This Media Life

Book Review

Books seem to offer such gentility—they’re a seemingly more refined product category. But a product category it is—a mountain of dumbed-down mass-market product. And soon enough, like any product marketer, you come to love your better-selling products and to want no truck with the lagging items. (It is true that there are still people who go into the book business because they have a genuine, disinterested love of literature for itself. But I know these people—and they are all quite creepy. They’re no longer part of a social norm.)

Devoting your professional life to books, even to books that sell (even to really moronic books that sell), is for many people arguably better than spending life in a profession in which there are no books, and no talk about books, and no interest in them at all—which is almost every other profession (which book people are still able to look down on).

There are, too, people in books who have come to see themselves as media professionals. They are held back in realizing their full media potential only because of an early career mistake (I have always thought that Larry Kirshbaum at Time Warner Books was a much more likely movie producer than book publisher) or because they lack visual talents and other presentation skills.

Ann Godoff is, it seems, the former type—that is, she is able to maintain a certain snobbishness about books—and her replacement, from Ballantine, Gina Centrello, the latter, a kind of eager purveyor of a media category. The competing pictures of Godoff and Centrello, in almost all the stories on the Bertelsmann putsch, were worth a thousand words: a dour Godoff versus a perky Centrello.

It is, though, I think, a kind of false face-off. They are not really different publishing people. They both seem to have fallen into a book career—Godoff first as a publishing temp, Centrello as an assistant at a paperback reprinter—and to have risen up and been shaped in the modern book business of ever-decreasing expectations on the part of authors and ever-rising irritation on the part of owners (book professionals, interestingly, have earned the enmity of both authors and owners). Godoff and Centrello are wanderers in publishing purgatory. Indeed, if Centrello’s replacing Godoff is seen as a triumph of the corporate ethic over a writerly one, when Godoff replaced the journalism legend and bon vivant Harry Evans—forced out, like Godoff, for large advances and thinning profit margins—it too was seen as an assault on editorial éclat and independence.

So of course, the more reasonable answer to the question of why people are still going into the book business given its questionable satisfactions and low rewards is that—putting aside the several thousand people still on the payrolls of the few remaining houses—they are not.

This isn’t where a kid with heart and imagination is going to end up. Rather, the book business is logically getting a dimmer bulb.

Now, this is probably true about all the egghead professions. Public intellectuals are now merely political hacks—William Bennett, for instance. Academics are real losers, or, at best, people with specialized sexual and cultural grievances. Writers are, interestingly, often subliterate. And book publishers are . . . cold fish or overly promoted secretaries.

What if, by its very nature, book publishing is self-selecting exactly the wrong people—like the priesthood or certain police departments?

What if the book business reinforces its own failings by hiring failures (as with the priesthood and the police, this might suggest that the book business could benefit from really extensive HR psychological profiling)?

This, of course, would not be a condition unique to books.

Sony has just hired Andy Lack, the president of NBC, to run its music business precisely because he has no experience—or possibly even interest—in music.

The least likely people to manage themselves out of a crisis are, reasonably, the people who created it.

Surely someone at Random House has thought about calling Tommy Mottola.