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industry. .. >> but to start at the beginning , could you talk a bit about your father in france and his publishing venture which began, as i understand it, that began the schriffrin publishing dynasty. >> well, i was going to go back over the 50 years i've been in publishing. if you want to start talking about my father, you go back a century which is perhaps a

little bit more than everybody here needs to know about. certainly, publishing has changed in the years, and if you look at 1920 when my father started, that was just another world altogether. he worked very closely with a lot of french authors including the major french author of the time, and in reading the diaries i notice an entry in which he says he and my father spent three weeks correcting the galleys of his last book. that's something that's inconceivable now. most people don't even read galleys, and the idea that anyone would have that much time together is just another world, another era. having said that, i think, you know, publishing hasn't changed all that much until the last decade or two. my father started -- he came from russia like you, translated

a lot of books from the russian and then started a series of books which in france became a major staple of every bookstore and every library. and, unfortunately, though, he worked -- eventually he joined the major publishing house of galley meyer which was one of the initial targets of the germans when they came in this. and the german so-called ambassador who knew france extremely well, had lived there for many years, had figured there were only two institutions that they needed to take over and control. one was the bank of france, and the other was galley mar. and galley mar was immediately closed down, and they were told that if they fired all the jews who were there -- of whom there were very few, my father included -- they could reopen. and, of course, had to happened over control of the editorial output to a fascist author who

was newly hired and be stayed there for some years until he committed suicide before the end of the war. no matter who your sponsors are. [laughter] >> even the nazis. well, you know, it's interesting when you look at it how incredibly careful they were in how they planned everything. they knew france in the '30s was absolutely filled with anti-semites and right-wingers and people who were fascists themselves. so they had a read-made role deck of people to put in charge of the movies and the press and so on. and they did. they put them all in immediately, and in many cases the collaborationists, more than the collaborationists, the fascist felt the travelers were even worse than the nazi occupiers were. i just finished reading alan riding's new book on france during the occupation, and he among many others, you know,

points out how remarkable it is that the country was that vicious in if its dealings with jews. and, of course, america wasn't that much better in those days which is why so few jewish immigrants were allowed to come here before and during the war. but the french really were a case at that time. >> and just before we go across the atlantic, the reason that your father was bought out was the fact that he had a very successful -- [inaudible] right? >> right. >> and what were those? >> those were a series of classics. initially, as i said, the russian classics and then the french classics and then the classics from the rest of the world. so the library of america here is an attempt to copy that model of having a really good selection and well-annotated text and so on. they were leatherbound, they were very handsome, but they

weren't meant to be that expensive either. so people started buying them. it was less expensive than buying all the individual volumes, so it was a good thing to have on your shelf. >> and this eventually game the backbone of the gallomar empire. >> yeah, yeah. and after the war, in fact, they tried to deny that my father had ever been there because they were ashamed of having fired him as they had, and until i started writing their books, they more or less kept up the official line that, you know, he'd had nothing to do with it. and then p when my first book came out ten years ago in france, they threatened to sue me if i told the story. but, of course, they had no grounds to. to do so. so didn't manage. you can sue the -- [inaudible] in france, by the way, which is very dangerous. [laughter] >> so then you came to new york in 1941? >> '41, yeah. the germans came into power on

my fifth birthday which was inconsiderate of them. [laughter] and we had to celebrate the day before. and then it took a long time to get out. it took a very long time. we left and arrived here in august '41, just about in time for the american war. >> and then your father once again took up publishing. >> right. he started publishing the french wartime resistance writers, and i don't know if those names mean anything to anybody here, but at that time there were a lot of people writing, aragon, etc., a book called -- [inaudible] the first anti-german book came out at that time. and it was published in france, but it was by an underground publisher called the midnight editions. and they could only do 300 copies of the book which was not very much. but they got it out to england,

and the raf started making little microfilm editions of the book, and they scattered them over france which have always made me feel that was the best way of distributing a book i could come up with. [laughter] >> distribution, we'll talk about distribution later. >> you're not going to get aerial distribution on your books, i'm afraid. [laughter] >> no, we would need a plane. we would need an air force actually. >> one plane would do. >> it's a start. so, and this was -- that book, was that the beginning of the french resistance? was that pantheon already? >> it started out under his own name, and then he joined a german exile publisher called court wolf who with his wife, helen, were running a place called pantheon. wolf had been a publisher in germany, a very distinguished publisher, and he tried to publish here at the time. and it was very difficult for both of them. there were books published in simultaneous editions, herman

bach, for instance, was published in english and in german at that time. the german edition sold out immediately, and it took 20 years to sell out the 1500 copies they'd printed in english. so there was not that much interest in what was going on in europe at that time except to make, you know, anti-german comments when they published the grimm fairy tales, that kind of thing. >> so there were enough germans in the u.s. to sustain a publisher? >> oh, yeah. yeah. in fact, before the war the germans in america sustained the german film industry. goebbels targeted the americans, and it was the major export market particularly for the very light, fluffy musical stuff that he liked to produce. and when i was a kid living next to yorktown, yorkville as it was called in those days, 86th street, third avenue, there were p german-language movie houses.

