The slow re-Gutenberging of the book trade

As anti-regulation fervor toward media and tech companies recedes in Washington, it's set to collide with the transformation of the book industry in ways that will slowly remake books as we know them

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You may have seen the recent news that Amazon and five major book publishers got sued for allegedly engaging in monopolistic practices that have the de facto effect of fixing prices in the book trade.

It’s a bit of laziness from this season’s writers, truly, because the firm that filed the suit (Hagens Berman) was the same firm that sued Apple in 2012 for fixing book prices at the expense of …. Amazon. Plot twist, now Amazon is the bad guy. The friend of my enemy is something or other. Everyone loves an anti-hero.

But from a mile up, the lawsuit is interesting on a couple levels. It is less about this particular news and more about what is going on in the book industry right now. But it also represents somewhat the silliness of this particular fight relative to what is to come.

Yes, we’re gonna talk about power.

Last week I wrote about a particular aspect of the problem of concentration in media ownership. That piece was about social networks and regulation, but this lawsuit offers a different way of looking at the problem by asking you to look at it in multiple ways. In this case, you’re dealing with twin trends that are merging in unhelpful ways.

The first problem is that the five book publishers named in the suit have tremendous market power; they publish about 80% of books Amazon sells, according to the suit. And it shouldn’t be surprising, because the publishers named in the suit are brands you know, including Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster (who in some cases themselves are horizontally integrated companies with tens of book publishing houses under their control). These are publishers who’ve had a large market share for a long time, but they also have been gobbling up smaller publishing houses to the effect of controlling larger and larger segments of the book publishing trade.

The second problem is Amazon itself, or what it has become. By 2019, one analyst estimated Amazon accounted for more than 70% of book sales online, a staggering number that represents a stranglehold on the market. There are other outlets available, such as Barnes & Noble for primary sales and eBay for secondary markets, but Amazon has outsize power. You also need to consider Amazon’s rise in the context of the decline in brick-and-mortar bookstores. Chains such as B&N and Borders (may the latter rest in soy lattes and also a scone to go, please) were systematically killing community independent bookstores for years before Amazon came around, and now Amazon is coming for the chains. As the bard Qui-Gon Jinn once said, there’s always a bigger fish.

So the chess board is set. You have Amazon having amassed near-monopoly power on the distribution side, and five publishers amassing quasi-monopoly power on the gatekeeper side. The way those two sides interact with one another determines a lot about what the book trade looks like, from the titles you see to the price you pay.

This was not the promise of the modern press, but it was probably a predictable story.

Early on from the invention of Gutenberg’s press, the possibility of cheaper books was that it would democratize publishing. Lower costs increased access for those who wanted to be authors, and it opened up accessibility for those who wanted to consume more books from a wider variety of sources. Prior to Gutenberg (who likely, ahem, borrowed the technology behind the printing press from the Chinese and Koreans rather than inventing it), books were hand-copied. The difficulty in doing that created an industry that depended on the small ranks of literate men within the Catholic Church who could read and write well enough to produce works in demand by those rich enough to commission them. Think of the Catholic Church, in this setup, as both those big five publishers and Amazon combined into one giant publishing Voltron. The Church controlled both the trade and the distribution, the most monopolistic monopoly of all. It controlled content and price, and its product (the scriptures) were a prestige item that confirmed faith bona fides in a society that really liked faith bona fides.

Gutenberg’s press destroyed that little cornering of the market. It put printing power in the hands of anyone who owned a press, which was admittedly expensive but still a lot cheaper and more productive than paying a monk to re-copy a single Bible over 15 years of their life. It’s supply-side economics 101. Printing presses meant more books flooding the market, which decreased their scarcity and thus their cost.

And for a while, this disruption decentralized power away from the Church in favor of people who independently owned presses all over Europe and then, eventually, everywhere. But power has a funny way of consolidating and reforming, and what happened over the next several hundred years should not surprise students of history. Smaller presses got larger and more influential, gobbling up competitors and market share. The five in this lawsuit are the result of hundreds of years of dead competitors, consolidation, technological innovation that made presses super expensive, and general laissez-faire attitudes toward regulation.

