>> andre schiffrin is at the new school in new york city.

this discussion is a little over an hour and 15 minutes. >> we are told almost on a daily basis that publishing is in crisis. publishing seeming to be in crisis and it seems like publishers exaggerate the issue to keep advances for authors down. to start at the beginning, can you talk a bit about your father in france and his publishing venture which began as i understand it that begin the publishing banks? >> well, i was going to go back over the 50 years i've been in publishing, if you want to talk about my father, you have to go back a century which is more than what everybody needs to know about. certainly prishing changed in my

50 year, and when you look at, you know, 1920 when my father started, that was just another world all together. he worked closely with french authors of the time and i notice an entry in which he has here my father spent three weeks correcting the gallies of his last book. that is something that is inconceivable now. most people don't read gallies anymore, so the idea that anyone has 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, a lot like you, translated books from the russian and then started a series that in france became a

major staple in every bookstore and library. unfortunately, though, he worked and eventually he joined the major publishing house of gally marr which was one of the initial targets of the germans when they came in, and the german so-called ambassador knew france extremely well, lived there for many years, figured they were only two institutions that they needed to take over and control. one was the bank of france, and the other was the gally mar. gally ma rrk was immediately closed down and they were told that if they fired all the jews who were there, some who were very few, my father included, they could reopen, but had to hand over control of the jut put to a fascist author who was dually hired, stayed there for several years, and he committed suicide at the end of the war.

there's no right way in publishing, no matter who your sponsors. [laughter] it's interesting. when you look at it, they were incredibly careful and they planned everything. they knew france in the 30s was absolutely filled with antisemites and right wingers and fascists themselves. they had people to put in charge of the press and movies and so on. they did. they put them all in immediately. in many cases. -- in many cases, the travelers were worse than the nazi occupiers were. i just finished reading cultural life in france during the occupation, and he, among many others, points out how remarkable it is that the country was that vicious in its

dealings with jews, and, obvious, 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 atlantaic, the reason your father was bought out was because he had a very successful edition; right? >> right. >> which were those? >> a series of classics, the russian classic, and then the french classics, and then the classics from the rest of the world. the library of america here is an attempt to copy that model of having a really good selection and well text. they were leather bound and on paper, and handsome, but they were not to be expensive. people started buying them. it was less expensive than

buying individual volumes, so it was a good thing to have on your shelf. >> this became the backbone of the empire? >> it certainly became an important part of it, yeah, yeah. after the war, in fact, they tried to deny that my father had ever been there because they were ashamed of firing him, and until i started writing my books, they more or less kept up the official line that he had nothing to do with it, and when my first book came out 10 years ago, they threatened to sue me if i told the story, but, of course, they had no grounds to do so. you can sue the dead in france, by the way. [laughter] >> then you came to new york in 1941? >> 41, yeah. the germans came into power on my 5th birthday, which is inconsiderate of them. [laughter] we had to celebrate the day

before. [laughter] and then it took a long time to get out, a very long time. we arrived here in august of 41, just about in time for the american war. >> and then your father once again took a publishing -- took up publishing? >> right. i don't know if those names mean anything to anybody here, but at that time, there were a lot of people writing. there's a book that was the first antigerman book coming out of that time, and he published them here. another was published in france by an underground publisher called the midnight edition, and they only made 300 copies of the book which was not much, but they got it to eng ladged. they -- england. they scattered them over france

which made me feel that was the best way of distributing a book. >> distribution, we'll talk about that later. [laughter] >> you know, you're not going to get airline distribution. i think one plane would do. >> was that the beginning of the freeness resistance? >> it started under that, and then joined a german exile publisher who with his wife, were running a place. wolf had been a publisher in germany, a very distinguished publisher, and he tried to publish here. at the time, it was very difficult for both of them. there were books published in simultaneous editions. a great os treian --

autre ya writer was published. it took 20 years to sell out the 1500 copies they printed in english. there was not that much interest of what was going on in europe at that time except to make antigerman comments when they published grim fairy tales. >> there were enough germans to sustain a publisher? >> oh, yeah, yeah. in fact, before the war, the germans in america sustained the german film industry. they were the target of the americans, and it was the major export market particularly for the very light fluffy musical stuff he liked to produce. when i was a kid living next to yorktown or yorkville as it was called in those days, 86th street and 3rd avenue, there were movie houses. they were the whole series of german, but those were the old