and they were still in milwaukee, you know, other towns there was a whole series of german language. but those were the old germans who had lived here who was mostly -- who were mostly pro-nazi. there were enough germans who could read it. >> also french? is it was published in german and french? >> my father's books were done in german and french, and german and english so there was a population which was, you know, sizable of immigrants here. and, obviously, they wanted to know what was being written back home. the difference was, of course, as you all may or may not know, there was a new school. there was a major french university which had strauss and various other people, and they set up, alvin johnson set up a french university in exile here which was major intellectual center while most of the american universities were not willing to take on any of the exiled publishers, exiled professors because most of them

were jewish. so, you know, when i, when i started out at college in the '50s, there was one jewish professor at yale, one at harvard, one at princeton, two at columbia because they were in new york. they made a concession. [laughter] but, you know, the anti-semitism which we talked about earlier as existing in america was very strong, and the role the new school played here was fantastic. and i think that's why. you had willie brant out there, the germans later after the war were grateful for what the new school had done. >> and so this small publisher that was publishing in german, french and english, eventually it took off. >> eventually it took off. partly because of dr. si having go which sold, you know, like a million copies in hardcover and paperback -- >> because he won the nobel prize. >> because he won the nobel prize and because of the political noise around the

publication of the book. the first printing was 4,000 copy cans which was the right -- copies which was the right printing for a long russian novel. so it shows you can't always guess what the right printing is going to be. >> that wasn't the only thing. did pantheon not publish the essays of charles lindbergh's wife? >> ann hint berg? right -- lindbergh? right. a gift from the sea which may be a title more of you are familiar with than the other books we've talked about. that was, again, a total coincidence that he met lindbergh and got her manuscript. a little dubious because, of course, her husband had been one of the leading allies of hitler before the war and had made a great point of, you know, not entering the war and so on. and he was so strong in his

youth that he finally described it as himself even with -- [inaudible] thought he'd gone too far which he had, of course. >> so, but and this is a lesson about publishing, it seems to me, that two exiles, two refugees from the nazis end up publishing the essays of the wife of a famous american anti-semite. >> well, it is a curious story, and i don't know the full background behind it. of course, by then, you know, everyone had forgotten lindbergh's politics, and she hadn't overtly shared them. i don't know what her inner most thoughts were. but indirectly she helped pay for the publishing company, so i guess it was a good thing. >> um, and then, so then to move forward a little, so pantheon was bought by random house in 1960. >> uh-huh. >> and they brought you in to take over. well, not quite. i mean, i had never thought i would work there. my father had died when i was

very young. they never suggested they would want me to come there, and i went to work for mass market paperback house which is where i started out in publishing in the '50s, a long time ago. but they did realize after the wolfs had left that they needed somebody there to be an editor. and so i came to do that at pantheon and then, gradually, began to run the place as time went on. i was, you know, about the age of most of the people in the audience at the time which was interesting because the random house people were willing to let me do what i thought should be done. and that's, of course, the enormous difference between then and now. the people who ran random house, bob haas, were real publishers. they really believed in what they were doing, and they knew that a publishing house is in a way like an archaeological cut. you have to have different generations, and you have to

find the talent in the each generation. and in many i case they also wanted to continue doing stuff from europe which random house didn't and was beginning to give up on. so i was more or less given carte blanche which, i mean, i knew i couldn't go embezzle the money, but if i saw something that was important, i was allowed to publish it. nowadays, of course, that's completely out of the question. i remember being in a paris bookstore and reading, picking up a book by a guy and looking at it and thinking, oh, this looks interesting, maybe we should translate it. and we did, and we published all by the author after. but we lost money on it for the first ten years or so. nowadays, you know, if somebody came up and said let's publish whoever, the commercial people who run the decision-making

machinery will say, well, what did his last book sell, you know? and what's the audience? how many people are going to buy this book? and it looks relatively innocent, but it's a framework. it's a kind of iron mask that you put on publishing which makes sure that no new ideas are going to come through. and that's very useful to the conservative political intent of many of the owners, murdoch and the others, because new ideas don't have a preestablished audience by definition. and my german publisher who's the great biographer of kafka points out that kafka's first book sold 600 copies. i discovered the other day that beckett, the first book sold three copies. they had distribution problems. [laughter] and, you know, those books would just not be published now by a large firm.

