to promote and discount English-language books rather than domestic titles. Putting local publishers at a disadvantage might have been, with hindsight, an unfortunate consequence for both domestic publishing and the dominance of the country’s language itself.
And to end on a purely personal example, what if, when I was CEO of Macmillan, I had not shared a
bottle or two of wine with the CEO of Bloomsbury which led up to my joining that incredible
business? I think it’s for others to speculate whether that decision was good for Macmillan or
Bloomsbury but for my part it could not have been a more fulfilling and productive decade of my
career.
Join us monthly for Richard Charkin’s latest column. More coverage of his work from Publishing Perspectives is here. Richard Charkin’s opinions are his own, of course, and not necessarily reflective of those of Publishing Perspectives.