germans who lived here. they were not going to read the exile stuff, but there were enough refugees who could read it. >> also french? >> well, my father's books were done in french and german, and i'm sorry, german and english. there was a population that was sizable of imgrants here, and obviously, they wanted to know what was being written by whom. the difference was, of course, and as you all may or may not know, you know, there was a new school. a major french university and they set up a french university in exile here, a major intellectual center while most american universities didn't want to take on any of the exile professors because most of them were jewish. you know, when i started out in college in the 50s, it was one

jewish professor at yale, one at harvard, one at princeton, two in columbia, because they made a concession. [laughter] the anti-semitism which we talked about earlier as existing in america was very strong, and the role of the new school played here was fantastic, and i think that's why you had brand out there later after the war were grateful for what the new school had done. >> this small publisher eventually took off? >> eventually it took off. partly because of one individual and that sold, you know, like a million copies in hard cover and several in paperback. >> he won the nobel prize. >> yes, and because the political noise around the book. the first printing was 4,000 copies, which was the right

printing for a long russian novel, and then things took off. you can't always guess what the right printing's going to be. >> that's not the only thing. did they now publish the essays of charles lindberg's wife? >> right, i guess from the sea, which may be a title you are familiar with more than the other books we talked about, and that was a total coincidence that they met in aspen at a celebration, and she got the man uscript. it's dubious. he made a great point of, you know, not entering the war and so on, and he was so strong in his views he finally discredited himself even when the press felt he had gone too far which he

had, of course. >> this is a lesson about publishing. it seems two exiles publish the essays of the wife of a famous american antisemitist. >> it is a curious story. i don't know the full background behind it. of course, by then, you know, everyone forgot the fall, and she didn't overly share her innermost thoughts, but indirectly, she helped pay for the publishing companies, so i guess it was a good thing. >> okay. so then to move forward a bit, so it was bought by random house in 1960, and they brought you in to take over? >> well, not quite. i never thought i would work there. my father died when i was very young. the wolf's had 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. they realized after the wolf's had left, they need somebody to be an editor, and so i came to do that, and then gradually began to run the place as time went on. i was about the age 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 one, of course; that's the enormous difference between then and now. the people who ran random house better served were real publishers. they really believed in what they consider doing, and they knew that a publishing house suspect in any way like an archaeological cut. you have to have different generations, and you have to find the talent in each

generation, and in my 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 this. i couldn't lose a lot of money, but if i saw something that i thought to be important, i could publish it. nowadays, of course, that's completely out of the question. i remember being a -- in a paris bookstore looking at a book thinking this looks interesting, let's translate it, and we did. we lost money on it for the first ten years or so, and nowadays, you know, somebody came up and said let's translate whoever, the machinery people could say, well, what did his last book sell, what's the

audience, how many people will buy this book? 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 because new ideas don't have a preestablished audience by definition, and my german publisher, the great biographyer points out that the first book sold 600 copies, another book sold 800 copies. i discovered the other day that beckett's first book sold three copies. they are distribution problems. [laughter] you know, those books would not be published by a large firm. there's no way it would get through the machinery. when i interview young people

wanting to work with us, they know there is a profit and lost sheet kept on them, the amount of money made by each book is recorded, and they know the last decimal point, what their per percentage is. that's an effective way of controlling people because if you're going to threaten your career by publishing the kind of book, you know, you're going to think twice, and it's interesting that over the years, you know, we've talked an enormous amount of how dictatorships control the pleases, how people with controlled under the communism regime. the capitalist control is every bit as thorough. you're not going to get away with murder or even one book in a large firm no matter how good it may be, and that's a major change. >> let's go back to the 60s. in the 60s, we lived under capitalism. here's a list of books you

published in the 60s. the making of the working closes, also the bookses of ehcarr. you published the divided self. you publisheded civilization. how did you -- you were going to britain a lot? >> france and britain and germany. >> and you would just talk to people and say who's? >> no, i mean -- >> you just went to the bookstores? >> yeah, and read the reviews. it wasn't that hard. you know, i wrote a memoir called the political education which i talk about the mccarthy period which is when i came of age in the 40s and 50s, and that had the effect of eliminating from american life the thought from europe or even in america that was at all