there's just no way it would get through the machinery. and when i interview young people wanting to come and work with us, you know, they know that there is a profit and loss sheet kept on them, the amount of money made by each book is recorded, and they know to the last decimal point what their percentage is. so that's a very effective way of controlling people because if you're going to threaten your career by publishing the kind of book that -- [inaudible] you know, you're going to think twice. and it's interesting that over the years, you know, we've talked an enormous amount about how dictatorships control the press, how people are controlled under the communist regime and so on. but, you know, the capitalist control is every bit as sterile. you're not going to get away with murder or even with one book in a large firm. no matter how good it may be. and can that's a major change. >> i, okay, i want to go back to the '60s because the '60s we

lived under capitalism, and yet i made a list of books that you published at pantheon in the '60s. the making of the english working class by e.b. thompson, also the books of e.h. carr, eric -- [inaudible] you published r.d. lang's books including the divided self, you published books of sartre and then -- [inaudible] was, when you discovered fukow, you were going to britain a lot? >> france and britain and germany. >> and you you would just talk o people and say who's -- >> no. you took a look at what there was in the bookstores. >> you would just go to bookstores? >> yeah. and read the reviews and, you know, it wasn't that hard. you know, i've written a memoir called "a political education" which i talk a lot about the mccarthy period which is when i came of age, in the '40s and '50s. and that had the effect of

really eliminating from american life a lot of the thought from europe or even in america that was at all dissenting, right? so when i published chomsky's first book, he had never been published politically until the new york review published his first articles, and we published the book. and the same was true of europe. i mean, people who were known there and were very good were not, were more or less kept out of the mainstream of american life. so in the '60s it was very easy to find. there were lots of very good authors like these who, i mean, i'd gone to the university in england for a couple of years, so i knew bowman in the english there, but, you know, english publishing hadn't been changed in the way it has been now. so you could go, and you would find really important weeks being published -- books being published, in some cases, by very small firms. but there was a lot going on. >> um, how did that first, how do -- so those fukow books, they

were reviewed, right? they weren't ignored? >> negatively. >> negatively reviewed. >> yeah. i mean, that's another interesting aspect is, you know, we talk about iron curtains, but we don't talk about, i guess, the paper curtains you'd have in most of the proo possessions. professions. i remember a review that complained on the footnotes. i remember a distinguished american historian, and the point was fukow had written the book when he was living in poland, and he was working from memory. so the footnotes were dicey, no question. but instead of dealing with the ideas in the book, you know, use it for something you can complain about when you want to keep out new ideas. and, you know, lang's work was never reviewed by any psychiatric journal in the u.s., nor any of the other more credentialized -- it was called anti-psychiatry in those days.

those weren't reviewed at all either. so it's interesting to look and see profession by profession who's open and who isn't. and it takes a while. fu kow was not invited to speak at an american university during those first ten years ever. and when he was finally invited to the university of buffalo i joked it was from his time in poland, the polish population in buffalo which in those days was considerable would flock to hear him. but harvard and yale certainly weren't about to invite him. >> you couldn't get him over for a book tour? >> we had him coming over, but no university was going to invite him to speak. it changed, of course, later. but it took a very long time. >> um, so there was this great run in the '60s and '70s for pantheon, and then things started to change. they began to change, i guess,

when newhouse bought random house? >> pretty much. and by the way, it's not just past on, you know? pantheon, you know? i did an analysis of the catalogs of the ten, of the major houses in america, all of them from 1950, '60, '70, etc., to 2000 when the book came out. and you look at them in retrospect and harper, for instance, which is now all show biz biographies and right-wing propaganda -- >> and our book about the financial crisis. [laughter] >> congratulations. but, you know, you look at 1950s, '60s, those kind of books look like university press catalogs and very good university press catalogs. i mean, they were publishing lists, you know, like the ones e we mentioned. and, you know, with the civil rights movement, with the vietnam war there was a huge,

huge cascade of political stuff from everybody. things changed enormously, and that's my argument, when the takeover changed ownership. but in those days if you look at what publishing was about not just in the u.s., but everywhere else, it was very open. and, you know, you had a huge amount of stuff coming out in the post-mccarthy years, in the '60s. you know, it's interesting to look and say, you know, was '68 because of all these books or was it caused by the books? and a lot of the books that were influential came out before '68. >> and so i just want to talk specifically, so what starts happening in the '90s where -- '80s where, i mean, it's not like you're getting calls telling you not to publish certain books, right? >> well, you know, when large conglomerates take you over, there's always the same pattern, and i described it in the

