‘Most publishing conglomerates are owned by people very far to the right’ said André Schiffrin to S Anand of Navayana, his Indian publisher, during this conversation, of which a short version appeared in The Hindu Sunday Magazine on 20 November 2011.

Legendary publisher André Schiffrin warns us that we are witnessing ‘a rebirth of the old colonialist methods of export and import’.  Schiffrin founded the The New Press in 1991 after being forced to quit Pantheon (a division of Random House), where he could no longer work with the new CEO, Alberto Vitale, who would ask Schiffrin who Carlos Ginzburg was and why books could not have a sell-by date like cheese and milk do. Schiffrin, who has published Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky, Günter Grass, Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, Margurite Duras and Gunnar Myrdal among others, was in India earlier in November for the launch of the Indian edition of his memoir The Business of Words, a combined edition of The Business of Books (2001) and Words & Money (2010).

 SA: You say there was a time when publishers did not look to make not more than 3-4 percent profit from publishing—just what people make from a savings bank account. Today, the conglomerates expect 15 percent and even 30 percent. How did this come about—this greed?

AS: The difference of course is in ownership, and that’s the key question. Once people buy publishing houses, they expect to make as much money as they would from their other holdings—such as television and newspapers and so on. All the other media have lived off advertising until now. So if you owned a newspaper in America, you’d expect to make 25 percent profit every year. And if that company then bought a publishing house, they would say to the publishers you can’t possibly earn just 3 percent. So you have to change what you are doing, so that you are earning if not 26 percent, at least 10 or 15 percent.

Now these numbers may seem abstract; but what they mean is what you publish has changed entirely [and is shaped] by what the salespeople think is likely to sell. It means you have a total transformation of what used to be published in all of these countries, and what is published now. I believe in most trade publishing houses in India now, like in Penguin or HarperCollins or any large firm, you have to show before a book is published that you expect it to be profitable. This is the imposition of a totally different kind of an ideology on publishing, because for the first time you are saying ideas matter only if they are going to make money.

You have published an impeccable list if authors from Foucault, Chomsky, Studs Terkel to Sartre to Art Spiegelman. Surely, they would have made money.

For the 30 years where I worked within the framework of a large firm, for a long time we worked within the traditional framework of publishing where you hoped that some of the books that sell very well, over a million copies, will help us pay for the books that aren’t going to make a lot of money. And in publishing Foucault we certainly lost money for the first ten years; Kafka’s first book sold 600 copies, Beckett’s sold three but that’s an exception.

Only three?

Yeah. That’s encouraging to any author, I think. There are two aspects involved. First, a lot of books take a long time to be established. It took a long time for Kafka to begin to sell a lot of copies. Secondly, sales do not mean quality. Most people have internalized this idea that if something is good it will sell well. That’s not the case. Many important and good books have not sold a considerable number. So the old system accommodated that by saying a publisher who makes money on one book can take it from one pocket and put it in another pocket… the new system is not interested in ideas, it is just interested in making as much money as possible.

It is Murdoch who first said that books are part of the entertainment industry—this happens especially when a firm has crossholdings.

Murdoch has been exceptionally bad, of course. He owned a lot of television in America, especially the most popular and reactionary stations. He wanted his publishing house to tie-in with that, and to publish books that came from the TV programs and so on. Fifty years ago Harper’s catalogs in the US looked like those of Harvard University Press with books on science, philosophy, art history etc. None of those are there any more. The only ones there are those that will be commercially successful. I suspect the same is the case with HarperCollins here. This is worrisome for it’s happening in India too. Publishing has gone from being artisanal to becoming industrial. It has changed from being a national and local thing to being globalized. And the globalization process means that you have, in India, exactly the same problems that we had in the US. In fact, you see a rebirth of the old colonialist methods of export and import. Many of the firms we are talking about had started out that way. Pearson, which owns the Financial Times, owns Penguin, owns Madame Tussauds… was initially the owner of the waterworks in Argentina. That’s where they made their money initially, in Colombian holdings. The French firm, Vivendi, which for a while owned a third of French publishing, was also initially a water company.