dictatorships senting, -- dissenting, so when i published a first book, he had never been published politically until the "new york times" published his reviews. people who were known there and very good were more or less kept out of the mainstream of american life. in the 60s, it was easy to find. there were a lot of good authors like these who, i mean, i had gone to the university of england for a couple year, and i knew the english there, but, you know, the english publishing was not how it is now. you would go and find really important books being published, in some cases, by very small firms, but there was a lot going on. >> how did that -- how -- those books, they were reviewed; right? they weren't ignored? >> negatively reviewed.

that's an another interesting aspect. we talk about iron curtains, but we don't talk about the paper curtains you have in most of the professions. i remember a review of a took that complained about the footnotes. what was it? peter -- distinguished american historian, and the point was that he wrote the book while in poland and he was working for memory without the archives. the footnotes were dicey, no question, but instead of dealing with the ideas in the book, you know, you zoom for something you can complain about when you want to keep out new ideas, and lang's work was never reviewed by any journal in the u.s. or any other creditor. it's interesting to look and see

profession by profession who is open and who isn't. it takes awhile. he was not invited to speak at an american university in the first 10 years ever, and when he was finally invited, it was because he spoke polish from his time in poll land, so the polish population in buffalo, which was considerable in those days, would flock to hear him, but harvard and yale would not invite him. >> no book tours? >> we had him coming over, but no university would invite him to speak. it would change, of course, later, but it took a very long time. >> so there was this great run in the 60s and 70s, and then things started to change. it began to change i guess when new house bought random house? >> pretty much so, and by the way, it's not just this, you

know. in the business of books which was published 10 years ago, i did an analysis of the catalogs of the major houses in america, all of them, from 1950, 60, 70, ect., until 2000 when the books came out. you look at them in retrospect, and you know, harvard, for instance, which is now all show business biographies and right wing propaganda -- >> and books about the financial crisis. [laughter] >> good, congratulations on getting through. [laughter] you know, you look at 1950-60, those catalogs look like university press catalogs, and good ones. they were publishing lists like the ones we mentioned, and, you know, with the civil rights movement, there was a huge cascade of political stuff from everybody. things changed enormously, and that's the argument, when the

takeover changed the ownership, but in those days, i mean, if you look at -- and look at what publishing was about, and not just in the u.s., but everywhere else, it was very open. you have a huge amount of stuff coming out in the mccarthy's years in the 60s. it's interesting to look was 68 the cause for the books or the cause of the books? >> and so, i just want to talk specifically, what starts happening in the 80s, where, i mean, it's not like you get calls from new house telling you not to publish certain books; right? >> well, you know, when large companies take you over, there's always the same pat ternings and -- pattern, and i describe it in the business of books and publishers told me that was the

funniest part of the book because they were told the same thing verbatim, and, you know, i same and said, of course, i bought you folks because i admire what you are doing, i wouldn't dream of changing anything, continue as before, ect., ect.. of course, he didn't mean it. he intended to completely change the nature of what was being plushed by random house, and then he would sign up trump, for instance, for his book, and 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 details, but changed the structure of the firm, quality going down the market which didn't work well, and finally at the end of the exercise, they ended up selling to a german firm, and now, you know, most of the american publishing is by far companies

which is not to be center phobic, but the reason is viking is on pierson that owns the financial times which owns the whole group of ouster house, ect., ect., and leading publishers, so all of these people, many of whom wanted out of the trap of publishing in their own native language, right, one was willing to take a loss in need be in buying random house because they knew the market was limited, and once you were in english, you were safer. they even changed their name to random house which sounds funny in german. another basis for the business of books is all these companies owned newspapers, tv stations, cable, ect., ect., and they made

a lot more money than publishing had ever made. now, publishing in all of western europe and the u.s. and england ect. throughout the whole 0th century -- 20 century made roughly 3-4% on average taking the most commercial and least commercial firms. it doesn't mean they went to the poor house. it was reasonable to make that kind of money, but it was not the huge gains you made in other areas which was fed by advertising that kept newspapers and so on at a level of making 26% every year, so the owners would come and say, look, you guys are lovely people, but, you know, we can't subsidize you. that's how they would say it. the other people in the group are making 25%. you guys are making 4%, you know,. at the very least, you need to make 15%.