business of books and publishers in other countries told me that was the funniest part of me, of the book because they had been told exactly the same thing very verbatim when they were bought. cy came and said, of course, i bought you folks because i admire what you're doing, i wouldn't dream of changing anything. you continue as before, etc., etc. but, of course, he didn't mean it. and what he intended to do was to completely change the nature of what was being published by random house. and he did so quickly. he would sign up trump, for instance, for his book, that kind of thing. and various other people of that literary quality. and at the same time he would, you know, well, i don't want to go into all the details, but he changed the structure of the firm going way down market which didn't work very well. and finally at the end of, at the end of the exercise, they ended up selling to a german

firm, to bertelsmann. and now most of american publishing is owned by foreign conglomerates which is not to be xenophobic, but the reason that, you know, viking is owned by pearson which owns the financial times, holtz owns the whole group of bernard strauss, mcmill lin, etc., etc. the french conglomerate, so all of these people many of whom wanted to get out of the trap of publish anything their own native language, right? bert lesman was willing to take a loss because they knew the german market was limited, and once you got into english, you were much safer. and they even changed their name to random house which sounds a bit funny in germany. but that was part of the purpose. the other purpose, of course, which is the basis of the business of books is that all of

these conglomerates owned newspapers, tv stations, cable, etc., etc. and they made a lot more money than publishing had ever made. you know, publishing in all of western europe in the u.s. and england, etc., throughout the whole of the 20th century made roughly between 3-4% per year as an average taking the most commercial firms and the least commercial. you know, which doesn't mean that the the poorhouse. it was perfectly reasonable to make that kind of money. but it was not the huge gains that you made in other areas which were, from the most part, paid by advertising, of course, which is what kept newspapers at a level of making 26% every year. so the conglomerate owners would come, and they would say, look, you know, you guys are lovely people, but, you know, we can't subsidize you. that's the way they would say it, you know? the other people in the group are making 25%.

you guys are making 4%, you know? at the very least you should be making 15%. and so that's what happened. but that's what's shown in that list of catalogs that i talk about, the whole content changed completely. and whole areas. i mean, you know, everybody goes into a bookstore, and there are lots of books, and you say what's he going on about? there's more there than what we can read, which is true. on the other hand, if you look -- [inaudible] who's done a better job of maintaining itself or murdoch's people or whatever you see that whole areas have just disappeared. i mean, there's nothing, you know, harper had a huge list in art history, for instance, in religion and scientific thought and philosophy, etc. all of those areas have disappeared, you know, and the idea as well maybe the university presses will publish it, except now the university presses all feel they have to make money. and a lot of them, like nyu here, are not even subsidized at

all by the university. they even have to pay rent. so all of the possible publishers for these many fields have pretty much disappeared. and you only have a small, a handful of independent, some of them not-for-profit de facto who, you know, are willing to take on those books. and that's when my colleagues and i leapt back in because we objected to the changes that were being imposed. we started the new press as a not for profit because that was the only way we were going to be able to publish the book we were talking about. >> so in 1990 you left pantheon. at the time some of your former colleagues wrote a letter saying, well, pantheon was wasteful with money. did pantheon make money? >> yeah.

pantheon had always made some money, not a huge amount, but enough to pay our costs. the real cost, that is. and what happened, when the tally was brought in by new house to change everything came in, there was really -- and we have to think in those terms, it was a new ideology. the ideology was no longer find the best books, it was every book must make money, bar none. there's no exception allowed. and he wanted to get rid of pantheon precisely because we had said, look, the money we're making from publishing -- [inaudible] the simpsons or whatever we had on the list should be used to pay for the books by fukow. and that's the way publishing had always worked. i'm saying very old-fashioned stuff. and the new ideology said, no, forget about it. the purpose of a book is to make money, you know? an idea is to be judged entirely by how valuable it is in the

marketplace. and so when it was clear that that's what they wanted us to do and they said, and by the way, stop doing so many books on the left for emphasis, but, obviously, that was part of the agenda. we knew that there was just no way, you know, we could stay. and so we left. the people who stayed behind, a, had to rationalize the fact that they were staying behind, many of whom left subsequently in the next year or two. but they were simply given a series of totally fraudulent figures which gave the impression that we had lost money and which were totally inaccurate. now, you know, "the new york times" and the others played along with that, and nobody bothered to talk to, you know, they could have talked to the former president of random house who'd also been fired, bernstein, and said how come you kept all these people all these years if they were losing money? he could have said, no, they weren't losing money.