This was much before Murdoch… we are talking about 19th century here.

And into the 20th. But they all follow the same pattern. You come in from the outside, make as much money as you can out of exploiting the local economy. And Vivendi was responsible for the revolution in Bolivia. They made it more expensive to buy a bottle of water than to buy a bottle of Coca Cola. There are no limits involved and the idea was to make as much money as you can out of the market, out of the new holdings.

Let’s step back a bit. Publishing was both a calling and an inheritance for you. Your father Jacques, a publisher with Gallimard in Paris, was forced to leave during the War and founded Pantheon with his friends in New York in the 1940s. And much later you ended up in Pantheon and headed it for 30 years. Tell us about it.

That’s too a long story. My father started in publishing in 1922 in France. He started the series called The Pleiade which became very famous there, and being Jewish was forced to leave during the Second World War. The Germans entered Paris on my six birthday, which was inconsiderate of them. In New York he joined with exiled German publisher, Kurt Wolff, who was Kafka’s publisher, and started a small publishing house called Pantheon, which I ended up accidentally joining many, many years later. What was interesting was that at that time the attempt to introduce European writing in America was very difficult. The first bestseller we had by a European writer was Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum, which I published in 1962—20 years after Pantheon had started. The question of what to translate and what to bring into another culture is one that’s linked to what we are talking about. Because on the whole if you publish from another culture or another language you are going to lose money.

You say here in your book that looking to Europe made intellectual sense but it was also good publishing strategy. Yet you say that Focault did not make money for over a decade. Gunnar Myrdal was seen by Americans as ‘the interfering Dutch uncle’.  How did you deal with an insular American public?

Ultimately, new ideas are very difficult. When they come from another country, it is harder. Which is why Indian fiction does very well in America, but it has been very hard to do nonfiction. When we left Pantheon, the new owners had no more translations. Period. This takes us back to what we were talking about earlier, which is one book paying for another. [Art] Spiegelman’s Maus had been turned down by 14 different publishing houses, and we ended up selling about two million copies in English, and that helped us do many books that wouldn’t make any money. The problem with the new capitalist model I am describing is it keeps you from taking risks, because you need a guarantee that a book will make money.…

How do you retain authors you have nurtured, who don’t sell initially and pay dividends later, especially when they are being lured by the conglomerates with bigger advances and better sales?

What’s important is you have a reciprocal loyalty between author and publisher. That has been changed now enormously in this new system because the author now feels if these people are interested only in making money from my book, then I must also make as much money as possible. A generation of agents has been developed in the US, not yet here, who primarily are interested in getting more money—so they move an author from one publisher to another who pays more. That changes the whole relationship… so this is harmful to the authors and books.

We see that in India too, where authors nurtured over a few years move to bigger multinationals. How often have authors left you…

It is now very common. But I was very lucky; when we left Pantheon and founded The New Press, all but two of our authors of the thousands I’d published decided to stay with us. So people were willing to take the risk. In more general terms, many authors would be tempted at first to accept the bigger money, and then they discover that unless they are the biggest fish in the puddle, they won’t get the attention they were hoping for. Some would rather be a big fish in a small pond…

You talk in your book about Kurt Vonnegut deciding to move to a small independent…

Yes, Seven Stories is a small firm in New York which has kept going only because of the fact that Kurt Vonnegut has given them his books. And he used to be published by Bertelsmann, the large German holding corporation that holds Random House and so on. And he said, ‘I don’t want that, I want to help somebody who publishes books I believe in, and if it means less money for me, fine.’ His books have been bestsellers in spite of that, and I don’t think he has lost money, but was willing to make that decision, take that risk.

And now we have e-books, and some have given five years for the physical book as we have known it. Will it be like what happened to film and music? It’s like when we were told the physical film was going to die, even Kodak did not believe it. And I believe Amazon sold more books through Kindle than physical copies last year in the US. Seems e-books accounted for 20 to 25 percent of what was sold on Amazon last year…

Things will certainly change, no question. But from what we have seen, they will change for the worse. I have nothing against technology, and every time a new technology has come along—radio or television—people would say, ‘oh that will change the whole cultural scene’. But it depends on who controls technology and what they do with it. And the people who now control the technology, whether it is Amazon or Google, are people who want to establish a monopoly on distribution, and to make as much money as they can from that monopoly. So their first battles were on cutting back on the amount of money they were going to pay the publishers and authors.

