BISG a.g.m. focused on change

| By Gayle Feldman

The Book Industry Study Group (BISG) looked energetic and focused at its annual meeting in New York last week. That was not always the case. There’s nothing like life-changing challenges to concentrate collective minds on the role an industry-wide organisation can play.

In the past year, BISG added 32 members and expanded the board; the executive leadership now includes Safari chief Andrew Savikas and Wiley sales vice-president George Stanley. Hachette c.o.o. Ken Michaels has just taken over as board chair, having co-chaired with indefatigable Sourcebooks founder Dominique Raccah. One of the most high-profile accomplishments of Raccah’s tenure is the BookStats project—at long last, instead of individually producing data that often conflicted, BISG and the Association of American Publishers are working together to produce data that is useful.

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Are There Too Many Books?

Traditional publishing is experiencing an upswing, but that doesn't mean the quality of print is increasing as well

By Peter Osnos

It was probably a coincidence, but on one Sunday in July, two New York Times luminaries wrote columns complaining about books. Bill Keller, the outgoing executive editor, had a piece in the magazine headlined “Let’s Ban Books, or at Least Stop Writing Them.” In the Sunday business section, Bryan Burroughs, a regular reviewer and himself the author of multiple bestsellers, took on the preponderance of business books in an essay called “Compelling Tales, Rarely Told Well.”

Meanwhile, UNESCO’s list of “new titles and editions” of books published in the United States for 2009 totaled 288,355, a number that has doubtless increased since then, as books long out of print are revived in digital versions. BookStats 2011,the annual comprehensive report just released by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, concluded that book sales, in terms of revenues and copies sold, have steadily increased in the period of 2008-2010. Overall, the report supports the belief that publishing is on an upswing, contrary to the widely held but incorrect assumption that competition from other forms of media was diminishing the venerable book world. In the press release accompanying the report, Dominique Raccah, CEO of SourceBooks and chair of the committee that did the survey, said: “The BookStats study indicates that the publishing industry is healthy and growing during a time of unprecedented change… Publishers in every sector of our business have made significant investments in content and technology to better serve their audiences’ needs and those efforts seem to correlate with the results we’re seeing.”

So there you have the contradiction in perspectives: Keller’s piece was especially cranky, and I’m guessing was intended to be wittier than it turned out to be. Burroughs, whose Barbarians at the Gates set a standard for business narratives, summarized his view this way: “Of the sprawling mass of books that spill across my desk, far too many just aren’t very good… some are too technical, some not technical enough. Some topics are hopeless.” Nonetheless, books are pouring forth — and, in the midst of the digital surge, are actually selling in aggregate better than ever.

In fact, among the various forms of information and entertainment, books are distinctive because there are so many of them. Every movie, television program, news organization, and the top tiers of websites combined represent a relatively small number compared to the books being published. Books do fall into categories, such as fiction, nonfiction, and textbooks, and subcategories like politics, economics, history, romance, science-fiction and so on; yet, most books have to be considered separate entities with their own strategy for reaching an audience.

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