what's interesting is that on the whole in the u.s -- not in europe -- the press went along with the line, and it was, you know, should intellectuals be allowed to continue running money-making organizations because they're bound to lose money and so on and so forth. they went along with the party line, basically. >> and so, so if panel onwas -- pantheon was making money, you started the new press in 1990, pretty soon after leaving pantheon, why did you decide to make it a nonprofit? >> well, because we weren't making enough money. i mean, the whole point, i mean, we were more than breaking even at pantheon, and we had a huge, effective distribution system. but we weren't ever going to make the 15%, you know, that investors wanted. and we couldn't have found private investors, very simply, because that's the money that they wanted. and, you know, this in a parallel fashion -- in a parallel fashion we talk about the newspapers being shut down in this country, you know, many of them are in trouble, "the

chicago tribune", l.a. times are in bankruptcy, a lot of other papers have closed down, and there's a large part of this book devoted to that issue because they were no longer making 26%. you know? the night ridder chain had the misfortune of making 19.6% the other year, and they were sold off. and they were sold off. even if it meant closing down some of the newspapers. so you have a problem. you have the officials, if investors at new house at all figured the very least they should make is 25%, then anything that makes less than that doesn't make sense. and now when you discover that if you can sell fraudulent mortgage instruments and so on and make, you know, much more than 25%, no capitalist in his right mind is going to invest in a publishing house or a newspaper or a bookstore, whatever. right? so the purpose of the words and money we're talking about tonight is to say if that's the case, what other models are possible? you know, how do you keep print alive whether it's in book form

or newspaper form? >> or even if it's on the kindle, it doesn't matter. invest the money and invest the time. the time is very important. my last year at pantheon, "the new york times" always has, you know, the list of the ten best books. we had two of them on that list, each of which had been commissioned 25 years before. [laughter] now, you know, any accountant would have told you, a, 25 years at 4% inflation, you've lost your investment, write them off, you know? >> forget about it. and they would have been right, of course. and those are extreme examples. i don't like telling authors that example because it delays the manuscripts. [laughter] but time is important, and time is important to a bookstore. i've talked to people in the big chains who tell me that, you know, they've stacked up a bestseller in the front of the shop because they know it's

going to be on the "today" show. and if it's not on the day expected, the books are sent back to the back of the show. and if it's not on the "today" show the week following, they send it back to the publisher. so time is something that is very valuable. and, fen, the current system -- again, the current system which in the bookstore is based on how many dollars per square foot you make per hour means that the chains are going to choose fewer and fewer books and, of course, they will have gotten rid of all the independent bookstores. the figure i give in this book is when i was a kid and i worked at the eighth street book shop down the street, there were 333 bookstores in new york. now there are under 30 including the chains. and, you know, it's understandable. the chains deliberately set out to open their branch in front of the independent, give discounts on the bestsellers, you know, for the first few months until they'd sunk the independents,

and then they were there on their own. what they didn't realize, of course, is that, you know, somebody else can always do to you what you've done to others. and the costcos and the others started selling bestsellers at a lost -- loss just to bring in customers. in england the last harry potter which had a 20 pound price was going for one pound in the big chains, and it means the stores were not getting the sales they needed to pay for the rest. >> when you talk about the chains, that's barnes & noble, right? >> and borders. >> and borders. that's what we're talking about. was there also walden books? >> yeah. there are lots of chains that have begun to disappear, and borders just closed their 150 model stores the other day which was half of their stores. but, you know, i mean, when i was a kid and went to the new school, there were lots of bookstores around here, and the new school had it own very good

bookstore paid for a foundation, i might point out. all of those have gone. >> and the other thing, so some of the pillars of the publishing industry, the bookstores, and then the newspaper review sections, right? >> right. >> you said something to me interesting, that there's -- one of the reasons that they're disappearing is the ad, that the ad money from the publishers is now going to barnes & noble. >> the chains to pay for what they call cooperative advertising which is a euphemism for bribery. it means that they'll put your book in the front of the store, you know, if you pay them an extra whatever. >> and people don't know this. so a book at barnes & noble does not get to the front of the store by itself or because the staff has taken initiative. >> right. if you see a stack of ritz crackers at the front of the supermarket, you don't think it's a staff pick. [laughter] you know. same thing with the bookstores now, and the number of bookstores that even have a staff that can tell you what to pick, you know, barnes & noble

people are paid less than they are at mcdonald's. this is not somebody you're going to ask for advice on which of the latest novels to read. and they won't know it's there anyway. i mean, i did an analysis of our foreign fiction at barnes & noble, and they would buy 300 copies for the thousand stores, you know, which i joked with them was, you know, 100 pages per store. and then they would return 90% of the books. so i finally said to our sales people, look, we're not selling them books, we're lending them books, you know? we're helping them decorate the store. and they used to have all these nice -- they don't anymore. now all the books are face up because they've cut by 80% the number of books, titles they have. and, you know, the idea that a bookstore which, you know, when i worked at the eighth street bookstore, a good bookstore wasn't just the place that had the book you wanted, it was the place that had the book you didn't know you wanted.

