Publishing

• 1. Introduction

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  Publishing once was a small, ancient form limited by law or religion. Today it is a large-scale industry that disseminates every type of information, in physical or digital form, for sale or free of charge. The word covers more than the bound book on a shelf. It stretches across newspapers, journals, magazines, e-books, websites, social media, music, and video games.

  A single sentence about a man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, captures the scale of the shift. By his fiftieth year he could look back on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed. That was more, perhaps, than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330. How did a craft of copyists become a business of multinational conglomerates? Who controls what reaches the public, and who gets shut out? What does it mean to publish a book and yet keep it from ever reaching a reader?

• 2. Many Kinds Of Publisher

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  Newspapers and news websites carry current reports, articles, and features written by journalists. The news industry is meant to serve the public interest, hold people and businesses to account, and promote freedom of information and expression. Editors manage the tone of voice of their publication. Negative versus positive articles can shape how a reader sees the world.

  Journals occupy a different corner entirely. A journal is an academic or technical publication carrying articles by researchers, professors, and people with professional expertise. These works are specific to a particular field and often push its established boundaries. Most run a peer review process before publishing to test the validity and quality of the content.

  Magazines sit apart again, published at regular intervals with creative layouts, photography, and illustrations. They can be purchased on apps or websites like Readly, or accessed free of charge on platforms like Issuu. Directories, meanwhile, hold searchable indexed data about businesses, products, and services. Once printed, they now live mostly online as searchable lists, sector portals, review sites, or comparison sites.

  Catalogs are a visual list of a large range of products that let a customer browse and buy from one company. Interactive catalogs like IKEA and Avon let customers browse a full range before they decide. Tie-in publishing markets products closely related to a major film, such as Star Wars, including spin-off books, graphic novels, soundtrack albums, computer games, models, and toys. The Harry Potter and James Bond franchises show the same idea built outward from books.

• 3. The Big Five

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  In 2013, Penguin, owned by Pearson, merged with Random House, owned by Bertelsmann. The combination created the largest consumer book publisher globally, with a global market share of more than 25 percent. The industry narrowed to a handful of big publishers as it adapted to digital media.

  About 80 percent of the United States trade market for books came to be controlled by the Big Five publishing houses. Those are Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan. Mainstream publishers like these traditionally produce hardcopy books in large print runs, with established networks distributing to bricks-and-mortar stores and libraries.

  In November 2020, ViacomCBS agreed to sell Simon & Schuster, the third largest book publisher in the United States, to Penguin Random House. Had it gone through, the deal would have formed the largest publishing company in the world. On the 2nd of November 2021, the United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit to block the merger on antitrust grounds. On the 31st of October 2022, the D.C. District Court ruled in favor of the Department of Justice and filed a permanent injunction on the merger.

  Some major publishers devote entire divisions to a single franchise. Ballantine Del Rey LucasBooks holds the exclusive rights to Star Wars in the United States. The BBC runs its own publishing division that does very well with long-running series such as Doctor Who. These cross-marketed works frequently outperform the average stand-alone published title, which makes them a focus of corporate interest.

• 4. Who Bears The Risk

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  When a mainstream publisher accepts a book, the author signs a contract surrendering some rights to the publisher. In exchange, the publisher takes care of every aspect of publishing the book at its own cost. It relies entirely on sales to recoup those costs and make a profit. The author receives a royalty on each sale, and sometimes an advance on royalties when the book is accepted. Because of the financial risk, mainstream publishers are extremely selective and reject most manuscripts submitted to them.

  Small presses, also called independent or indie publishers, run on the same traditional model where the author surrenders some rights in exchange for the publisher bearing all costs. Their precise terms vary greatly, and often they do not pay an advance on royalties. Hybrid publishers share the costs of publication, and therefore the risks, with the author. The arrangement is a source of debate, because vanity presses tend to masquerade as hybrids.