But Google itself does not produce content. It cannibalizes…

Nor until now has Amazon [produced content]. You control distribution, you control everything. Google is not going to send a reporter to Libya; they are not going to cover the news any more than Amazon is going to commission a book, edit it and pay attention over the years and so on. So this is a short-term phenomenon. And from what we have seen, and the figures in New York Times on Sunday are very clear. They publish a list of bestsellers selling in paper and those selling electronically—and it’s the same books. The e-books have helped the sale of the bestsellers, there’s no question.

Juergen Boos, the Frankfurt Book Fair director, who was in India a few months ago, was talking about what’s happening in Japan, where publishers of Manga comics are now, in fact, telecom companies. People access and read these comics on their mobile phones. So it seems telecom companies have stopped waiting for publishers to generate the content and instead just started doing it themselves—as mobile phone updates. And he predicts that it will take less than five years for us to move from paper and ink books to reading on the computer, a tablet or even mobile phones.

Well, I’m not sure he should be taking that line. But in any case it’s the same bestsellers. E-books, even the US, do not account for 25 percent of all books published. So you have a situation where a tiny fraction of the titles will benefit from electronic sales. But the overall picture in the long term is very dangerous. First of all, the bookstores will be killed by this. Which is why most European countries have not allowed Amazon to come in and sell books at a discount. That will kill the bookstores as it has [happened] in the US. When I was boy I worked, after school, in a small bookstore in New York, and we had 333 bookstores in the city; now we have under 30 which includes the chains. Even the chains are beginning to fail because of Amazon and so on. That’s one factor. Secondly, the paperback, which is the way publishers make money from their backlist, will also die since Kindle will sell an e-book at the same price of a paperback. They deliberately price the book in such a way that will kill the paperback. So once you have done that—once you have killed off the bookstores and even killed off the publisher—it’s fine. You would still have the method of making books available, but where are the books going to come from? That’s a question which is not being answered. Amazon last week [late October] signed a handful of commercial authors in the hope of publishing them directly, but you know that’s a tiny fraction of what has been published. And it certainly is zero percent of any book of any interest intellectually or culturally.

Isn’t the editorial process paramount even if we eventually are to do away with paper, ten or fifteen years from now?

Well, we can see now there are hundred of thousands of people who put their manuscript on the internet assuming that somebody other than their family would read it. Everyone believes in this myth—once you make it available via the computer it will find its readership. But of course that isn’t the way it happens. Publishers, like the newspapers, are a filter. More important, they also help shape the manuscript or very often, like in the US and UK, they give the author the money to begin writing the book. The last year I was at Pantheon, we had two books listed in the NYT annual list of 10 best books; both of those books had been commissioned 25 years before.

25 years?

Yeah, they took a longer time to write than they ought to have—and I don’t like telling authors this story because it gives them reason to be late—but nonetheless it shows that time is one of the elements we are talking about, and patience and the work that publishers would put into a manuscript. All of these elements are not there when you say, ‘Ok, here’s my book, and I will put it on the web.’ People do it all the time and it has no readership.

So we if we let the conglomerates and monopolists decide what gets published we are going to see only books of a certain kind. You do say in the book that your boss at Random House, Alberto Vitale, told you that you seem to publish too many books of the left.

Most of the large conglomerates are owned by people who are very far to the right. And [S.I.] Newhouse who owned Random House at the point was in that category. He was unhappy that we were publishing books that weren’t with his politics, in the same way that he was unhappy that Random House was publishing Soviet dissidents. And as I have said, Murdoch was happy to publish books that would please the Chinese communist government, even though he was theoretically anticommunist, because he wanted to get Sky Television into China. So he deliberately commissioned books that would be friendly to the dictatorship. Then you have the problem that with the conglomerates there’s always something more important than the book itself.

