with a panel titled the publishing world yesterday and today. it's about an hour and 20 minutes. >> good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. it's a pleasure to be here, a pleasure to see all of you, so many old friends here. my name is marie arana. i had the great privilege of dania senior consultant to the librarian of congress, dr. james billington and i'm also a writer and formerly the editor-in-chief of book world at "the washington post" for many years, and also a

veteran of the publishing world. i worked for harper is a senior editor and vice president for many years and went on to work at simon & schuster as well. so i have been around the block. i'm a bit of a veteran in all fields, but we have learned so many things in this conference so far. it such a delight, such a pleasure to the wonderful keynote speech about the importance of words and the report from the frontlines of so many countries, south africa and russia, marvelous and to learn that the first encounter between europe and the new world, between the conquistadors and the quinta was over a book and

on and on with the heritage of thomas jefferson and the wonderful discussions that you just heard. at such a vibrant discussion. and wonderful to know that it will go on on in the sum of as we go forward around the world. now what we have learned in the whole process is that the book culture is changing, although we all know i think in our hearts that the world of books which we have known for so long, to which we have dedicated our lives, will shift as it did and has done from scrolls to books from monks to people and from leather-bound to pocketbooks. i just finished writing a book which will come out next year

and bolivar would take a printing press onto the battlefield and he would carry it along with the canon and the muskets and the horses and the cattle. there was a printing press and the spanish would laugh at him. why was he lumbering through the jungles with a printing press. he, in the course of liberating six countries change the language because it was a spanish that was very different but was very vibrant and was not that dusty old cask alien that was spoken or written in before and somebody asked me just the other day, i bet if olivo were living today he would have been using social media. and i'm sure he would have. would he have change the language? i don't know. of course that is what we are here to discuss.

which would bring us to the subject of the may king of books which is you know the bible tells us, there is no end to the making of books and we are very fortunate to have a great panel of speakers. we are still waiting for the fourth one to calm and i hope she will, dissenting on us like an angel from on high, but we have two representative -- i wanted to make sure we had two representatives of fiction from different houses and i chose nan talese and geofrey kloske because i thought they were two very different corners of the industry and it turns out that jeff, i think it was 10 days or week ago penguin and random house have merged making probably the largest trade publishing conglomerate in the

world. although i thought i was inviting people from two corners of the world, they have become one corner of the world even as we have gathered together here. we also are very fortunate to have karen lotz of candlewick and walker, company that consistently has been one of those innovative children's pug -- publishers around and niko pfund who represents the very revered scholarly publisher oxford university press. before introducing each of them separately, i want to say a few words about publishing in general and a few cameos of the notable events of the past year just to set the stage. let me start with the events of the past year. first, after 244 years, the encyclopaedia britannica announced in january of this

year that it's stopping presses, seizing its print publication and going 100% digital. the britannica's last print version is a 30 2-volume, 130-pound 2010 edition of one cameo. another highlight from the year, number two, in june library announced that for the first time in history, all of its shakespeare library additions will be available in e-book format for less than the price of a market paperback. each of the bars work is now downloadable, electronically readable and principle on-demand. cameo number three, publishers weekly which is the official magazine of the publishing trade and now its choice for publishing choice of the year, not hillary mantell who was the

first woman to win the book prize twice and not anything like the publishing people of the year in years past like david shag for instance who is ceo of penguin who really managed to balance nicely the digital and print publication company. he was the choice last year, and not the choice before which was, anyone like the choice before who is it arnson noble who managed to divert this company at a very critical time, and not going under. he was a choice in the -- this year. the choice was el james. not pd james, el james, the author of "50 shades of grey."

this is a publishing first of the year. the rationale? the cost end of quote, per trilogy connects people who are not regular readers. [laughter] so this is progress, folks. now to the industry in general. we recently have had dramatic, dramatic changes. i'm just going to talk about just very briefly about the last five years. the united states as we know is the largest producer of books in the world and over the course of the last decade we have seen that production verging. when i began editing books at "the washington post" in the '90s american publishers were producing 50,000 books a year. 10 years later still in the same position in 2003, they were producing 330,000 books

annually. look world at the time, we were getting 150 books a day, 40,000 books a year and of that 40,000, only 1600 could be reviewed. in 2007, that number climbs to 415,000 books a year published by american publishing. in 2009, a mere two years later, 1,100,000 books are published in the usa according to bowker. two-thirds of them, or 725,000 of them, were self-published. so you see the whole idea of self-publishing, social media, the facebook culture, brought about a huge wave of self-publishing. in 2011, just last year they

reported 3 million books published in this country. i suspect only 15 or 20% of those are published by mainstream university or were small presses. this means that readers are faced with exponentially more and more books. but it also means less and less of a market for each title. the average book in america, believe it or not, sells 250 copies a year. when you average the millions that steven king might sell and the one that you might sell of your life if you were to self-publish. even so, the american association of publishers concluded that actually this is the really interesting part to me and i hope we will discuss this. book sales overall have actually been increasing steadily since 2008. adult trade book sales are definitely up.

children's book sales are up. e-books in 2011 outsold hardcover books for the first time and interestingly enough, mass-market paperback sales have plunged. now that makes sense with people reading popular books are more likely to read them on their handheld devices but it's important to keep in mind that book publishing is a very unpredictable and very eccentric business. every book is a new start up. think about that. requiring some product research and development, its own production, its own branding, it's a marketing strategy, its audience development. and you can't sell a book by ian mcewan with the same strategy you would use to sell patricia cornwell. each is like a different company unto itself.