We replaced the Church with several publishers that grew to hold mutual, concentrated interests. Yes, there are five rather than one, but the five acting in concert with any distributor such as Amazon (allegedly) or Apple (confirmed, if you take the meaning of a $400 million settlement that had it not technically admitting guilt) is probably one in function. When you control most of any one thing, tacit cooperation of any sort is the order of the day to protect what you have. Any competition is just border disputes.

There are reasons to think, though, that we are at the precipice of a new Gutenberg moment. Self-publishing has entered the chat, and it’s created a slow-motion disruption in ways similar to the first printing press. Remember it took 50ish years to draw a line from the Gutenberg press to the defining historical tidal wave it fueled, the Protestant Reformation. This new wave won’t take 50 years. If you know what to look for, you can already see it cresting.

And just like in the 1440s, the driver is technology change.

The first change is self-publishing, using digital formats that allow anyone to create a book if they just have enough time and discipline to write it. You can distribute EPUB books pretty much anywhere, for free or otherwise. You can sell through an Amazon or Apple, or you can use other types of distribution including Patreon, which doesn’t publish books but offers an alternate way to distribute in ways that chip away at the monopoly power. The decentralized nature of the internet by definition makes anyone a distribution point. Amazon’s control is one of convenience, not necessity, and as we create new ways to connect people independent of the companies that act as middlemen, we begin to imagine a life without those middlemen.

The second change is who owns the nodes of distribution. One of the great competitive advantages of book publishers is they have relationships with distributors, and the more market power they have the more they can get per book. Imagine being an author having to do your own distribution. There’s a reason why publishers, the new hand-copying monks, exist. But what if we create these relationships in different ways? What if the old notion of publisher-to-bookstore relationships isn’t the only way to configure the book trade? Print-on-demand, or even small printing jobs managed by an author are more of a reality than 10 years ago, and so closing the hole on connecting writer with buyer is an opening for innovators and forward-thinking entrepreneurs.

My case study here is the late Rachel Held Evans, a name you might not know unless you are familiar with the world of Christian publishing. Evans was a best-selling author before her tragic and unexpected death at 37 back in 2019, having written a series of books aimed primarily at women but also at people struggling to make sense of faith and belief in a time of disillusionment and hypocrisy. One of the interesting things about her story is that this orientation for her writing made her an outsider who challenged existing power structures in ways that got her into trouble, and inevitably clashed with an embedded publishing structure within her sector of the Christian church. First of all, she was dealing with the Christian bookstore distribution complex that largely was conservative and generally closed to women with non-conforming opinions, and that gatekeeping power at times forces writers to play it safe when wading in on cultural issues or watch languages or turns of phrase that might invite controversy. Evans was a brilliant writer who had a gift for challenging orthodoxies about women in church ministry and social issues for years, but she largely stayed out of the line of fire. That changed in 2012, when Lifeway Bookstores, a division of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, yanked her books of the shelves. Her crime? She used the word “vagina” in a book, and she was more largely critical of how Lifeway could use its gatekeeping power in ways to make authors self-censor into not using words like “vagina.”

There are many who thought Lifeway’s decision meant death for Evans’ writing career. The Christian bookstore market at the time was powerful in its control of the market for religious books read by Evangelical and Mainline Christians, such that it affected what publishers would produce. That is, there were other bookstore chains, but they still could only sell what publishers could profitably print, and Lifeway had inordinate control over the latter by virtue of its market share. In the U.S. that meant its gatekeeping power was largely unquestioned. Yes, you could buy Evans’ books on Amazon, but the serendipity of finding it (or not!) in a Christian bookstore affects your ability to know whether a book even exists in a culture where recommendation from peer-to-peer is a powerful engine for sales.

It turns out that until her death, Evans’s career ended up being just fine and Lifeway was not. The bookstore chain closed its stores in 2019 and converted to an online format. Its power was greatly diminished. Evans had this to say:

“I hope it sends a message to retailers that banning books for not conforming to strict, fundamentalist standards is an ineffective strategy because readers of faith want books that reflect the diversity of the church and the complexity & nuances of the faith experience. The average reader has no idea just how large Lifeway loomed over Christian publishing, & just how many voices & ideas it managed to stifle, even outside conservative circles. I hope this unleashes a new era of freedom, creativity & diversity for writers & readers of faith.”

