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| Apple's iPad, with iBook Library & iBook |
I noticed after winter's class, however, that many students in the large class told me they felt quite "positive" and "hopeful" about the future of publishing, mainstream, independent, large, small, and otherwise. I too felt the same way after reading the many articles assembled for that portion of the course, and they reframed books like Jason Epstein's The Book Business: Past, Present and Future in positive terms. In today's New York Times, Julie Bosman, in her article "Publishing Gives Hints of Revival, Data Show," reports that this morning's BookStats, "a comprehensive survey conducted by two major trade groups," the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, showed that publishers' net income rose 5.6% from 2008 to 2009, for a net revenue of $27.9 billion, and that in 2010, publishers sold 2.57 billion books, an increase of 4.1 percent over 2008.
The two trade groups surveyed 1,963 publishers, including the 6 largest trade publishers, encompassed 5 major categories of books--
"trade, K-12 school, higher education, professional and scholarly"--and also expanded the categories of what qualified as books, including not only print and softcover codex books and e-books, but "professional and scholarly journals and databases, multimedia teaching materials and mobile apps." Sales of books in all five categories rose, with the largest gains, according to the article, in the higher education area, of 18.7% in three years. Tina Jordan, Vice President of the Association of American Publishers, pointed to the expansion of higher education and increased enrollment as a result of the weakening economy. (I would add that for-profit universities may also be playing a role in this jump.)
As heartening to me were other figures: adult fiction rose by 8.8% over the 3-year period, while scholarly books, once considered a shaky area among not only the trade publishers but even academic publishers, rose by 4.4%. One of the questions that arose repeatedly in articles we looked at in the "Situation of Writing" was whether e-books would depress the overall market for books, or expand it. Early signs from this survey suggest that the latter is occurring, as e-books continue to take off. Though only 0.6% of the trade market in 2008, they were 6.4% in 2010, and Bosman points out that overall sales for e-books in 2010 came to 114 million. That is still a small portion of the larger book sales figure, but the article notes that in 2011 e-book sales continue to rise, and eventually, I think, they will constitute the majority, as more and more younger readers grow accustomed to reading using digital devices such as laptops and desktop computers, cellular phones, e-readers like Barnes & Noble's Nook, Amazon's Kindle, various tablet computers like Apple's iPad, as well as devices not yet perfected, invented or imagined. Books themselves continue to change too; what is possible with e-books and apps, as the digital The Waste Land proves, offer quite a different book-immersion (because it goes beyond but still encompasses reading) experience.
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| Barnes & Noble's Nook e-reader |
This is only one article out of many written daily (I do scan Publishers Weekly's daily, dizzying waterfall of tweets to see what the publishing news of the day is, and also glance at other publishing sites when I can), and it thankfully is anything but "doom and gloom." There are readers, they are reading all kinds of books, and while reading may have seemed at risk a few years ago, things appear, at least for now, to have swung back in the other direction.
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| Philip Levine www.english.illinois.edu |
When I was in graduate school and he was a visiting poet, he would sit in on at least one graduate literature class I took, taught by Harold Bloom, who seemed both amenable and impervious to having a major poet listening in on his soliloquies on the "Major American Poets"; Levine always appeared to take Bloom's pronouncements with a good deal of respect and humor in return. Levine is 83 and continues to write and publish his work, though like the previous Poet Laureate, W. S. Merwin, also highly lauded and an octogenarian, it's unclear how much traveling and proselytizing he'll be able to do. I think he's a fine enough choice, but I really wish that the Librarian of Congress would make more of an effort to regularly appoint more women poets, and to diversify the choices.
I hate always to have to point such things out, but among the last 10 Poet Laureate Consultants in Poetry of these very diverse United States, only 3 have been women--Rita Dove, who held the post from 1993-95; Louise Glück, from 2003-4; and Kay Ryan, from 2008-10. Since 1986, when Gwendolyn Brooks held the original post of Consultant in Poetry, only one poet laureate has not been white: Dove, and over the entire history of the position, Brooks, Dove and the late Robert Hayden have been the only laureates of color. No Asian American or Pacific Islander, no Latino, no Native-American, no Arab American, no non-black mixed-race poet has ever held the post. Really, the folks in charge can and must do better. We are in the 21st century, in a country more diverse than it has ever been (and it has always been diverse). Though mostly ceremonial, the Poet Laureate is the major face, especially outside of the literary world, of poetry and its chief public advocate. I can recall how excited I and many others were, especially young people in the nation's capital and across the country, when Dove, a superb poet and lovely person, as well as dynamic figure and excellent teacher, served in this post.
One additional point: it would also be great to have more aesthetic diversity among the Poet Laureates, and this goes in all directions. Having a poet coming from the spoken word direction, a poet also primarily working as a musician, a poet known for more formally innovative work, would all be great ways to go. This is not to knock mainstream poets, but there are many poetries within the larger American house, and selecting poets representing some of these other traditions and trends would be a great step for the Librarian of Congress to take, because the Poet Laureate should be poetry's chief public, governmental advocate, and many kinds of poets can and would be willing to do that. So congratulations to Philip Levine, but going forward, let's really see some change we can believe in.
On Philip Levine (from Modern American Poetry)
Poems by Philip Levine (from The Poetry Foundation)
The news on the unemployment front, like a great deal of what we read and see on TV, has been growing grimmer by the day, and the social conditions behind it are certainly grimmer still. Several people I know well, friends and relatives, have lost their jobs, and others are struggling to make ends meet. Alongside the weak job market, other signs of the economy's sickness are evident everywhere: plummeting home values and rising foreclosures; the appearance of Bushvilles; the collapse of the commercial real estate market; personal bankruptcies resulting from people's inability to pay debts; and on and on. These are only a portion of of the social crisis the country faces, and conditions are as bad or worse overseas. We're officially at 8.9% unemployment, though the reality is probably far worse, which is the worst things have been since the recessionary period around 1983. That was the year I graduated from high school, and one of the reasons I'm able to look back on that period without nostalgia is because, despite my fond memories of particular aspects of being 17 and 18 years old, my perception of the national situation was clear-eyed. In case you don't recall, in 1983 the ur-right winger, Ronald Reagan, was in office; a claque of extreme conservatives were frothing in their new government positions; the Cold War still raged; the AIDS pandemic was steadily increasing, with little attention for the federal government; the crack epidemic was picking up steam, and the concomitant drug war and buildup of the penal system were underway; the US was meddling in a war in Iraq (against Iran, no less, while secretly funneling money from Iran to right-wingers in Central America); and on and on. While I, though penniless and the child of a working-class background, was heading off to college and what I hoped would be a decent future, I was quite aware that things were terrible for others. The lack of jobs, particular for the poor and working-class, for black people, for Latinos, for undereducated whites, was a pressing national concern, which the GOP exploited brilliantly. It would be 10 more years and another recession (along with a young and conservative Democratic president) before the country really turned around. I hope it does not take that long this time, though the underlying conditions do appear to be worse than they were in 1983, or 1993.