so it begs the question when you put an ad in "the new york times" or "the wall street journal" for a book it's not like putting in an ad for a honda or for a cadillac or chrysler, it's for one book. it's not random house advertising all of its books. it's one book. it's a very very different and very subjective business. which means that you can only plan so much when it comes to marrying books to readers. books for which publishers paid a great deal of money and i remember being at simon & schuster when simon & schuster paid $8 million for the record number -- record size of advance for ronald reagan's memoir called american life. now to earn $8 million, and you know the math as well as i do, you need to sell 4 million

books. isn't that right? the million-dollar fans to sell 250,000? the books actually sold 300,000 copies, so it was a spectacular failure even because of the comparison of the size of the event to the actual sales. so it's a highly complex business with a thin margin of profit and you had to that the dramatic changes in technology and the public demands for new ways to read and you have an industry that needs to redefine itself. nobody knows that more than these people who are sitting on the stage here to talk to you ouscrale to survive or are going to take an adage of the unprecedented opportunity and that's what we are going to talk about today. i have asked each of the panelists, still waiting and hoping that man comes. we will see if she does. she is taking the train and

should be arriving at the station but we will see. if she does, we will certainly bring her appear. i would like each one to give an overview of his or her career, bit about their personal philosophy of book publishing and how that philosophy has changed in the course of their career. first up is niko pfund who is the president publisher of oxford university press united states. he joins new york university press in 1990 and rose to become its director. he began at oxford in a junior position in law and social science before he rose to the ranks of the institution to become its head executive. sum of the books on his list, barbara rogoff's the cultural nature of human development, david kilcullen's the accidental guerrilla, peggy pascoe's book

on law and race in america, daniel walker howe's history of america between 1815 and 1848. ladies and gentlemen, niko pfund. [applause] >> thank you very much for coming here and listening to his talk on friday afternoon. i am so delighted by many of you who have chosen to spend your afternoon here. i spent 10 years working for a library and and half of that time actually physically working in a the library because as director of the press i've reported in the library so i'm thrilled to be here to talk to you about publishing. in terms of marie asked us to give you a quick overview of our personal philosophy of publishing was found to little pretentious that i would say in terms of how i look at what we

do, it is squarely driven by oup. oup oxford is about fundamental education. we often say that we don't exist to make money but we do have to make money to do the things that we exist to do. and that really doesn't form all of the work that we engage in. personally one aspect of what we do at oxford that i particularly enjoyed, and that is the kind of publishing that i think oxford does especially well and is specially important these days is to essentially take the work of scholars who often exist in fairly influenced environment speaking to members of their own discipline-based tribe and try to help them translate their work to a larger audience and that sometimes can be a real challenge. but it goes to the heart of what oxford should be doing which is not publishing works to very small groups of intellectuals,

although that is a crucial part of what we do, but also trying to identify works that are broader input and trying to bring those works to people who are interested who did do not reside in the academy. so i think the subtitle of the session today is the publishing world today and tomorrow and i want to look back a little bit and tell you the differences that i have tracked in the last 25 years of my time in publishing through the prism of how people have responded say at a cocktail party when i tell them i'm in publishing. it used to be that there were essentially two. the first response was to ask me whether i've read anything that was published which is obviously completely impossible and the other was to tell me about the book ideas. and that of course is exactly as it should be. that is their lifeblood as

publishers for people who want to write but i was always reminded of the statistic that appeared in harvard's index many years ago, and those of you who know how they juxtapose statistics sometimes. the first statistic was they asked a group, significant group of people, large number of people, how many people, what percentage of the population should write books? if i recall correctly and i'm sure i'm not going to get this right but it's more a -- them a quantitative one. the number was three to 4% and a asked the exact same group of people well, what about you? do you have a book in you and something like 75% of the people said hell yes, i have a book in me. [laughter] and i think that is in some ways, that is where publishers live. and that goes into some of the things we we are writing about the explosion in the number of books that men publish and i will talk about that a little

bit in a second. now when i tell people i'm in publishing there tend to be two reactions. in addition to those two that remain and the first is that people instantly launch into this impassioned monologue about their own personal reading habits. it used to be a few years ago it was how much they loved the print, the relationship between their thumb and forefinger when they're holding the book and all of that and it what's very interesting is how that has changed and people now who i once would have thought, actually one of our sales reps no less, who i would never thought would have started reading on a handheld now says he only reads on a handheld. but the point is less that it is change. the point is more that people feel incredibly and passionately about this issue and they will talk to you about it ad infinitum. it doesn't really matter whether they are shifting, doesn't

matter whether they have switched entirely. the point is it is something that people feel it certainly passionately about and if there's one thing i hope you will come away from, at least my comments, thinking is that things really aren't quite as dire as they may look sometimes or some people may have you believe. i think it's a challenging time in the publishing industry and i'll think there's ever been a better time for reading. i think that's a really crucial distinction because reading is a fundamental human experience. there is a fantastic prose by john updike that says reading is the encounter of the mind. that is really important. the publishing industry is important in facilitating that but there is an enormous difference there and i think it's important to highlight. the second new reaction that people have is essentially commiserating. they look at me and they say oh yeah, it must be tough out there

in publishing. every time i pick up "the new york times" and read david carr's column, the phrase the crumbling publishing industry comes up. i think it's worth pointing out relative to the point about the publishing person of the year that last night as i was sitting in my office trying to finish up, was writing a letter to our staff informing them that as one of the gifts we are providing to our staff over the holidays, we are giving everybody a free copy of a short introduction to american history by the paul buyer who was a documenter's who wrote a marvelous book about american history. just as i was putting the finishing touches on the memos somebody sent me an e-mail which was an article from "the new york times" who had gotten on line about how random house had given every single member of the staff of a 5000-dollar holiday bonus. [laughter]

