Let’s Review the History of Publishing’s Decline

Mercury House publisher Tom Christensen started what looks like it might turn into a useful series of short essays on the state of independent publishing on his Right Reading blog yesterday. Actually, this entry is all set up, basically just Christensen running through a list of significant 20th-century publishers and noting which multinational corporation absorbed them when, until we reach the present day, where “80 percent of U.S. publishing is controlled by five giant multinational corporations.” (And there’s at least one error: Scribner somehow winds up still a division of Macmillan, but the Macmillan that bought Charles Scribner’s Sons in the ’80s and was then acquired by Simon & Schuster in 1994 was a separate entity from Macmillan Publishers Ltd., which is now the company formerly known as Holtzbrinck.)

So, nothing we haven’t heard at least a hundred times before, but then Christensen isn’t really writing for “us” necessarily. “It’s easy to get so immersed in a subject that you lose track of how much of it is generally known,” he says, and this is the refresher course. But it sounds like the argument is probably headed someplace new and interesting in future posts, once he finishes laying the groundwork.

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