In your book you talk of the Norwegian model where the state comes to the rescue of independent media and that this model is being considered by other European countries as well. In India, it’s a contrast—we would be wary of state subsidy because of the caveats and the fear of state censorship and control.

We are dealing here with a number of issues and one of them is what’s happening  to the newspapers. In America and Western Europe, and I give detailed information on this in the book, the newspapers are in enormous danger because the advertising has gone to the internet. And I am interested in seeing the Indian newspapers which still carry classified ads—those have disappeared from the papers in the western countries; all these now go on the internet. And so the internet is becoming immensely profitable. Google made a five billion dollar profit last year, just to give you one figure, and the newspapers have lost that money. What we are faced with is the disappearance of newspapers. In the US, a great many papers have already been closed down. In Germany, a few years ago when there was a downturn in the economy, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the leading paper, fired half of their staff because they just did not have enough advertising. So the question which I raise is whether advertising income is the safe basis for newspapers. No one had decreed at the beginning that advertising was the way newspapers had to be paid for. And if you think about it, advertising is simply a private tax. Every time you buy a bar of soap or go to a movie or whatever, you are paying part of that price for the ads that persuaded you to make that purchase. So is that private tax the best way of doing it? Or are there other methods? And I give the example of Norway which is an exceptional country in that some years ago, after the war, they decided that they would have a cultural policy that would protect their own culture and make it safe, and also make the democracy safe because they felt that having a series of newspapers or publishers that were free to publish what they felt was important whatever their politics. This was a central part of having a democratic debate. So decided they would help fund all of the newspapers and publishers…

And there’s no catch here?

No catches at all. Since they are funding everyone, on all sides, if they started to move in one direction…

You mean these newspapers are free to criticize, attack the government.

Right. In the same way, in France after the War, they were afraid the Americans would take over the film business which was certainly a reasonable fear, and so they put a tax on every cinema ticket that you buy in France, which goes to help French cinema producers. It also helps a network of a thousand art houses that will…

So you are concerned about independent media as such. This seems like more like a battle of ideas, right? When you talk about the word being under siege, it’s not just words, it’s the whole realm of ideas…

Well, most people would say this is modern capitalism and this inevitable. The neoliberals have been successful in persuading people, like the communists have tried before to say that the future is theirs and there are no decisions for you to make, and this is what is going to happen, come what may. And yet, every decision involved is a political decision. In Europe, for instance, the bookstores for the most part have been protected because you have the fixed price on the book, and if you don’t have that you have what you get in America and England where there are no bookstores… So each of these decisions determines what people have access to, because if you don’t have independent bookstores you only have the top bestsellers being sold in the supermarkets and so on. As it is, the independent bookstores have a hard enough time. In France, for instance if you want to start a bookstore in many of the regions, the government will give you, not lend you, but give you 50,000 euros to help start a bookstore. The reason for that is not simply to help books but to help the urban context; if you have bookstores in the middle of the town, they are less likely to die. People who come to the town and still would go into it; they just won’t go to the supermarket…

Is this the reason why you seem to be spending half a year in Paris and France these days? Is it also that you also running away from what you cannot change in America?

Well, I think I am using my consumer choice! I am doing what every consumer is allowed to do. And certainly in Paris and France there are more good bookstores that I can visit. In New York there are just three good bookstores.

Like you stumbled on Foucault’s History of Madness in the 1960s, do you still chance upon things you’d publish at The New Press?