that was obviously a little discouraging. but i think it's crucial to highlight that there is a direct connection between the publishing of a book like that which has been obviously fantastically successful and the ability to sustain the publishing industry even has a stunning host of other things. i think our company differ slightly with murray on that particular book which i'm going to point out that i haven't read yet but my wife who is a teacher says sometimes it's actually -- to get people reading and the notion somebody while ago mentioned to me in a conversation that "harry potter" was essentially a gateway drug to books for an entire generation. i actually thought that was a really pity way of putting that. i want to read you a letter that appeared in "the sunday times" magazine last week and it reads

as follows. as i'm about to self-publish my novel, i watched -- all they do is put their imprint on the products. no thanks. amazon may end up being a monopoly for everything we buy but right now it's given me the chance to have with the industry tonight me, access to readers. i get that a lot. we all get that a lot in publishing and my response to that is yes and no. i think one of the best things for readers and arguably even for publishing in the last decade has been the democratization of dissemination, the way in which technology enables anybody for a few hundred books to print out the short stories, their poems and family history and the mars. that's a really good thing. it might not be a great thing in terms of all the books that are being printed but environmentally, but i think

it's actually a good thing. the trilogy action started that way but it's also important to point out that there is more to publishing that assets and there is more to publishing now than there has ever been. one of the things in business you hear about is double running cause the idea that you are doing one thing and trying to build a new business related 2-year-old business and you are having to do two things at once whereas before you were just doing one thing. to me netflix is a perfect example of this because they obviously have to know in 10 years people won't be watching movies but shipping physical objects -- [inaudible] and so they are creating this cable delivery system even as they are building so publishers are actually in a position i would say where we are almost

triple. we have on the one hand we are doing old things in old ways. we are still editing and acquiring and working with authors. we are marketing and we are promoting and doing publicity. pretty much all of that is exactly -- some of its gotten a little easier and we don't take enormous chances. we can do multiple short runs. but were still doing all that. secondly, we are doing all these altering said new ways so when you start selling e-books you have to create a whole infrastructure according to e-books. social media, the promotion of social media requires a whole different type of expertise. for press likes oxford which is almost split between research publishing an english language training and english as a second language publishing, we have about 50 offices the world over and we historically have looked

at a lot of overview market just as that, as markets and now we are moving more towards thinking. all the places we should be publishing content from and that is an enormous shift. and then finally, we are doing completely new things that we have never even thought of or done before. we have something called oxford biographies on line and just as an example of how something like this emerges where we went out and ask them what do you want from us? you are the dog and we are detailed. how do you want us to weigh? we obviously are publishing books but what else should we do? and what we kept hearing over and over again across disciplines regardless who you talk to, we are pinned to the wall by this fire of information. what we want is somebody to help us make sense of it all and we want them to help us make sense

of it all in their business because we can't keep up. we walk around at the annual convention and look at the new books and that's impossible. there's too much stuff now. so we created something called oxford bibliographies on line which attempts to do precisely that and it's not a sterile bibliography. it's a quite subjective and opinionated resource that tells callers what we have decided through our long-established overview system what is good and what's not good. and that has been extremely successful but again it requires a whole host of different ways of thinking. and i think it's important when one makes a point like i just made about triple running costs, that sounds like a little bit of a wing. we haven't really hard and that kind of is beside the point. if what we do is no longer valuable to people, we will go

away. people will vote with their wallet and the ominous phrase disintermediation has been hanging over publishing for 15 years since negroponte first debuted it and so i don't worry about that too much. i am actually quite confident we will be fine in that respect. just as a few closing thoughts, there's the notion of being agnostic raised in the previous session and i would say i oxford amendment publishers i know have firmly embraced the notion of agnosticism. we want to get book to as many people as we can increasingly in a globalized world in a world where there is a booming middle class especially in china, we want to try to get as many books and journals and as much access to on line content as we can to as many people as possible at lower prices as we possibly can while still sustaining our

mission and doing what we think we should be doing. i think that's a really critical distinction. i was meeting earlier this week with the gentlemen of the copyright printers and ernie said something that i wrote down because i thought it was so interesting. he said if you can get people to pay for content they are all ready reading or using for free if you offer to offered to them at a reasonable price. i think that is quite debatable notion and by that i mean it is actually generally debatable. i think it's true with some but less true with others. in thinking about how we should be doing what we have long done and how we can do that differently, we have party change the way i think. a colleague of mine was walking down the street and there were all sorts of kiosks on the street and she saw some of our english language training books were prominently displayed. she thought that was terrific.

it was like a newspaper stand essentially and then she was doubly thrilled to see they had the ministry of education, a hologram on them. antenna was somewhat dismayed when she looked more closely and realized a was a pirated edition with a hologram on it. [laughter] and i say pirated because i'm not entirely comfortable with that term in that context. you can make the argument that even though it may not be desirable for people to be taking her content and giving it away or selling it it is creating a consciousness of oxford as a publisher in that market that did exist before and again from a mission standpoint it cno, they are worth the time. finally, i would just admonish you to mistrust the theologians when it comes to future books and future publishing. wikipedia denigrate or is, the

book will never die bibliophiles, the book is arty dead technophiles, you know everybody stakes out their extreme positions and the reality as i can tell you the conviction from the vantage point of a publishing house is a billion dollars a year. we publish college textbooks and highly specialized academic research. it's just a messy time right now. everything is splintering and fragmenting in one of the ways in which we are struggling is to figure out how to continue fulfilling our mission while sustaining the back office and back aspects of all these dissemination models. a lot of it has to do with tedious hard work and that is what i mean when i say there is more to publishing that access. and finally to close on i hope encouraging note and i touched on this briefly moment ago, i

really think that there has never been a better time for books. i can't remember a time in the 25 years i've been doing this, i can't remember five years. not great boom like this when you have a conversation like this because people really do care about looks. people have a deeply autobiographical relationship with books and given that we traffic and industry of books -- [inaudible] thank you. [applause] >> thank you nay. thank you for keeping the standard so high and indeed, there are wonderful books being published today. there seems to be no shortage of good books. next is geoffrey kloske. jeff is vice president publisher of riverhead books, a dynamic maverick armed of penguin books.