that's what happened. that's what is shown in the list of catalogs that i talk about. the whole context changed completely, and whole areas. i mean, everybody goes into a bookstore and there's lots of books. what's he going on about? there's more there than we can read. that's true. on the other hand, whether you look if it's the staff doing a good job maintaining itself or other people or whatever, you see that whole areas have just disappeared. i mean, there's nothing -- harper had a huge list in art history, for instance, in religion, scientific thought, philosophy, ect., all those areas disappeared. maybe the university presses would publish them, but now they all feel they have to make money too, and so a lot of them like nyu here are not even subsidized at all by the university. they have to pay rent even, so all of the possible publishers

for these many fields have pretty much disappeared, and you only have a small handful of independent, some of them non-for-profit, that generate more for non-for-profit de facto that take on those books. that's why we laugh at them because we objected to the changes being imposed. we started the new press that has a non-for-profit because that's the only way to publish the books we talked about. >> this is in 1980s, and when you left, at the time, some of your former colleagues wrote a letter saying this was wasteful with money. did he make money? >> yeah, they always made some money, not a huge amount, but enough to pay our costs, the

real cost that is, and what happened when they wanted to change everything and come in, there was really issue and we have to think of it in those terms. there was a new ideology. it was not finding the best book, but every book must make money. why not? there's no exception allowed. he wanted to get rid of them precisely because we said, look, the money we're making from publishing this or the simpsons or whatever was on the list should be used to pay for the books, and that's the way publishing had always worked. that's, you know, very old fashioned stuff, and the new ideology said, no, forget about it. the purpose of the book is to make money. the 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, by the way, stop doing so many books on the left as emphasis, but, obviously, that's part of the agenda. we knew 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 they were staying behind, many who left in the next year or two, but they were given a series of totally fraudulent series that gave the impression that we had lost money and were totally inaccurate. now, you know, the "new york times" and the others played along with that, and nobody bothered to talk. they could have talked to the former president of random house who also was fired and ask why did you keep these people after all these years when they lost money? he could have said, no, they were not losing money. what's interesting is 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 are losing money and so on and so forth. they went along with the party line basically. >> and so if they were making money, and you started the new press in 1990 after leaving, pantheon, why did you make it a nonprofit? >> because we were not making money. we were just breaking even. we had a huge distribution system. we were never going to make the 15% that investors wanted, and we couldn't find private investors simply because that's the money they wanted. in a parallel fashion we talk about all the newspapers being shut down in this country, you know, many of them aren't -- the "chicago tribune" "last time" are all in brings.

a lot of this book is devoted to that issue because they were no longer making 26%. the night ritter chain had the misfortune of making 19.6% were sold off even if it meant shutting down newspapers. if investors knew house at all, figure the very least they need to make it 25%, anything that makes less than that doesn't make sense, and now, when you discover you can sell fraudulent mortgage instruments and make more than 25%, no capitalist in his right mind invests in a publishing house, newspaper, or a bookstore or whatever; right? the purpose of the wrdz in money, the book we are talking about tonight, if that's the case, how do you keep print alive whether it's in book form or newspaper form or even on the kindle, it doesn't matter.

how do you keep the content going in a system that is no longer going to invest the time and money you need to do it? the time is very important. i mean, my last year at pantheon, the "new york times" has this list of the 10 best books. we had two on that list, each of which was commissioned 25 years before. [laughter] now, you know, any accountant would have said, 25 years at 4% inflation, you lost your investment at most. forget about it. they would have been right, of course, and those are extreme examples. i don't like telling authors that example because that encourages them to be late, but time is important, and time is is important to bookstores. i talked to people in the big chains, and they stacked up a best seller in the front of the shop because they know it's going to be on the "todaytoday" show, and if it's not, the books