Yes. Certainly, I can continue as a publisher by working in Paris in a way that I can’t in New York or even in London where the bookstores have disappeared. So the point of the independent bookstore is to make available what the small publishers do, what the new titles are like. I was visiting a small town in Brittany called Brest last year and I had just published a French novel called that used the name of the town and was set in the town. And I went to the biggest independent bookstore in the town, and I asked how many copies of a book like that did they sell. Obviously it has the name of the town, people would be interested in the book… and the owner said, ‘Why don’t you take a guess?’ I said maybe 30 copies, and he smiled. And I said, ‘Okay, 50.’ And he said ‘We sold 2,000 copies.’ Which is more than what we have sold in all of the United States and Canada put together. So a small bookstore in a small town can actually make a book succeed simply by having people look at it, by recommending it to people who walk in. The people who work for Barnes & Noble earn the same amount of money as the people who work for McDonalds. So any more than you’d go to McDonalds and say what does the chef recommend… would you make that question to a person in Barnes & Noble bookstore? Usually when I ask them about a book we have done they don’t even know if such a book exists. They have trouble even finding it on their computers. So you have to ensure that the independent bookstores are paying their staff much more. And one of the ways the French regional governments have dealt with this is to give money to help hire another person in their bookstores, so that you have staff even though independent bookstores are barely going to break even. It’s well known they are not going to make money. The question is, you see the problem—do you want to do something about it? Or do you say it is inevitable.

How do you see the scenario in India?

I think this is going to be a question for India in a great many areas. Because you can see the pattern from Europe replicating itself—the major publishers here all belong to the European conglomerates.

Well, you say that most of American publishing is in fact German-owned.

Yes, and in America, the five largest publishers control 80 percent of the market.

What is the share of the independents in the US book market?

Depends on which market. If you are talking about the overall market, it is like 1 percent. There are about a hundred university presses and they have accounted in the past for 2 percent.

And the university presses are also cutting down.

Right. If you ask what percentage of the important books are being published by the small houses, their numbers go way up. But the amount of sales is very small. Part of the problem is that you have this enormous polarization which is taking place so that more and more people are buying fewer and fewer books. The chain stores and the big publishers will concentrate on a few titles and then forget the rest.

One of the interesting things I found in your book is that French thinker Pierre Bourdieu founded a publishing house. Have public intellectuals in the US ever tried something like that? Tell us more about Bourdieu for there’s only a passing mention in the book.

Well, Pierre Bourdieu did a very careful and very accurate analysis of the transmission of culture in France, and he discovered that there were increasingly a large of number of areas that were being lost in the process. And I remember I went to France every year for 40 years. At that time, in the 1980s, I’d ask each year, what new political books were being published by the regular houses. And they would all say: ‘Oh, nobody is interested in politics any more, the young people aren’t willing to buy these books, so we stopped doing them.’ And Bourdieu decided this was wrong. Not just morally but also technically inaccurate. So he set up in his office at the College de France a small publishing house called Les Éditions Raisons d’Agir (Reasons to Act), and they started publishing books…

And some of them sold a hundred thousand copies.

One of them sold 300,000 copies and others sold in hundreds of thousands. It helped that Bourdieu was writing some of these books. Some [books] sold fewer copies. But he showed that if you think through the problem and if you come up with the right titles and also if you published them inexpensively in paperback like he did, then there is either an audience or you can create the audience. And of course Kurt Wolff is famous for having said that the role of the publisher is not to publish books that people want but books they ought to want. And that’s what Bourdieu did. So one of the arguments that I make is that every university could have such an independent publisher attached to it…

But in India the situation really is that the space that the independents occupy is what the university presses do in the US or Europe. In India, we do not have university presses like Duke or Harvard… which is what creates these gaps.

But Anand, I am not talking about setting up university presses. I am saying that universities can lend facilities for people to start small presses.

Okay. Like your own New Press started out with support from the City University of New York (CUNY).

Right. And this has been done with a number of presses in America. There’s a university in Southern Illinois, which is not the intellectual centre of the country…that helped set up Dalkey Archives to publish translations that people were no longer publishing. And Dalkey Archives is now the leading publisher of translated fiction. And we have had three of four other small companies being set up, in universities, to compete with it. The question is, if you have an infrastructure already there—and Bourdieu showed you don’t need that much, he had himself and his secretary and some friends—and if you can spare a university professor, that helps to do this… then you can begin to have the kind of diversification that everybody would like to have. If you leave it entirely to the European conglomerates to decide what’s going to be published then you are going to have a very narrow choice. And in terms of Indian politics and Indian culture, possibly a very dangerous restriction of choice. Because I don’t see the European companies coming up with major books on the social problems that you all know exist in India. In some cases, they are simply not going to…