he has been an executive editor of simon & schuster and an editor of little brown. at riverhead, he has managed to infuse the imprint of his own very distinctive personality. in the course of his career he has published such authors as david the karis, david edgar, bob dylan, ceravolo, and juno diaz. geoffrey kloske. [applause] >> thank you mari and thank you to the library. for holding this summit. of future that is we have discussed it a read in the papers is very much always in doubt. i teach a course at columbia about publishing and one thing that i always do is read them headlines about publishing, but

"the new york times" and i quizzed them as to when they think those were written. there are things like you know editors don't edit and good books on published anymore and the decaying of our book culture and their intellectual culture and so forth. you can't find them in different forms but fairly similar forms almost every decade for the last 120 years. book publishing is a melancholy industry for some reason. we are always in a fallen age. i have been doing it for 20 years and the golden age ended right before i showed up. [laughter] and it really was in high swing, depending on the age of the person telling the story.

but it has always been the case that looks have the spirit of not quite being what they used to be which is amazing because we show up everyday and we do it again and we find new authors and publish publishing of books and get excited about things, which maybe makes us book publishers strange people filled with incredible hope, a rational hope sometimes like the fine memoir by president reagan, many books fail in any way of looking at it critically, commercially. but we live with that failure and we continue to find new authors with a great deal of hope and the vision that we will find readers for those books. i work in the penguin group which is the largest english-language trade publisher in the world and we have a number of imprints doing

different sorts of things. there is a course paperbacks which everyone has heard of, starting in 1935. seeing an opportunity for really low priced paperbacks. he published in his first year 10 different titles and within the first two years sold a few million copies of these low priced paperbacks and really created the format of the industry. we also publish putnam books. the putnam started as booksellers in boston and its many booksellers do, they want to sell good things and so they became publishers and publish people like nathaniel hawthorne all the way up to today when they do patsy cornwell and tom clancey. we also have viking, which is

the storied imprints that published "the grapes of wrath" and steinbeck now publishes many best-selling fiction and nonfiction writing. the publisher of riverhead and riverhead is a specialized small literary imprint and our goal is to bring new voices, new perspectives to readers. so we are always looking for something, something appealing that we have not heard before. the first book i mentioned that i ever published was the book by a guy heard on the radio. i could remember his name. it was something so fresh and distinct about his voice that i had to call them up and buy that book. that was david sedaris.

it turned out i was not alone. many people wanted to hear that same voice. that is what we look for. we have this irrational hope in the midst of a constant state of collapse and we continue to do it. it has been touched on here at the summit and we will probably talk about it today. the history of book publishing is a coming together of format around successful publishers who have adapted new formats and amalgamated them into a single company. paperback and riverhead publisher cease to be separate which was a problem for paperback publishers because they needed products, so they bought or started hardcover imprints. ultimately it's about the book and as most of those support we

are at gnostic about format. we just want to bring books to readers, readers that are waiting for them and enjoy them whether it is neal james or one of the writers at oxford. at riverhead we look for those fresh voices that we have not heard before and we take a lot of care in developing them over time, working closely with the writers and publish them with a great deal of marketing, to try to create that readership and we have been doing it for now 18 years. our authors include people like chang lead the native speaker, juno diaz who won the pulitzer a few years ago. those are the kinds of authors that we look for in the publish with this enduring hope in a

state of collapse. [laughter] [applause] >> thank you jeff. obviously jeff has been enormously successful and he is very modest about it. i am so glad to see that man has made it. hello, nan. we have been mattering on about the publishing business and i have explained that what i've asked of you is for you to tell a little bit about your career and about your personal philosophy about publishing and how that philosophy has changed or held up or modified in your very long quite illustrious career. nan talese is's senior president of doubleday and nan a. talese doubleday books. she has worked at simon & schuster, houghton mifflin

before becoming part of the random house pool. she has published some of the most distinguished and popular authors of our time. among them, margaret atwood, ian mcewan, thomas -- barry underwood, valerie martin and pat conroy. nan talese. [applause] >> i do apologize for being late. the amtrak engine decided it wanted to put on the brakes and he did it by itself. i had a terrible time getting it going but here i am. as marie said, i have a very long career beginning really learning publishing at random house at a time that publishing -- i think were often referred to

as the golden years but roger straus on for our strauss, charles scribner and knopf owned alfred knopf so it wasn't a joke. in fact you had enough money to go into the whole thing to begin with. but i started and my interest has always been serious fiction and nonfiction. so that is what i publish through the 60s and in the 70s i was at simon & schuster, where i first began to publish being mcewan and margaret atwood, barry unsworth and i commissioned schindler's list at that point.

tom conneely always submitted to books to be published at the same time and one was perfectly wonderful and the other was i thought a clinker. i made an offer on one and i never got to publish in. one day i got a letter from him handwritten saying i have come upon these remarkable files in a letter shop and are you interested? you have always been so nice in liking my work. i said well can you tell me a little bit more? so he rode a little bit more and we had to have a -- we didn't have a literary agent for him in dealing with this because i found out later schindler, his life had already been sold to a think mgm so tom had to pay back mgm in order to write schindler's list.

