In most corporate settings, the term institutional memory normally refers to the valuable insights and background carried by senior members of a company’s team. These are the people management will turn to for the answer to Why do we do this the way we do it?
Randy Petway, chief revenue officer with the industry software company Ingenta (formerly Publishing Technology), mentioned on Monday of this week at a conference that a better term for institutional memory is tribal knowledge, as in the wisdom carried by the elders. The problem with tribal knowledge, of course, is that it usually exists only in those elders’ heads.
One of US publishing’s most experienced elders, if you will, is the consultant Mike Shatzkin, who started work in the family business more than fifty years ago under the tutelage of his father, Leonard, who died in 2002. (Leonard Shatzkin, an author himself, not only developed an inventory and stocking system for bookstores but worked on the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weaponry in World War II.)
In his article “The Sea Change That Comes with the Latest Iteration of the Book Ecosystem,” Mike Shatzkin reviews a march of decades in publishing that’s worth our capturing in an abbreviated, bulleted form, simply because there are not that many heads around today that can offer this kind of tribal knowledge. Get your coffee and take a minute to step back through the decades:
- Mid-1940s to mid-1950s: Sales departments rise in publishing houses as the mass-market paperback is introduced.
- Mid-1950s to mid-1960s: Mass-market paperbacks support new bookstores and are found in non-book retail sites (drugstores, newsstands, etc.).
- Mid-1960s to mid-1970s: Department stores, which had become a mainstay in book sales, lose ground with the rise of shopping malls, which surround the department store anchors with specialty shops.
- Mid-1970s to mid-1980s: Two shopping-mall chains, Dalton and Walden, drive bestseller lists; Ingram and Baker & Taylor build wholesale distribution networks, the supply chains to support the big stores.
- Mid-1980s to mid-1990s: Barnes & Noble and Borders are built out of those superstore networks; backlists are included in store inventories; returns are light as new stores keep opening.
- Mid-1990s to mid-2000s: Online bookselling begins at the height of big-box bookstore chains and independent bookshops.
- Since the mid-2000s: The ebook arrives; retail shelf space contracts; book buying migrates to the internet; publishers’ distribution costs are pressured.
As Shatzkin writes, that mid-century stage was “the beginning of a half-century of uninterrupted growth for American book publishing. It has not necessarily now come to an end, but the growth of the segment controlled by big publishers may have ended.”
What Shatzkin illustrates here is that, before the digital disruption, books were growing in relation to other media:
“The fact is that books used to live in a moated ecosystem, independent of what was going on in other media and book readers’ communication streams. Since ubiquitous broadband, that is no longer true.” He writes, “For the first time … books are competing with everything else you might read or watch or listen to in a way they never did before. Online doesn’t care what is in the file it displays.”
The challenge for publishing and its authors, as digital reading takes place in the same space as other electronic media delivery, is to find ways of tying books into other media: “digital marketing promoting discovery.” But as Shatzkin notes, what exists in digital can be interrupted by other offerings in digital. The consumption of books has changed, along with the space in which they’re sold and delivered.
Bottom line: While many think of traditional publishing as a stately ship that has sailed uninterrupted on placid seas for decades, Shatzkin’s look-back reminds us that change has always been afoot in this industry. Indeed, his father Leonard Shatzkin’s artfully titled book, In Cold Type (1982, reissued in 2012), was about “the book crisis” of the 1970s and ’80s, in which “the trade book publishing industry faced financial and philosophical problems of a magnitude unparalleled in its 342 years of existence.” The advent of the digital dynamic is upending the publishing business (and other businesses) more profoundly than the crises of the past, but the procedures and context of the industry have never been as static as critics like to suggest.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
