Publishing legend André Schiffrin visited India for the first time this November. As publisher at Pantheon for 30 years, he published Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, Günter Grass, Art Spiegelman, Marguerite Duras and Gunnar Myrdal. Resisting the exclusive emphasis on profit, Schiffrin quit the Random House-owned Pantheon in 1990 and founded The New Press, a non-profit firm. On the eve of the launch of the Indian edition of his memoir The Business of Words , a combined edition of The Business of Books and Words and Money , Schiffrin was a part of Alliance Francaise's “Writers, Etc” series in early November in New Delhi. Excerpts from a conversation:
You say there was a time when publishers did not look to make not more than 3-4 per cent profit. Today, the conglomerates expect 15 and even 30 per cent. How did this come about?
The difference, of course, is in ownership. Once people buy publishing houses, they expect to make as much money as they would from their other holdings such as television, newspapers and so on. All the other media have lived off advertising until now. So if you owned a newspaper in America, you'd expect to make 25 per cent profit every year. And if that company then bought a publishing house, they would say to the publishers you can't possibly earn just three per cent.
Now these numbers may seem abstract; but what they mean is what you publish has changed entirely (and is shaped) by what the salespeople think is likely to sell. It means you have a total transformation of what used to be published in all of these countries, and what is published now. I believe, in most trade publishing houses in India now, you have to show before a book is published that you expect it to be profitable. This is the imposition of a totally different kind of an ideology on publishing; for the first time you are saying ideas matter only if they are going to make money.
You have published an impeccable list of authors from Foucault, Chomsky, Studs Terkel, Sartre and Art Spiegelman. Surely, they would have made money.
For the 30 years where I worked within the framework of a large firm, for a long time we worked within the traditional framework of publishing where you hoped that some of the books that sell very well - over a million copies - will help us pay for the books that aren't going to make a lot of money. And in publishing Foucault we certainly lost money for the first 10 years…
There are two aspects involved. First, a lot of books take a long time to be established. It took a long time for Kafka to begin to sell a lot of copies. Secondly, sales do not mean quality. Many important and good books have not sold a considerable number. So the old system accommodated that by saying if you make money on one book you put it on another… the new system is not interested in ideas, it is just interested in making as much money as possible.
It was Murdoch who first said that books are part of the entertainment industry; this happens especially when a firm has crossholdings.
Murdoch has been exceptionally bad, of course. He owned a lot of television in America, especially the most popular and reactionary stations. He wanted his publishing house to tie-in with that and to publish books that came from the TV programmes and so on. Fifty years ago Harper's catalogues in the U.S. looked like those of Harvard University Press with books on science, philosophy, art history ... None of those are there any more. The only ones there are those that will be commercially successful…
This is worrisome for it's happening in India too. Publishing has gone from being artisanal to becoming industrial. It has changed from being a national and local thing to being globalised. And the globalisation process means that you have, in India, exactly the same problems that we had in the U.S. In fact, you see a rebirth of the old colonialist methods of export and import. Many of the firms we are talking about had started out that way. Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, owns Penguin, owns Madame Tussauds… was initially the owner of the waterworks in Argentina. That's where they made their money initially. The French firm, Vivendi, which for a while owned a third of French publishing, was also initially a water company.
And now with e-books, the physical book is under threat. I believe Amazon sold more books through Kindle than physical copies last year in the U.S.
Things will certainly change; no question. But for the worse. I have nothing against technology… it depends on who controls technology and what they do with it. And the people who now control the technology, Amazon or Google, want to establish a monopoly on distribution, and to make as much money as they can...
But Google itself does not produce content. It cannibalises…
Nor until now has Amazon (produced content). You control distribution, you control everything. Google is not going to send a reporter to Libya; they are not going to cover the news any more than Amazon is going to commission a book, edit it and pay attention over the years and so on. So this is a short-term phenomenon.
How do you see the scenario in India?
The major publishers here all belong to the European conglomerates… When I came out of the Delhi airport, the first bookstore I saw had a whole rack of books labelled Hachette… And Hachette belongs to the leading French manufacturer of armaments, Lagardère. So you ask yourself, would Hachette in India ever publish a book on military spending in India when they are selling their aircraft to the Indian Air Force? I doubt it. So you have a number of interesting conflicts that are built into it… and they are not going to get away from them.