are sent back to the store, and if it's not on the show the week following, they are sent back to the publisher. time is something, you know, that is very valuable, and again, the current system which is in the bookstores is based on how many dollars per square foot do you make per hour? that means the chains are going to choose fewer and fewer books, and of course, they will have gotten rid of the independent bookstores by now. when i was a kid working in the book shop down the street, there were 333 bookstores in new york. now there's under 30 including the chains. you know, it's understandable. the chains deliberately set out to open up their branch in front of the independent, give discounts on the best sellers to stop the independents, and then they were there on their own. what they didn't realize, of course, is that, you know, somebody else can do to you what

you have done to others. others sold best sellers at a loss to bring in customers. the last harry potter book bringing a 20 pound price in england, was selling for one pound price. the stores were not getting the sales they needed to pay for the represent. >> when you talk about the chains, that's barnes & noble? >> and borders. >> was there weldon books? >> yes, there's lots of chains that are beginning to disappear. borders closed half of their stores the other day, but, you know, when i was a kid and went to the new school, there were lots of bookstores around here and good ones. the school had its own very good bookstore. all of those are gone. >> and the other thing, some of

the pillars of the publish industry, the bookstores, and the newspaper review sections; right? those are appearing. you said something interesting. one of the reasons they are disappearing is the ad money from the publishers is now going to barnes & noble? >> right. to exchange and pay for cooperative advertising which is a yiewfism for bribery. you pay them an extra whatever. >> people don't know this. a book at barnes & noble does not get to the front of the store by itself or the staff took an initiative? >> no. if you see a box of crackers at the front of supermarket, you know. same thing with the bookstores now, and the number of bookstores that have a staff can tell you what to pick. you know, barnes & noble people are paid less than they are at mcdonalds.

don't ask for them advice on the latest novels to read because they won't know they are there anyway. they would buy 300 copies for the thousand stores which i joked was 100 pages per store, and then they would return 90% of the books, so i timely said to the sales people, look, we are not selling books, but lending books and helping them decorate the store. they used to have all the nice shelfs, but now the books are face up because they cut 80% of the titles they have. the idea that a bookstore, which, you know, when i worked at the bookstore, a good store was not just a place that had a book you know you wanted, but books you didn't know you wanted. they had a whole range of ideas and that makes the backbone of

independent publishing. i was in france on a book tour, and i went to a bookstore in the town press, and we just published a book by a french writer. it was a funny, good book. i said, you know, since the name was appropriate to the town, i said how many copies did you guys sell? they said, guess. i said 50? he smiled. i said 100? he said 2,000. they sold more books in that one bookstore than we sold in america because they had a staff that liked the book, and when people scdz what was good, -- asked what was good, they said try this one. every publisher in france tells me, you know, they live because the independent bookstores. i mean, they have supermarkets too and sell 20% of the total, but if you want to sell a new book which has ideas in it whether it's poetry, fiction, or nonfiction, it's the small up

dependents that get to 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, so what are they doing in france and germany as the other examples? >> 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 americans should have never 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 that actually stopped some mergers from taking place that would have been very harmful. beyond that, there's legislation you can't discount books for the very reason i mentioned is that you don't have the chains cutting down the price and knocking out the independents. that means there are, you know,

thousands of bookstores around. in germany, there's 8,000 bookstores which is 5 lot of bookstore -- is a lot of bookstores. one of the things i asked once of the german culture minister, a former publisher, he said if that law was changed, we'd lose half of the bookstores overnight. >> you are not allowed to sell a book too cheaply? >> right. we saw this happening in the music industry; right? when you're allowed endless discounts, the publisher raise the cover price so they are still getting the same, but the small independents are knocked out. if you look at what happened, you can see what happened or came close to happening in the book industry. what i've done in the book is to show concrete examples of what's happened in different countries and how they decided not just

with books, but with newspapers that, you know, if you want a democracy, a country in which ideas are exchanged, you have to save the word. 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 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 the downtown alive which is a question, of course, that applies to most cities in this country, and if you don't want everybody going out to the edge of town to buy at the big costco's and so on, how are you going to keep alive, you know, the culture of the inner city whether it's a movie house or a bookstore? there's a thousands movie houses called art and experiment which are art houses in europe.