So how did she survive? It turns out social media, community and self-publishing granted her a power that once required a publisher. She used Twitter to amass a large following, largely because her writing was so steeped in authenticity that it served as a type of brand distinct from other Christian writers online. I use the word “brand” with some care here. I don’t like the term because it is reductionist for people who hold genuine, core beliefs. What I mean in this case is that her beliefs and work were lived out in authentic ways when she engaged in social media spaces. In terms of authenticity and voice, there was little difference between her tweets and her books, and that resonated with an audience that was drawn to her for that voice.

Her Twitter was always a wild ride, and much in line with a voice that allowed her to wade in on third-rail issues in Evangelicalism that moved her out of that culture’s mainstream but also represented the beating heart of what people saw in her writing to begin with (she famously questioned orthodoxy on gay marriage before it was more mainstream in the church, for example). She also used her influence to promote and center other writers at the margins in Christian publishing, including Black and queer voices that often were cast out or left at the margins in Evangelicalism. All of it meant accruing influence and credibility, but more to the point, a type of loyalty that publishers would kill to have. People like authentic. They’ll pay for it.

Writing books is more of a hustle these days than it used to be. Publishers want some sense you’re marketable. A successful prior book helps a lot, but so does having a built-in audience. Smaller authors spend a lot of time building community on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, through podcasts. Those are a touchpoint that create a type of loyalty and following that becomes an instant market when a book drops. They are a distribution list. Rather than relying solely on contracts with hundreds of bookstores to sell books, publishers increasingly want an author to have thousands of potential book buyers in their back pocket the minute the book rolls off the press.

And I keep using the word publisher, but here’s the thing. At this level, we’re talking about a publisher’s job as being that of editing, printing, and mailing—with the long-traditional hustle and legwork of advertising and marketing decoupled from the process. What used to be the publisher’s job now that’s been shifted to the author, but that comes at some cost. Once the author is among the people, gathering contact information and making conversation, at some point you’re an uncaged bird. What Evans discovered is her own marketing power. She used a printer to print her books, but it’s not hard to see a world coming where she would have figured out that part out too had she lived longer.¹

Evans is a unique example, but an increasingly common one. She famously said that Christian writers wanting to dip their toe in edgier waters don’t need Lifeway, and she was correct. The legacy of writers that followed her lead and benefited from her promotion, writers such as Austin Channing Brown and Tori Williams Douglass, were proof of this. I use the example of Evans purposefully. It has a religious component, much in the same context that Gutenberg faced. That the entrenched dominant interest in both examples is religious and/or powerful should not be lost here. And it should make us ask questions about what is next, what new reformations await long-held power structures when their influence is diminished.

So.

Yes, consolidated market power for Amazon and the big book publishers is important. We need to worry about it for the same reasons we should always worry about concentrated power and monopoly. But we have writers carving out new paths, creating loyalties with audiences that publishers cannot themselves buy. I look at the people like Evans and see a disruption of the power relationship. In the age of big publishing houses, writers are at a disadvantage. Once writers own the audience, it’s the publishers who will come asking.

Big publishers aren’t going away any time soon, but social tools provide a disruptive path that is going to remake the industry and shift power balances. Social media and podcasting offer types of engagement opportunity to amass and access your audience. Tools like Substack (yes, we’re getting META here) create publishing connection into the most private of realms—the audience’s inbox—and also have portability in the sense you own your audience’s contact information and can take it with you the minute you hate the terms of service. Imagine how terrifying this is to publishers, not owning the audience and controlling the market.

This is a world of more opportunity. It requires more hustle and differentiation; you can’t be just another person producing more of what everyone else is making. Being unique is difficult and cannot just be a brand you ride into the sunset. But for those doing the truly original work, the groundbreaking work? They represent the change coming.

1. As an aside, if you’re a person of faith or struggling with faith, I recommend RHE’s work. She was a gift to me at a difficult time of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever cried over the death of a famous person quite like I did for her. And she was a friend to journalism. I miss her light, and her voice, terribly still.