they had a whole range of ideas, and that's what makes them the backbone of independent publishing. i was in france on a book tour, and i went to a town, a bookstore in the town, and we had just published a book by a french writer, a very funny, good book. and i said, you know, since the name was appropriate to the town, i said how many copies did you guys sell? and they said, guess. i said, what, 50? he smiled, i said, what, 100? he said, 2,000. and they had sold more books in that one bookstore than we had sold in all of north america partly because they had a staff that liked the book, and when people came in they would say, try this one. so that every publisher in france tells me, you know, that they live because of the independent bookstores. i mean, they had supermarkets, too, and they sold 20% of the total, but if you want to sell a new book which has ideas in it

whether it's poetry or nonfiction, it's the small independents that carry, carry it. >> and so, so let's talk about this now. in the book you talk about what other countries are doing to keep their bookstores alive. >> uh-huh. >> so what are they doing in france and germany as your other examplesome. >> right. well, a lot of what i'm talking about can simply be changed by using the existing legislation, right? everybody has antitrust laws on the books, and the big american conglomerates should never have been allowed to come into being. and, you know, in europe the same problem is there except there's a european antitrust commission in brussels which has actually stopped some of the mergers from taking place that would have been very harmful. but beyond that there's legislation that says you can't discount books for the very reason i mentioned, that you don't have the chains, you know,

cutting down the price and knocking out the independents. and that means there are, you know, thousands of bookstores around. in germany there's 8,000 bookstores which is, you know, a lot of bookstores. and one of the things i asked once the german cultural minister who was a former publisher what would happen if that law was changed, he said, we'd lose half the bookstores overnight. >> you literally are not allowed to sell a book too cheaply. >> right. and, of course, you know even when you discount, i mean, we saw this happening in the music industry, right? when you're allowed endless discounts, the publishers just raise the price, the cover price so that they're still getting, you know, the same. but the small independents are knocked out. and, you know, if you look at what happened with breckenridge, you can see what happened or what's come close to happening in the book industry. now, what i've done in the book here is to show very concretely

exactly what's happened in different countries and how they've all decided not just with books, but with newspapers that, you know, if you want a democracy, if you want a country in which ideas are exchanged, you have to save these, the word. and in france, you know, there's a whole program of helping bookstores, lending them money. if you want to start a new bookstore, you can get up to 40,000 euros, you know, to help set up a shop. a lot of the cities help underwrite the rent in the center of town because it's a question of keeping the middle of downtown alive. which is a question, of course, which applies to most cities in this country. and, you know, if you don't want everybody going out to the edge of town to buy in the big costcos and so on, are you going to keep alive what, you know, the culture of an inner city whether it's a movie house or a bookstore. and one of the things they have,

a thousand movie houses called art and experiment. arthouses, right? and they keep, you know, they keep the whole culture of film alive. they get ten million a year paid for by tax on the multiplexes, on all the, on all the big commercial houses. now, you know, when i was a kid in be new york, there were just endless arthouses here. now there are a few left. film forum is the only not for profit. they started that with 70 folding chairs a few years ago, and now they're extremely successful. but in most cases the figures there used to be 10% of the films in america used to be from overseas because of this network of arthouses. i forget the foreign language houses. and now it's less than 1%. because you have your

multiplexes. the multiplexes are doing exactly what the bookstores are doing. if a movie no matter how good or where it's from doesn't make money in the first few days, you drop it. you give a second screen to whatever is making the most money. so the choice is whether it's books, movies or newspapers is constantly being narrowed. so you can say, okay, so we can't see the korean movies in new york that we see in paris all the time. big deal, you know? but when you look at the overall picture, then what you do is you end up with the iraqi war. because the press, you know, was pressured by condoleezza rice called in all the heads of all the networks before we even went into afghanistan and said i don't want to see any wounded civilians on your screen. because they knew, they're not dumb, they knew that's how the vietnam war ended. well, you still don't see a wounded civilian on any of the

network news programs whether in afghanistan or iraq. the pressure worked. because all of these companies, you know, were depending on the bush administration to give them new legislation which they wanted, namely to, you know, allow people to own a newspaper and a tv station in in the same town. so bush was about to do that when a few ngos like hue chesney's free press and other organizations began to raise the alarm. and the people on the right, interestingly enough, also saw there was a danger here. and within a couple of months there were three million letters sent to washington to the congress, you know, which is unheard of in american politics. and bush had to pull back. and so the networks weren't rewarded as they had hoped for the support they'd given to the iraqi war. but that's, you know, that's ultimately, that's, you know, the end point when you talk about the media and politics.