  A vanity press will publish any book. The author covers all the costs, surrenders some rights, and pays royalties on sales. These presses often engage in deceptive practices or offer costly, poor-quality services with limited recourse for the writer. In the US, the Better Business Bureau has cited such practices in unfavorable consumer reports.

  The Society of Authors and the Writers' Guild of Great Britain have called for reform of the paid-for publishing sector. Representing 14,800 authors, the two unions jointly published a report to expose widespread bad practices among companies that charge writers to publish while taking away their rights. Self-publishing sits at the opposite pole. The author retains all rights and assumes responsibility for every stage of preparing, publishing, and distributing the book.

• 5. Type And The Press

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  Bi Sheng, a Chinese inventor, made a movable type of earthenware around 1045. No known examples of his work survive. The Korean civil servant Ch'oe Yun-ŭi, who lived during the Goryeo Dynasty, invented the first metal movable type between 1234 and 1250 AD.

  Johannes Gutenberg developed movable type in Europe around 1450, along with innovations in casting type from a matrix and a hand mould. The printing press gradually made books less expensive to produce and more widely available. Early printed books, single sheets, and images made before 1501 in Europe are known as incunables, or incunabula.

  Modern newspaper publishing began in Germany in 1609, with magazines following in 1663. Historians describe the last third of the eighteenth century in the German book trade as the Sturm und Drang period, German for storm and stress. Missionaries brought printing presses to sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-18th century.

  The United States publishing industry began with a printing press in Massachusetts in 1638, making New England an early hub. In Philadelphia, William Bradford set up the first paper mill, and Benjamin Franklin opened his own press. By the mid-19th century New York City had become the industry's center, with large houses like Harper, Wiley, Putnam, and Scribner. They relied heavily on pirated British works until international copyright laws arrived in 1891. Cornell University Press, founded in 1869, and Johns Hopkins University Press, founded in 1878, began a wave of university publishing houses for scholarly books and journals.

• 6. The Digital Turn

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  The World Wide Web, established in 1989, soon propelled the website into a dominant publishing medium. Wikis and blogs developed next, followed by online books, online newspapers, and online magazines. The shift merged commercial and self-published work, and folded publishing and production into a single online process built around multimedia.

  The global book market is vast, with around 1.5 billion people speaking English. Each book carries a registered ISBN to identify it, and translation services widen the reach into other languages. Preparing a book for e-book release works much like print, with only minor variations. E-book publication also eliminates some costs, such as the discount given to retailers, which is usually around 45 percent.

  The British Library shows the sheer volume now in play. It holds more than 170 million items and takes in 3 million new additions each year. With consent, that material can be repurposed for the web as e-books, audio books, CMS-based websites, online learning platforms, videos, or mobile apps. On the Internet, writers and copy editors are known as content writers and content editors, though their roles differ from their print-based counterparts.

  Newer practices keep reshaping the field. Accessible publishing digitizes books, marks them up into XML, and produces formats such as large print, Braille, DAISY, audiobooks, and e-books for readers who experience difficulty reading. Green publishing minimizes environmental impact through on-demand printing, manufacturing books close to the customer on a just-in-time basis. Oxford University Press, the largest university press in the world, specializes in research, education, and English language teaching internationally.

• 7. Killed In Print

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  Privishing describes a book that is nominally published but printed in so few copies, or with such lack of marketing and sales support, that it never truly reaches the public. The title is almost impossible to obtain through normal channels such as bookshops. It often cannot be ordered specially, and its publisher may refuse to reprint it. A book treated this way may be called killed.

  The Berne Convention frames the legal boundary around all of this. Publication is the distribution of copies or content to the public, and it can only be done with the consent of the copyright holder, who initially is always the author. The Universal Copyright Convention defines publication in Article VI as the reproduction in tangible form and the general distribution to the public of copies of a work from which it can be read or otherwise visually perceived. Depending on the motivation behind it, privishing may amount to a breach of contract, censorship, or simply good business practice, such as not printing more books than a publisher believes will sell in a reasonable length of time.