And what will be the effect in years to come of Bertelsmann's ownership of Random House and Doubleday? Or of the just-announced acquisition of Harcourt Brace by Reed Elsevier? Are Holt, Farrar, Straus & Giroux and St. Martin's marginally better off for being among the eighty or so companies owned by Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, a massive publishing conglomerate, rather than by an entertainment or information empire? Perhaps. But to think that Norton, the smaller Grove/Atlantic and the up-and-coming, larger, Perseus Group may be the only remaining American independent houses with critical mass is disturbing. Is the American future to be that we are in effect recolonized, an increasingly important market for culture but less and less creators of culture?

In the middle of this stew, one of our worthy heroes has brought us a book that demands we acknowledge what has happened: reduced to crude basics, that a world built upon respect for the written word has been replaced by one dominated by a bottom-line sensibility (which may be an oxymoron, but I prefer it to the even less descriptive bottom-line "reality"). André Schiffrin asks, Has the torch that is our literature and our collective intellectual output been taken out of our hands?

Good question.

That the publishing profession is under siege has of course been the stuff of panels and lunches and some newspaper reporting; but not, ironically, of books. So the appearance of the pioneering independent publisher Schiffrin's The Business of Books is newsworthy and important, to be followed close on its heels by a similarly titled work (Book Business) due out in January by Random House editor Jason Epstein (still working, and still working there), a volume expanded from an initial essay last April in The New York Review of Books and a more recent follow-up in those same pages.

America can be an extremely hostile environment for serious cultural endeavor. There seems an overriding confusion and ignorance regarding the tremendous significance of our First Amendment freedoms, the necessity of literature to national life (except perhaps as entertainment) and why we should care in the first place. Fame and fortune we understand, but literature? The funny thing is, hostile environment or not, it has also been a splendidly rich environment for culture producers in all the arts, especially in literature. Is that now changing?

One result of our cultural myopia--it borders on blindness--is that instead of operating with an implicit national consensus about the importance of literature, say, or even the role of investigative reporting in protecting our civic rights, the independent press community often stands as the sole advocate of those causes. As the pervasiveness of corporate culture grows daily, being a good publisher, in either an independent or a conglomerate setting, means learning how to survive while at the same time resisting, even defying, standard business-model values.

The apparent naïveté of the corporate sector when faced with our First Amendment responsibilities has been striking. Large publishing houses have sometimes been quick to call on their corporate prerogative, saying, in effect, We're just a business. They can try it, but we should not let them get away with it so glibly. Remember how lightly HarperCollins let go of former Governor of Hong Kong Chris Patten's book because, up the corporate ladder, Rupert Murdoch wanted to protect his satellite TV deal with China; or when Penguin/Putnam declined to publish Carol Felsenthal's S.I. Newhouse biography; or how St. Martin's turned against its author (the imprint's editor resigned in the controversy) when it canceled its biography of George W.

The last two titles were picked up by independent houses, Seven Stories and Soft Skull. But the actual cancellation of publishable, contracted manuscripts for reasons of corporate comfort suggests that executives often fail to acknowledge any responsibilities to the Word beyond packaging it and selling it for profit.

Smart people are doing good and important work within corporate structures--this too must be said. But the challenges facing those individuals are imposing when they work for parent companies that may be primarily concerned with other types of businesses, be it music (Bertelsmann), television and movies (TimeWarner and Viacom) or textbooks and professional publishing (Pearson and Reed Elsevier), and may be beholden to shareholder concerns over and above other considerations. Independent publishers represent as little as 5 percent of overall book sales in this country, but we are responsible for a disproportionately large share of our country's cultural life, First Amendment responsibilities and writers' hopes.

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