they keep, you know, they keep the whole culture of film alive. they get 10 million a year paid for by tax on the multiplexes on all the big commercial houses. now, you know, when i was a kid in new york, there were just endless art houses here. now there's few left. film form is the only non-for-profit. they started with 70 folding chairs a few years ago, and now they are extremely successful, but in most cases, the figures in the books is there used to be 10% of the films in america were overseas because of the networks, and now it's less than 1% because you have nor multiplexes. multiplexes are doing what the bookstores are doing. if a movie, no matter how good

or where it's from, if it doesn't make money in the first two days, you drop it. the choice you have in books or movies or newspapers is constantly being narrowed. you can see, well, okay, 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 condolence rigs calling in heads of the networks before we went into afghanistan saying i don't want to see wounded civilians on your screen because they knew, they are not dumb, they knew 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, and namely to, you know, allow people to own a newspaper and a tv station in the same town. bush was about to do that when a few ngo's like free press and other organizations began to raise the alarm and the people on the right, interestingly enough, saw there was a danger here, and within a couple of months, there were 3 million letters sent to washington, not congress, which is unheard of in american politics, and bush had to pull back, and so the networks were not rewarded as they had hoped for the support they had given to the iraqi war, but that's, you know, that's ultimately -- that's, you know, the that's the end point when talking about the media in politics. you end up having a situation where horrible things happen

because there's no one around to say, wait a minute, these guys are lying to us. there was a few papers that did, but they were very few. >> you propose in the book, we should tax school and give it to the bookstores? >> not to the bookstores. i said basically this. the idea people have if things are advertised, the end result is free; 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 pay for the tv shows, the newspapers, ect., but in reality, the ads are simply a private tax; right? you pay for these ad over time you buy a bottle of coke or whatever. you are paying indirectly to the company that then spends the money to persuade you to buy more stuff. it's a tax on you as much as

anything else. now, google uses the press all the time. look on the screen, and there's the latest headlines. they never pay a nickel for that, and they make over 25% a year, and they made $25 billion last year, and so what i'm saying is and in the book along with other arguments that there's no reason why we shouldn't have a tax on access providers that are used to subsidize the press in the same way in england and canada, you have a tax on your television set to pay for public networks; right in? in america, when they thought of pbs years ago, the commission that did that sunlighted a tax on the television set so that -- suggested a tax on television so they didn't give into political pressures. when they did big exposes, nixon cut the budget totally,

eliminated it. that's another form of censorship. the system in canada, in 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 still have a press that does it's 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 down. the "baltimore sun" had five. they are now closing offices in the state capitol which as we know where traditional forms of corruption are at their most ripe so that the idea of the

press has been and still is possible, but becoming less and less possible under the present regime. we are paying indirectly for something that's beginning to disappear. 83% of people your age assume that they'll be no newspapers in a decade; right? they 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 the whole financial collapse. there was no paper telling you what the economists who were predicting this were saying. the press are not idealizing it at all, but if you want to keep the structure at least and give them a chance to begin to hire folks and do their jobs then you do what's been done in europe. there's a chapter in the book honorway that is interesting

because the norway gives a paper of opinions, not just entertainment. every second newspaper in a provincial town, and they still have the second paper for the pr vine issue town, which we don't, and they have a press that doesn't get huge amounts of money from the government, but enough to keep going. this never affects content. 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 other countries. they'll never talk -- even the guardian, the best paper in england belongs to a nonfor

profit for decades. you don't find that in the "new york times". the press here is panicking saying we're going to go down the tubes quickly because alled ads are on the internet, and that's where they will stay. there's no talk whatsoever about what are the alternative possibilities, and again, there's a the purpose of the book. >> how do we save a bookstore? >> well, as i mentioned before, i mean, part of it is to have a law that says, you know, no discounting, but there's lots of other things. across the street from me on the upper west side, two of the last existing independent bookstores in down, two year ago or three years ago now they closed down because their rent was raised so high. the stores are still empty; right? they never had anybody else to rent the store to, you know? they knocked them out so that on

the west side we now have, you know, book culture at 110th street and that's it. >> on broadway and 93rd? >> broadway and 93rd. >> yeah. >> so part of -- any decent city should have is a minimal commercial rent control system where at the very least you can't raise prices if you don't have another customer, and maybe you shouldn't raise prices unless you can e roll or replace it with somebody doing the same thing so every store doesn't become a bland read as has happened here. these are not just preserving the bookstore questions, but they are preserving an urban civilization question. you know, you look where on broadway and 94th street, there is hardly a store left other than the korean grocery store that is not a chain store of some kind.