But in India these trends may apply to English language publishing. But there’s active publishing happening in over 25 Indian languages, and here the scenario is different. There are regional, local monopolies and also cases of authors who self-publish because not because they are vain but because they can’t find a publisher, and they wait for state libraries to pick up 350, 500 or 1,000 copies. Distribution is poor and the state support we have here is quite different…

Obviously I am not saying that everything that happened in Europe is going to happen in India. But there are patterns that one can see. When I came out of the Delhi airport, the first bookstore I saw [WH Smith], had a whole rack of books labelled Hachette. Now, that label doesn’t exist in America, though Hachette has bought American publishers. And Hachette belongs to the leading French manufacturer of armaments, Lagardère. So you ask yourself, would Hachette in India ever publish a book on military spending in India when they are selling their aircraft to the Indian Air Force? I doubt it. So you have a number of interesting conflicts that are built into it… and they are not going to get away from them.

I have one last question, which concerns not just the corporates but independents as well. When you were at Pantheon you say the staff was all-white and when you set up The New Press in 1990, you made a concerted effort to incorporate diversity in terms of recruiting editors. You say in the book how in a short time ‘our modest effort at minority recruitment would be seen as a model by the publishing industry’. But in India we have absolutely no thinking or self-reflexivity on this—I’d say even among the independents, where dalits, adivasis, and I would even add Muslims, do not really figure in any important roles in the publishing industry in terms of decision-making. Why do you think diversity is important to create books that ought to be read?

When we started The New Press we asked ourselves, ‘What haven’t we done before in the 30 years behind us?’ And I said one of the problems is we publish people just like us. They are white, they are bourgeois, they are well educated—there’s nothing with them but they are only a small part of the population. And how can we reach a broader part. Obviously, if you hire people from different minorities they will have different networks, they will know different authors, and they will have ideas that you wouldn’t have yourself. So we not only hired as many young people as we could and took them on as interns and so on, but we set up advisory committees in different areas… we had an Asian American advisory committee, for instance, and they said you should do a history of Korean immigration which would have never occurred to us. They all said: look the Koreans in America today are exactly like the other migrations we had in the past—the Chinese, the Japanese and others. And if you get people now, just now coming to America, and ask about their experience, you will get a microcosm of what the immigrant experience has been. So we published a very good book called East to America, which has become a standard book on this issue…

Did it do well?

It didn’t do that well because when we offered it. Because we had a Korean intern, we did news releases in Korean and went to the Korean bookstores in New York which are often better than the English bookstores, and they all said, ‘oh we will wait for the Korean edition’, because that generation had not yet learnt enough English to read books in English. So in that respect, the gamble didn’t work. In terms of having a book which has been used very broadly in university courses and so on, it did work. So there are things you have to adjust to. Statistically speaking, it is a fact that black Americans buy far more books than white Americans.

Is there a social audit among publishing houses in the US about diversity? Pearson does say it implements diversity on their website. Is this just corporate-speak or do you really see it in practice?

Well, again, in a profit-making way. If you want books about black sports heroes, the books are not lacking. What we decided to do at The New Press was deliberately publish books in areas that everybody said would not appeal to the minority audience. For instance, we did art books geared to the black population. Everyone said, they will never buy that. And they sold out immediately and were reprinted often. So, part of the problem is that since they have only white people making the decisions, they don’t know what the other interests will be. And they have the usual prejudices that the group I mentioned had—which is that other people aren’t going to be at the same intellectual level as they are. Now, in India, you have all sorts of populations that aren’t being served adequately. And if you did hire in the future representatives from those groups, then you’d have a different situation I think. It’s an easy decision to make by the way. I once talked about this to the American University Press Association and they came up and said, ‘Well this is a very interesting idea, but where are you going to find the people to recruit?’ And I said, the American universities are one place where by law you have a huge number of minority students and minority faculty. It is the easiest thing in the world to find people you want to hire—you just have to have the will to do so.