Dear Ms. Centrello
An open invitation to the head of the new Random House Ballantine Publishing Group
Francine Fialkoff, Editor -- Library Journal, 2/15/2003
As members of the book community, librarians aren't immune from either the speculation or the consternation. They may be more open to your vision than you suspect, however. Librarians are often regarded as guardians of good literature, and while that is true, their personal preferences range as widely as do those of the reading public. More importantly, they don't purchase books to fit their own tastes, whether high brow or low brow, but their patrons'. Their job is to meet patron demand, and according to LJ's latest Book Buying Survey ("Serving More with Less ," p. 42–44), that demand is more and more for the popular.
That's why I'd like to invite you to join us for a dialog with librarians at BookExpo America this spring. We'd love to hear about your vision for the combined imprint. We wonder how you plan to join successfully the more popular and genre-driven titles that Ballantine publishes and that many library users crave with Random Trade's more literary titles, some of which serve to shape our thinking and contribute to our intellectual conversation. We hope you will share some of your marketing savvy with us. By then, you will know, and could tell us, what books, if any, you have canceled and what you have signed. Of what new trends should librarians be aware?
There are other issues that affect the book world, too. On the same day that the New York Times dissected the change at Random House Trade (1/20/03), another article just below reported on declining sales among some best-selling stalwarts. This may merely be the natural decline in the appeal of these older writers to a new, younger generation of readers. Who are the new writers to watch, in your house and others? What kind of writing will interest this younger generation? Moreover, if best-selling authors give publishers the cash to sustain new novelists and risky books, as publishing lore has it, is the whole model in jeopardy?
These are big questions, but librarians, and publishers, have even graver concerns, among them the future of reading and the book. True, circulation of books at libraries is on the rise again, according to LJ's survey, driven by better promotion and programming, a poor economy, and electronic links to users that allow them to reserve books from home and give them help selecting titles. Nevertheless, many librarians are buying fewer nonfiction works as patrons turn to the Internet for information. Will you still be publishing books as we know them ten years from now, or 20? Should we be looking at popular formats like fotonovelas, graphic novels, and anime?
One respondent to our survey writes that we are losing readers to competition from the Internet, video games, and myriad other media. If that is so, where will publishers and librarians find new readers? These are questions that both publishers and librarians need to answer. We must do much more research on how and why people read. There have been some library studies of avid adult readers already. In nearly every instance, the hunger for books and reading is shaped in childhood. How can we create the experiences that will bind youngsters to books and make them readers forever?
I hope you'll join us for a panel at Day of Dialog, for librarians, publishers, and distributors, on Thursday, May 29, 2003, at BookExpo America in Los Angeles. We have lots to discuss.