you end up having a situation where horrible things happen because there's no one around to say, wait a minute, you know, these guys are lying to us. and there were a few papers that did, but there were very few. >> so we should, you propose in the book that we should tax google and give it to the bookstores. >> not to the bookstores. >> not to the bookstoresesome. >> no. i say, basically, this; you know, the idea that people have is if things are advertised, the end result -- [inaudible] right? how many times have you read somebody saying how much would the sunday times cost if you had to pay for the paper, right? the ads are what pay for the tv shows, that's what pays for the newspapers, etc. but in reality the ads are simply a private tax, right? >> you pay for these ads every time you buy a box of soap or a bottle of coke or whatever. you're paying indirectly to the

company that will then spend money persuading you to buy more stuff, right? but t a tax value just as much as anything else. now, google use is the press all the time, right? you look on your screen and there are the latest headlines. but they never pay a nickel for that, and they makeover 25% -- makeover 25% a year. so what i'm saying in the book and it's along with other arguments, that there's no reason why we shouldn't have a tax on access providers that is used to subsidize the press in the very same way that in england, in canada and most of the world you have a tax on your television set to pay for public network. right? and in america when they first thought of pbs all those years ago, the commission that did that suggested a tax on the television set so that pbs wouldn't have to go begging to the government every year and give in to their political pressures, you know, when they

started doing big exposes. nixon just cut the budget totally. eliminated it. you know, which is another form of censorship. so what i'm saying is, actually, the system -- i just was in montreal the other day. they have in canada as you have in the most of western europe and england is if you pay a tax on some of your communications, you know, could be the telephone bill, doesn't matter, towards maintaining the press, then you can still have a press that does its job. two years ago in america 16,000 journalists were fired. last year in the first six months 10,000 were fired. many papers that used to have an overseas office have closed them down. the baltimore sun had five, they're all gone. and now they're all closing their offices in the state capital which is where, as we know, traditional forms of corruption are their most rife.

so that the ideal of the, of the press as a fourth sate was -- state was possible but has become less and less possible. so we're paying indirectly for something that's beginning to disappear. 83% of people your age assume that there'll be no newspapers in a decade, right? and that may be true. but the importance of the press has been its ability to check the government. now, they failed in that in recent years in all sorts of ways. not just iraq, but on the whole financial collapse. i mean, there was no paper that was telling you what the economists who were predicting this were saying. you know, so the press, and i'm not idealizing it at all. if you want to keep the structure and give them a chance to begin to hire folks and do

their job, then you do what's been done in most of europe. and there's a chapter in the book on norway which is particularly interesting because the norwegians give a subsidy to every paper that's a paper that has opinions, a paper of opinion not just entertainment, every second newspaper in a provincial town -- and they still have a second paper even in a provincial town which we don't for the most part -- and they have a press which gets, you know, not huge amounts of money from the government, but enough to keep going. and none of this has affected content. no one has ever talked about governmental censorship. and you have the same situation for the most part in sweden and in other countries. so the possibility of saving the press in that way is there. and part of the problem is that the press here will never talk to you about the other models. they'll never tell you what's going on in if other countries, and they'll never talk, you you

know, even the guardian has belonged to a not for profit organization for decades. that's not something you find on the media page of "the new york times." so at the same time that the press here is panicking and saying, you know, we're going to go down the tubes very quickly because of all the ads that have gone to the internet and that's where they're going to stay, you know, there's no talk of whatsoever are the alternative possibilities. and again, you know, that's the purpose of the book. >> and how do we save the bookstores? >> well, as i mentioned before, i mean, part of it is is to have a law which says no discounting. but there are lots of other things, i mean, you know, as i mentioned. across the street many -- from me on the upper west side there were one of two of the last existing independent bookstores in town. two years ago -- three years ago now they closed down because their rent had been raised so high. the stores are still empty,

right? is they never had anybody else to rent the store to -- rent the store to. but they knocked them out so that on the west side we now have, you know, book culture at 110th street, and that's it. >> is this on broadway and 93rd? >> this was broadway and 93rd, yeah. so part of what you -- any decent city should have minimal commercial rent control system where at the very least you can't raise prices, you know, if you don't want o o hurt the customer. maybe you shouldn't raise prices on certain areas here unless you can, in rome and paris, unless you can replace it with somebody doing the same thing so that every story doesn't become a duane reed as has happened here. so these are not just preserving the bookstore questions, it's preserving an urban civilization question, you know? i mean, you look -- i live on broadway and 94th street, there's hardly a store left that is not a chain of some kind, you

know? and that's -- and in paris, i live of half the year, there isn't a chain store in sight. >> um, i'd like to take some questions. >> sure. >> all right? we have a microphone. do we have someone to hand it around? all right. let's ask some questions. >> the first question is always the hardest one to get. [laughter] >> first question. i want to say that the book will be available after questions. >> keep them short. >> yes, so -- >> oh, good. >> we haven't talked much about digital books, and i'm wondering what role you see bookstores playing in the distribution? >> right. well, the last chapter in this book is called technology and