i was dealing with a lawyer the whole time and snyder who is the head of simon & schuster then said, nan, don't bother with it but i was quite keen on publishing a book in publishing this author so eventually i did. and it paid a shocking price to today's market, $60,000 for world rights and of course the book has never been out of print. that went to more notice when steven spielberg did the movie and i remember when tom was in poland and he telephoned me and he said, steven is really making a good film. and i was with simon & schuster until 1981 and went to houghton

mifflin, and i learned a great deal at simon & schuster bed houghton. houghton was much more the kind of old-fashioned publishing that i've really felt at home with. and with me came on their own sedition market atwood, gary young's wood, ian mcewan, and it was wonderful that my authors just followed me. i was active for about six and half years and that was at the time they there were all of these takeovers. at random house, random was the first one to go public, and he was called into his office in he said now we are going to go public and there's going to be a stock government me tell you what's going to happen. i am not advising anyone. i'm just telling you what we are

doing. and then rca bought us in then i went to simon & schuster and when i was at simon & schuster golf and western bought simon & schuster. at houghton, houghton was already a publicly held company that maxwell was trying to buy it and only 10% to general books. i remember the director kept coming to me in those first few months and said, you know they are not going to sell the trade division. i said, you have just brought me here. stop telling me this, you are not going to sell the case that i've come to. but they were very smart. it was very hard on general publishing. 90% of the company's was a very profitable textbook division and i felt, as much as i loved houghton and did not want to leave, i felt that the general

books were given short shrift. and the new york office and the boston company so i kept having to take the shuttle back and forth. the last summer i was there i realized i was traveling 900 miles a week and not really doing anything worth anything. so i resigned and as i said i resigned from the boston shuttle, not really from houghton. it was a wonderful company and i loved it dearly. but happily margaret at work, ian mcewan and buried unsworth came with me to doubleday. when i was at houghton, pat conroy had a new editor for every single book and they assigned me to him and he got along terribly well. that was the prince of tides.

i remember -- every writer is very very different. pat sends a thousand plus pages and it's up to you to do with it what you can. having never worked with him i didn't know what to do so i've made like a movie scheme of timeframes, themes, characters and when he came to new york to work with me, he looked at it and shook his head and said nobody had ever read my work this carefully. so as you know it was quite a success and so we signed him up for another book. just after that time, i went to doubleday and pat came to me and said, i really don't want to stay here without you so i will come to doubleday too.

i said you have a perfectly good contract. i can do anything about it. it's entirely up to you. what he finally said was he was never going to write another book so he came to doubleday and after i had been there two years and it was rather chaotic, i said, i can't work in this chaos. so i started my own imprint and that was in 1990. i have continued to publish the same, the same ever since. i have done thomas cahill's books of history but all of the books that i have done, each one of them has something in common and that is they use language beautifully. they are story tellers and they passionate about what they are writing and whether fiction or

nonfiction, that is what goes on in my imprint. obviously in the last year and a half, it's been a very dicey time to say the least. i am sorry i missed everybody else talking about it, but i feel i have just been going on doing the literary fiction and nonfiction and flying under the radar and the independent booksellers are great supporters of my authors. with e-books of course in america we started it much earlier then it's been done abroad. we are beginning to get a sense of what the e-books, how they are going to be done and the other night i saw a presentation, what was called and e illumined. it was a book, it is a book by richard mason and he and his

partner have developed an e-book on the ipad that the story takes place -- it's the pleasure seekers and the story takes place in amsterdam. there's a there is a picture of a street in amsterdam and if you put your finger on it will take you through amsterdam. if you put your finger on the text it will be read aloud to you. there is music. this is what everyone said e-books were going to be that this this is really a tonight do think that what is going to eventually the fault, that will be the e-book because people will want it because you can listen to it and you get a good deal of history. not every book is adaptable to it, but i think the literary books, lot of them well. but i continue to publish as i did at random house. i'm afraid i don't have any new

tricks except marketing. we do a lot more marketing on the internet than we ever did before. publicity, although it's important, celebrities and big authors of party established. i'm not sure how we are going to continue to nurture young writers. it was the eighth book i think. i published seven books of ian mcewan before americans had any awareness of his being around. the big changes are going to be smaller advances for authors. and that something very topical and fought over. i think that i remember there were 9000 serious leaders -- readers in united states and i was very impressed because i thought there were 4000. [laughter] and so, as far as what i'm going

to do is continue to publish -- someone came in the other day and you probably read about the bonus that we all got because of seven shades of gray etc.. she came into the office and she said, i can't believe it. i'm still selling in still pushing that book. i said it's just fine. i am continuing to publish my good looks. thank you. [applause] >> thank you, nantes. she does publish incredibly good looks. so glad you could make it. karen lotz has been the president publisher of kennewick press since 1999. among her many books, the marcy watson series by kate d. camillo, what color is my world

i careened abdul jabbar ,-com,-com ma letter to the moon by maya soetoro in. last year she took on the additionaadditiona l responsibility of being the managing director of walker books, candle wicks british parent company. the mother of two young children she manages to split her time between london, the home of walker publishing and somerville massachusetts where kennewick is based. she is truly a global publisher. please welcome, karen lotz. [applause] >> thank you so much murray and thank you everyone and their good friends on call. at such an honor to be here to be included in the summit and thank you all for your attention. one of our speakers earlier today, former congressman tom

allen who is now at the aap talks about how the world of publishing is divided into many different industries really now and i would say that the corner that i hail in children's publishing is rapidly becoming even more different from our big books, partners on the adult side. we actually call it a dull publishing and we take it into this neal james family means one thing into us it means adult books versus children's books. children's books, it's interesting when he think about the context of yesterday as well because we been looking at the past and talking a lot about classics and very ancient and beautiful books such as the ones we saw last night. the entire field of children's books is actually fairly young in the scheme. the whole idea of creating literature specifically for children is rather new in a large history of publishing. and i think that is something

that is very interesting when you look at also some big, big titles that have united us over the past couple of decades. "harry potter" which has been mentioned, twilight of course. a lot of these books have come out of the children's and teen arena and they have united readers actually of all ages in this sort of imagined community. but there was a time not that long ago, time when i began my career when that wasn't really true. i think i was probably always destined one way or another in the world of books. i think my father knew this because when i was just about to head off to college, he took me out for breakfast and he didn't live with me at the time but he took met for breakfast and he he said i hope you find your college education as long as you promise this one thing and the one thing was, don't major in english. [laughter] he had a good insights.

