What the writer's role is in society, and what constitutes good writing, are two underlying questions that hang in the balance. Today, the notions of writer as voice of conscience, writer as critic, writer as visionary are understood to be part of the covenant between author and reader. But it is not hard to imagine a future in which the balance is tipped differently, and writers are routinely seen more as prettifiers and apologists for the status quo. A trend in that direction is implicit in the whole idea of the celebrity author, as books depend more on television tie-ins or exposure to sell them.

Well into Schiffrin's eloquent and anguished account of the book biz, you'll read about a recent meeting of the Freedom to Read Committee of the American Association of Publishers. Addressing the group were a number of top attorneys in the publishing field. Juries are starting to be less sympathetic to publishers than they once were, the attorneys advised: Judgments against publishers are on the rise, and it needs to be made more apparent that publishers are defenders of the First Amendment. About forty book-publishing executives were present, representing, according to Schiffrin, most of the major New York houses. When the attorneys asked, "Can we assure jurors in the future that if an important book comes along you will publish it?" Schiffrin writes, "Not a hand was raised. No one seemed aware of the irony that the publishing industry's own anti-censorship committee was itself part of the new market censorship."

It is just such obeisance to market values, Schiffrin suggests convincingly, that has led corporate owners to strip down publishing imprints on the grounds that they weren't profitable enough, only to replace them with bland and bloodless versions that are no more able to generate the desired profits than were their predecessors. In the late 1990s, HarperCollins folded Basic Books, its serious nonfiction imprint, into its trade division, although Basic had never lost money. Later, HarperCollins made news headlines when it canceled more than a hundred contracts in an attempt to stem the flow of red ink. Apparently, Basic had not been the big problem! Likewise, Simon & Schuster eviscerated its serious nonfiction imprint, the Free Press, keeping its name alive but skewing it toward finance-related titles. Today, S&S is rumored to be on the block. The Free Press may not have been its biggest problem either, though it was the one that management chose to fix.

Most movingly, Schiffrin describes--for the first time, I believe, and in intricate detail--some of what went on at his own former imprint, Pantheon, when its overseers at Random House decided it was too left-leaning, too independent, oh and yes, not profitable enough. In the end Schiffrin and his staff had to choose between overseeing what they saw as the house's destruction or leaving, which practically all of them did. Was Pantheon a cash cow after Schiffrin and his colleagues were gotten rid of? Hardly. It became and still is a shell of its former self, doing some good books, some less good, but beyond that just another name in the galaxy of names under what is now a German-owned multimedia conglomerate.

Writing about the purchase of Random House (America's premier book-publishing venture) by Bertelsmann two years ago, Schiffrin reminds us how, just one year earlier, Random had written off $80 million in unearned advances, which he interprets as proof that "the policy of risking more and more money on [large advances for] books had been an enormous failure." And how, when the New York Times reported Random's profit margin of 0.1 percent, the figure was so low that many thought it a typographical error. And further, that soon after the takeover, Bertelsmann "issued a press release saying they expected Random House to make a 15% profit in the next few years. That [would have] meant a change in profit from $1 million to $150 million (on their annual sales of a billion or so)." Schiffrin sees that as a laughably implausible goal. (Historically, return in book publishing runs around 5 percent.)

What is the alternative? I believe the best among us expect to lose money on at least some of the books we publish. This allows other sets of values to cohabit with more commercial ones, as would be true also at magazines like The Nation and Harper's. At Seven Stories, for example, we look to have profit on one-third of the list to cover losses on the other two-thirds. If, at the large corporate houses, the expectation is for virtually every title to turn a profit, then their "bottom-line sensibility" is indeed a threat to any literary aspirations they may have, since I believe that literature simply requires a longer look.

Missing from the merger fever of recent years has been the sense of a publishing mission to go with the obvious corporate one (it's cheaper to buy a backlist than to build one). One notable exception to this may be the Perseus Group, which appears to have a purposeful plan in place to buy serious nonfiction imprints in order to restore them to the project of publishing serious nonfiction. Fancy that.

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