monopoly. and it's about digital books. because the real danger is not the technology at all. i'm not a luddite in this respect. it's the monopoly that google and amazon are trying to establish. and they have come close to succeeding. and here again the antitrust fact is not being invoked. and you had a showdown the other month where amazon was offering to the publishers and the authors about half of what they normally make. and they were keeping the difference, of course. so that battle was temporarily wop by the publishers -- won by the publishers who said, okay, you don't have our books. in the meantime, by the way, amazon said, okay, we're not going to list your books at all if you don't give us what you want. which i would have thought any antitrust attorney would have said, wait a minute, this is an abuse of your powers. nobody said anything at the

time. but that's the real battle that's going on. and if you get a situation with one or two firms controlling what's going to be sold in that forum, then you have, you have real problems. the other aspect, and i don't know how many of you have read this stuff by robert in the new york review, is the whole library issue. those who chose to become a librarian precisely to be able to have the public platform for this kind of thing. he's said, you know, you can't allow google to digitalize every book in the past. it should be done publicly, it should be done by the library of congress. you know, this is a common culture, it should be made commonly cultural. it should not be subject to the 25% profit that google expects to have. so i think that's the real issue. and, of course, google and amazon with are not going to commission a book. you know, they're not even going to edit a book.

they're going to be responsible, simply, and that's why they want to make money out of it for the distribution. so it's very easy to knock out the bookstores, underpay the publishers, exploit the authors, make a lot of money for yourself and, you know, look like you're providing a public service. >> but as you have a digital book, what do you sell at bookstore? if you have a digital book, what do you sell in a bookstore? and what does one do in a bookstore if there are no books on the shelf? >> that's a real problem, i'm saying this, this is a system which will gradually eliminate the bookstore, certainly. and, you know, the problem with digital publishing -- and all of our books are available in that forum, that's not the point -- is that the only books that people really want are the bestsellers, you know? they're not -- [inaudible] or for any other book which has a relatively small printing. and that's why you need to have the bookstores. so i think the amazon, etc., and

they've been a threat to the bookstores anyway, is that they will eliminate the remaining stores, and, you know, that means you'll have much less access to choice. i mean, everybody's, oh, yes, you know, i can put my book on the internet, and everybody will read it. well, of course, that's crazy, you know? i mean, there are millions of people who put their first novel on the internet in the hope that somebody other than their cousin will read it. doesn't work. nobody knows the book is there, and the whole, you know, publishing means making something public. and that's what publishers better or not manage to do. the amazon/google system works for books that people already know about, and that's a very, very small percentage of the titles. so again, it's great. if you want to read jane austen on your kindle, fine. go ahead. but that's not going to solve the problems of most people today. >> [inaudible]

>> i would say given that question of the potential loss of bookstores and also not wanting to be reliant on corporations like google and amazon and also apple and the way they're regulating our access to digital books, do you see a role for alternative modes of the distribution of physical books, subscription models or other models that might be directed from authors or small presses that still give the book that level of discovery in being made public? >> you know, in some, in some ways it's a little early to answer that question. i mean, at the moment only 9% of books are sold digitally in this country, and america's way ahead. europe doesn't have figures anything like that. there's a french publisher that did an interesting experiment. they published a series of political books saying that younger people -- [inaudible] and they put them for free on the web, and they published them in paper at the same time. and the sale of the paper editions is no different from

what it would have been normally. which i find very encouraging. so it is -- it may be, you know, that you can create a dual audience. maybe the people who read the book on the web thought it was good enough that they wanted to be able to hold it in their hands and so on. we don't know the answer to that. and we, you know, we can't really believe entirely the figures being given out for amazon. i mean, amazon is making its money by selling the kindle. so every figure they come out with, and people have pointed out that they're often distorted, is suggesting that everybody's going to do this. but when they say they're selling more books, you know, it means they're selling more books on kindle than they're selling hardcovers. and what they're really selling, basically, are paperbacks and so on. so the figures are not entirely to be believed. but even if we take the overall figures that were in the times the other day, that 9% of the books are being read in this way and that that number probably will increase, it'll increase

only in the certain categories. so i think it's just too early to know what the long-term effect will be. you know, the book is still a very inexpensive and convenient p object. you know? not that many people are going to read their kindle on, in the bathtub or on the beach and so on. and i'm just anecdoteally, i'm surprised even when i'm on a long distance flight, most people are still reading paper. so for whatever that means. >> and yet there used to be book of the month clubs, right? which were much bigger than they are now. >> right. but that was pre-chain. i mean, the book of the month club, and you used to sell, you know, at least 300,000 copies for a book of the month club selection, sometimes a million. but that was because you had a country where there were bookstores only in the major cities and in the university towns. so everybody else -- and this is