he was hoping, virtually everythineverythin g else i could've picked would have been fine. with that wisdom of youth i agreed and i've went to college and studied croatian poetry. and even more direct path to the job market was mine when i graduated. and i definitely wanted to go in the publishing. i had lofty ideals of what i would do and what i would publish in the types of books i would work on. i went to what was then a radcliffe publishing course and now is the -- publishing course but i hadn't did my homework and there is a tremendous amount of homework you had to do big for you should do the course and begin showing my wisdom, i did not do my homework and as a punishment i was put into children's books. at that time nobody wanted to be in children's books. at first i protested and i thought this is awful but actually when i met the practitioners who are teaching the children's book course, they were amazing people. they were so dedicated to their

craft and that one summer they completely changed not just my view of what children's books were but my entire life are going going to that going go into new york and working for one of them in what was then the ep dutton. the day that i arrived was also the day of the announcement of the first of many mergers which would take ep dutton through penguin and now of course penguin and random house intermarriage. when i arrived it was this office on park avenue that have been its home for 100 years and one of my jobs is the lowest assistant on the totem pole was to keep something called the key to the centennial library. the centennial library was actually in the lobby of the building. you would walk in, roll out the carpet, but the key in the door and the wall would swing open like in batman or something. and behind it was the archives. in that archives there were just

amazing treasures. there was for example ernest munster who invented the -- book. how to make the first pop of books and things like that on also in my little cubicle which is actually a closet, a locked file cabinet. i always wondered what was in that file cabinet. cabinet. one night i found the got it opened and the thatcher was full of royalty checks that in the system did not want to mail and instead he kept them in the filing cabinet. [laughter] the bottom drawer was filled with original art from kernan shepherd, loss for dozens of years and ended up in the children's museum in new york. all of this was going on for me, the sort of entry into the world of publishing and this discovery by publishing past when all these mergers and things were happening at the same time. we were very quickly moved out of those offices, combined and put into larger much offices and that is how my career went,

watching this amazing world of big business intersect with this artisan craft and am comfortable tension between those two things. them one at a chance to move to a company called counter would present summerhill massachusetts i was very excited. candlewick was a new company. we are only 20 years this year so i've been there for 13 years out of the 20 and we publish only children's books. we start with zero and go off with two teenagers and publish some books about the craft of children's literature as well. and we are part of a group of companies that have its origins by man named sebastian walker who is a bread and a publisher in corporate england. he decided he needed to make a place where authors and illustrators could essentially calm as a haven. he founded this company and when he died he he left has accompanied to his family and have to the employees. we eventually purchased the whole company. so we have now walker books

australia, a children's television company that's very small in new and we have the two big tresses in the united states. in london, but we also have our owners 150 of our authors and illustrators who publish for us for a long time and invited them to be partners in the company. what this usually means is they are as depressed at the end of the year as of the year as the rest of us when there's not a tremendous amount of profit to share. in the good years that also means we are able to thank them for everything that they do. i think it's also a fabulous reminder to those of us who work on the creative teams that illustrators are really what it's all about. they are part of the strategy the company and with this model we have him so long and we have been able to really publish some amazing books and amazing authors. as i said we try to do it globally wherever possible and wherever practical and we are

really i think an incubator in a way for the connectedness that is now affecting all industry. basically in order to get our print runs big enough to work and to have the company survive we have always had to work with each other. even though we are sharing a common language, there is a lot of challenges to that in our day-to-day process of the. that is candlewick press and walker books and that is who we are. the other thing i just wanted to quickly say about the sort of challenges -- ave say we are talking a lot about the place where digital and print publishing meet and for the wide a portion, young adult portion, when you're talking about children's books and you are talking about looks for children zero to three or zero to 26, what does that mean? i think it's just a whole other question and a big new set of issues. there is a phrase that often

comes up in our meetings when people are getting very stressed for one reason or another. the margins aren't working and sales aren't happening or something is going on a loop in the room and someone inevitably obey says okay, these are children's books, it's not brain surgery. but a few years ago, it suddenly hit me, actually it is brain surgery because what we are doing is creating the books that are building the reading brain, hopefully. that is something that we keep very much in mind. we are trying to make the best books for children always end our definition of that really means the hoax that will help children grow up to be lifelong readers. that is their definition of the best book. as they are figuring out how in their own mind that part of us, that speech that is inherent in part of us, that vision is inherent in putting it together and learning how to read in learning how to write, what does that mean in the world a world of tablets and devices and apps instead of a tactile world of

beautiful objects? i think it means only good things but right now i would say we are definitely in the middle of the big squeeze. if you'll pardon the metaphor, maybe it's the birth canal and we will see what happens will make him out on the other side. but it is a very very interesting time and i think it's important for all of us to -- who clearly cares much about books to remember with this golden age of production that's going on, we need to figure out how to make those connections with the very youngest children and get them reading right away. that is the key to any future that we want to have. thanks. [applause] >> i think that is the first time i have ever heard children's publisherpublisher s being referred to as brain surgeon but it's very true. in fact i'm going to ask a question about that in a moment. we actually have time for a very

few questions so we only have 15 minutes. which means i will limit it to the big question in the big question, i have two big questions really. the first big question to all of you is really, are there too many books? i remember bill keller of "the new york times" complaining that there are just too many on the market and certainly self-publishing amazon and google have in their rush of publishing have her haps taken a different stand on the standards and perhaps even lowered the bar of quality in the kind of books that nan is talking about are all of us are talking about really. because they see it as a money-making business. the margin turnout -- the larger the turnout the more money you're going to make.