there's -- >> i'd like to take some questions, is that all right? >> sure. >> do we have a microphone? is there someone to hand it around? all right. let's ask some questions. >> the first question is always the hardest one to get. >> i will say that this book will be available after questions. >> okay good. >> we vice president talked much about digital books, and i'm wondering what role you see bookstores playing in the digital books? >> right. well, the last chapter in the book is called technology and monopoly. it's about digital books because the real danger is not the technology at all.

i'm not down in this respect. i think the digital books can be find, but it's the monopoly google and amazon are trying to accomplish. they are succeeding, and the antitrust laws are not being invoked. amazon was offering to the publishers and the authors half of what they normally make, and they were keeping the difference, of course, so that battle was temporarily won by the public who said, okay, then you won't have our books. in the meantime, amazon, okay, we won't list the books at all if you don't give us what we want. i would think any antitrust attorney would have said this is an abuse of your powers. nobody said anything at the time, by that's the real battle that's going on, and if you get a situation where one or two firms can control, you know,

what's going to be sold in that form, then you have real problems. the other aspect, and i don't know how many of you ahead the stuff by robert in the new york review is the whole library issue, and garden who is chose to become library of harvard precisely to have a public platform for this kind of thing said you can't allow google to digitalize every book in the past. it's something that should be done publicly, done by the library of congress, you know, this is a common culture. it should be made commonly accessible and not made subject to the 25% profit that google expects to have want i think that's the real -- expects to have. i think that's the real issue. of course, google and amazon won't edit or commission a book. they will be responsible, and that's why they want to make money out of it for the distribution.

it's 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. >> if there's digital books, what do you sell in the bookstores, and what does one do in a bookstore if there are no books. >> no, that's a real problem. i'm saying this i think. this is a system that will gradually eliminate the bookstores, certainly, and you know, the problem with digital publishing and all of our books are available in that form, that's not the point, is that the only books that people really want are the best sellers. you know, they are not for any other book that has a relatively small printing, and that's why you need to have the bookstores. i think, and the amazon ect. threat, and they've been a threat to bookstores anyway, it is that they will eliminate the

remaining stores, and, you know, that means you'll have much less access to choice. everybody's, oh, yes, i can put my book on the internet, and everybody will read it. of course; that's crazy. millions of people put their first novel on the internet in hopes something other than their cousin will read it. that won't work. nobody knows the book is there. the whole publishing thing means making something public. that's what publishers are better or are not managed 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. that's great. if you want to read jane austin on your kindle, fine, go ahead, but that's not solving the problems of people today. question? go ahead.

>> i would say given that with bookstores and not wanting to be reliant in the way they regulate this, do you see a role for alternative modes for distribution of physical books, subscription models directed from authors or small presses that still give the book levels to be made known to the public? >> it's kind of early to answer that question. america's way and europe doesn't have figures like that. there's an interesting experiment. they published a series of political books aimed at younger people called zone, and they put them for free on the web and published them in paper at the same time. the sale of the paper editions is no different from what it would have been normally which i find very encouraging. it is -- it may be, you know,

you can create a dual audience. maybe the people who read the book on the web thought it was good enough to hold 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 out for amazon. amazon is making money by selling the kindle, so every figure they come out with, and people pointed out they are distorted is suggesting that everybody's going to do this, but when they say they are selling more books, it means they sell more books on kindle than hard covers. what they are selling basically is paperbacks. the figures are not entirely to be believed. take the overall figures in the times the other day that 9% of the books are read in this way and that number probably will increase, but only in 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 independencive and -- inexpensive and convenient object. no many people will read their kindle in the bathtub or on the beach and so on. i'm surprised that even, you know, when i'm on a long distance flight, most people are still reading paper, so for whatever that means. >> in the -- there used to be book of the month clubs which are much bigger than they are now. >> right, but that was prechain. the book of the month club used to sell, you know, at least 300,000 copies for book of the month club selection. sometimes 1 million. that was because there was a country where there were bookstores only in the major cities, and in the university towns. everybody else and this is the public at which the book clubs was aimed who wanted to read a new best