doesn't matter if it's self-published books or whatever but what happens of course is the publishing enterprise that requires gatekeeping and judgment and a notion of what is it that makes a book great and lasting an enduring and a piece of literature or a piece of important information, sometimes that goes by the five when you keep making more and more books. so i ask you, are we making too many books? certainly the librarians in the audience who have been archiving them may be are a little careful when i quoted the figures about the 50,000 going to 330,000 going to 1 million going to 3 million. are republishing too many books, nico? >> those of you in the audience who are readers of the new york review of books i'm interested to know how many of you have noticed in the last year or two how many of the ads in the new york review of books are actually ads from what are

called vanity presses ,-com,-com ma i universe, author house because what struck me, and i traffic in moving circles that will pay a lot of attention to advertising in the real books is how remarkably few academics see those ads. i think that is actually a youthful -- useful metaphor for all the 3 million new books. i actually think they are largely invisible. i don't think they clutter the literary landscape in the sense that people think they do. i think the people just don't see them and i think you could make the point that in each of the last issues over the last year or two i would say it has been one of the top to advertisers for the new york review of books in for a press like oxford who publishes

nonfiction i think it's fantastic. what it means is shoring up the important review vehicle for us without necessitating our advertising dollars. [laughter] and so what it is, every author understandably wants to be red. you are making a comment earlier about the importance of hope over experience and we all traffic in that and without that they wouldn't be able to go to work every morning. but i think the question is actually more a question about are they doing books published by traditional publishers? i think they probably are but i don't have any idea how it goes about preventing that or whether that is actually genuinely a problem. >> you no, i think there are too many books and i think there are always will be too many books that you know of all the arts, the book is the most personal.

we see paintings and photography and museums together. we see -- listen to music together but when you open the book, it's you and the readers voice and that's all. because it is very personal, people have a lot of different tastes. i know a lot of bestsellers are books i have passed on because i didn't think they were good enough. i think one thing, there are too many books on the other thing is now we all have to understand more in the global community where i think i do quite a bit of -- which may be 2000 copies or so. bit by bit they will grow and is just that people have very different tastes, and with amazon and self-publishing, the

"50 shades of grey" was not self-published. is just a small publisher that published it in australia. i think their eyes will be, but i think editors, probably there are too many editors requiring books and we will see if that goes down but the one thing you mentioned in the new york review of veaux, and i always ask that my books be put in the new york review of books because i think that is where the serious readers are. so for my type of book, that is perfect for best-selling page turning. "usa today" is probably the best place to advertise but we always have too many books. >> jeff? >> i think the notion of

publishers as gatekeepers is a false -- and now with the author of services, everyone should just give it up. it's never been a case. there are no gatekeepers because there are no gates and self-publishing and distribution has actually been possible in the physical form for decades. so, it's the wrong way to think about it. some people now like to talk about while it's more like eurasian. i think that's the wrong way too. it's more enthusiast, the publisher is enthusiast and you have millions of books published and you have to pick the good ones and share the enthusiasm with a lot of people. that is a challenge. focusing on the number of looks. is that me? [laughter]

it's the wrong way to go about it. >> i like that, enthusiasm. how about you? >> i think that we can flip it and say the fact that there are so many books being published beans there are so many more writers and there is no great consumer book so therefore they're a lot more readers. if those writings would buy more books we could get those -- [inaudible] and then build out. >> a little loving circle. >> that's right. >> nel james job. [laughter] >> now i want to ask a question that has concerned dr. billington the librarian of congress who he has posed the

question to me personally and to people at the library. it's something obviously that concerns him very much and concerns all of us, and that is -- you publishers, as you said so well man, you are publishing a book that is going to be opened and shared as a kind of brain experience to the reader between a reader and a writer. we have known what that has meant over the course of centuries of reading and codex form. but what happens to cognition, to the way we think, to the way we process information, to the way we are inspired, to the way we are moved, to the way -- our desires. what happens to all of that when

the process of reading has changed? is this something that you are thinking about them publishing? is this something you were thinking about, nan, when you are looking at that handheld device that does pull those things that takes you to reading, or what are you considering now as publishers of enthusiast, people who will have to work with this new technology as we move forward? what are you thinking? what are you planning. >> i think one thing is, i just have to share this with you. pat conroy recently wrote to me and he said in the summertime -- and they all have those candles. we are going to have to invent some sort of bubble that tells people when they are reading.

but i think if, i mean right now, part of the transition is that people are fascinated with technology and in new york, to go to new york people don't talk to other people. they are on their iphones all the time. i think for 10 years or so we are just going to have to hold herself together and think less of the process and more the importance. when you think of how books change the world, it's rather amazing. now i think, i remember norman mailer said when television became so popular, he said it's not what's on television that's harmful. it's every few minutes there is a commercial and there is no

sense of concentration. quite frankly, i think in the younger generations, they never learned the ability to concentrate. somehow we are still going to get readers that we are going to get fewer numbers and hopefully the education system improves. he cannot be a hyperkinetic human being reading an 800 page book. >> one of the distinctions we try to make at oxford is the difference between them are separating which is what most of us talk about or mean women talk about reading and then the more extractive research-based work that happens a lot in the world of the academy. i think that has proved to be a very helpful distinction as we try to transition a lot of our books on line and as we try to create a on line resources for our constituents.

a good example of something that we just launched called oxford scholarly on line editions. the definitive work of major thinkers all over the world throughout the ages. we are focused on the last 200 years. i think the value of that in terms of people's research, in terms of what we are doing at the press to enhance knowledge is vastly improved by the fact that all of the content is on line, searchable, it's far more valuable and far more useful than having the enormous volumes open for you. so i think, i think there is a great to be gained on the extractive and research site. i think the question about immersive reading -- i have a kindle and i actually don't want to upgrade to the tablet because i think one of the reasons i love my kindle and

one of the reasons people love their e-readers is because they make you a better reader. you can do all those things. it just does one thing. the idea that we are moving towards this conflation of all sorts of functions and utilities in a single object, i ask they don't want that and i think carrying around an extra thing that weighs a calm is a price well worth paying. i would argue that kindle makes me a better reader. i find it a more immersive experience than reading print. >> jeff? >> i don't have any predictions of how reading will change but i do know as publishers we have spent a lot of time investing in technology and in new strategies and have to experiment and fail to make any sort of progress in trying new things. at penguin we do a lot of

iterating new forms to see what works and ultimately if a good open market will decide for us. >> a i will stop you there because i see your readers as being you know quite a young generation. your readers are i would say between 17 and what? 35? no. [laughter] and these are perhaps -- can you sense that there is a change and are they still reading the way that you read or the way that any of us in the audience have read in the past? >> i think they want great stories and distinctive voices and what has changed a lot is true is how we market and advertise. that tends to change rapidly and

you have to adapt to it, but work like juno diaz is very popular but also very dense and very complicated and she has young readers as you say that will calm and just get really excited about this aggressively complicated work. >> karen? >> i think about cognition and reading all the time especially women talk about the young books and one of the factors that's important to remember is the digital age can be very input oriented and when we are learning to read and we are talking about books that are read aloud to us, there is a constant change in the interaction between the reader and the one read to us as one

read to is getting a little scared or little exciter. the reader tap for telling. is the old storytelling. at story telling to an audience, not something that a device can do. we are learning how to read and we need to understand what's happening, the nuance that will allow us to grow up and take in the information. but don't get that early on through that human interactiinteracti on we won't get it later. >> as we say these four panelists have made me keep the faith. [applause] it has been wonderful. i want to thank congressman larson and senate to read for suggesting, and i want to thank dr. billington for holding it but i want to thank you especially for coming and giving

us a bit of your expertise. it's so good of all of you too, and thank you very much. [applause] >> this program is part of the 2012 international summit of the book. for more information visit l all maxie.gov/international -- book-summit. >> providence was founded in june 1636 by a prominent baptist preacher roger williams who was forced to flee massachusetts because a religious persecution. is one of the original 13 colonies of united states and is a rich literary culture steeped in history. with the help of cox communications booktv brings you interviews and torso the area all weekend long while we visit. >> i am michael chandley,

proprietor of cellar stories bookstore here in providence rhode island. we are in southeastern new england, that largest rear bookstore that you will find. this is the greatest in the world. it's just never knowing what you are going to see, what kinds of kind of books will come into the store, what people will come into the store. we have had famous authors come into the store, shopping. we have had people performing in rhode island or massachusetts come into the store. it's exciting to not know what's going to happen every day and to be surrounded by all these great books. it's just wonderful. a friend of mine had a romantic idea about starting a used bookstore. we both had english degrees and we used to go read two different bookstores and thought it would be neat to open one. we did and quickly found that we

didn't know anything about business or the book business. he drafted out a pursuit of -- and i kind of stuck with it. at that time, there was a magazine called the antiquated lien book lands we. the first 25 or 30 pages were articles about the book trade and the rest of the magazine were listed books for sale and in the back of the bag is seen, books people wanted. so that was pretty mitel i learned about the book business going through that magazine every week and quoting books to other dealers in reading articles. we started this in 81 in the basement of a building up the street, and hence that was the name, seller stories because we began in the basement.

while we have a little bit of everything, we also have in-depth collections of rhode island history. we have a lot of math books. we have art and architecture, modern first editions. the sale of veaux is popular culture pretty much however -- has been the best-selling in the store and that is kind of heartening. people are always reading that kind of thing. providence always has been a wonderful place for used books just because it's one of the oldest colonies. so there are vast collections of looks in providence and we have been able to tap into that over the years. and to buy collections from some of the oldest families in rhode

island. we just had a wide read the books that most or some have because of our geographical location. we get collectors coming in from all over the country prominent with the renaissance city. tourism in providence has picked up over the last 10 or 15 years and we did get an awful lot of tourists coming in, people who use their vacations to go looking for books in different cities. that has been a real boost to the store. we have a two-volume first edition of madam bovary published in friends. that is relatively scarce. there are not too many of those. once i got a call from a person in providence, who got a donation.

he was running some kind of outreach program that was a donation of books at about eight or 10 of them had been signed by ernest hemingway. that was a really great find. there were other books in their signed by an author that wrote about old fights so it was related to hemingway who was also an aficionado of old fights. there was a book signed by john steinbeck. it was just a great catch. when we get something like that, either collectors or other dealers are quick to come in and make burgesses. we started out as a pretty small store and slowly grew over the years and have been able to adapt to the changes in the book trade which have been pretty substantial with the introduction of the internet and

changes in people's book buying habits. the people coming into the store was the dominant driving force for sales. we did some mail-order but it was pretty small. once the internet started, especially amazon, that kind of changed people's buying habits so we saw a reduction of people coming into the store, of walk-in traffic and an increase in mail-order traffic, people ordering over the phone, especially ordering over the internet. it has affected us in a couple of ways. one is that has driven down prices for average folks, for run-of-the-mill books, even some

of the books that were priced slightly higher, people thought they were fairly scarce. you could go into five or 10 stores and not find a copy of the book but then you look on the internet they were readily available. so prices went down for a lot of things. on the other hand we have been we have been able -- used to be we bought a book about a city in oklahoma and we would have to wait until someone from oklahoma came in and was interested in them look. now with the internet, we can list that book and someone in oklahoma finds a listing the listing and we sell the book pretty readily. with publishers producing fewer books every year now, if they don't patronize stores like this are independent or independent stores they are going to find that they're not going to be books around. there is already a decrease in the number of books that are available because