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A Literary Cash Machine?
David B. Green
At an age when he could be winding down, publishing giant Jason Epstein is working to usher in the next new thing
Michael Smolens says that before April last year, he'd never heard of Jason Epstein. In fact, the global entrepreneur says he'd never even heard of the New York Review of Books, the prestigious journal of criticism and reportage that Epstein helped to found nearly four decades ago.
There are of course plenty of people who don't know who Jason Epstein is, or even Michael Smolens. But within the New York publishing world, if not among book people globally, Epstein, the 72-year-old former Random House editorial director, is something of a legend.
So it's somewhat ironic that Smolens, a man who didn't know from publishing until he was introduced by a mutual friend to Epstein a year ago, is now partners with the book maven in developing a system for printing books on demand.
When Epstein was still in his 20s, in his first publishing job, at Doubleday, he started and ran the Anchor books imprint, which made classic titles from the firm's backlist newly available in cheap but relatively high-quality paperback editions. (Until then, paperbacks had generally been a vehicle for pulp novels, whose physical quality corresponded to their literary value.) In 1958, after eight years at Doubleday, Epstein moved to Random House, where he edited a variety of writers who have included Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, E.L. Doctorow, Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Jacobs and Ben-Zion Netanyahu.
In 1963, during a strike that closed down the New York Times for a spell, almost overnight, Epstein and his then-wife, Barbara Epstein, together with Robert Silvers and husband and wife Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, came out with the first issue of the New York Review, which has been publishing some of the finest essay-writing in America - and doing so at a profit - ever since. Epstein (who is today married to Times reporter Judith Miller, a former Cairo bureau chief) is associated with a number of other trail-blazing projects too, which have helped secure his reputation as a publishing innovator.
In Jerusalem in early May to participate in a panel sponsored by the Aspen Institute at the International Book Fair on the future of publishing, Epstein talked with The Jerusalem Report about his vision of electronic publishing. A year ago, about the time Stephen King began to offer a new book directly to readers over the web, bypassing his publisher, the idea seemed poised to turn the industry on its head and Epstein still sees it that way. "I don't think people are going to read books on hand-held readers or on electronic screens," he says with self-assurance. "If that were going to work, it would have by now." What Epstein seems absolutely confident is the wave of the future, rather, is "a machine that can print one book at a time, at point of sale, anywhere in the world. An ATM machine for books," which, he believes, will look exactly like today's trade paperbacks: "same cover, same page size, same paper."
Now Smolens and Epstein's company, Three Billion Books, is very close to unveiling such a machine before potential investors and the rest of the world. It will draw, says Epstein, on "a vast catalog, as I foresee it, of digitized material, in all languages." After you've determined that you want to buy something, "you push a button, and the catalog will find the nearest print-on-demand machine to you. Within a few minutes, you will get a message on your screen telling you that your book is ready - come and get it, or we'll deliver it to you, like a pizza."
Epstein gives a very similar description of the system in his recent book, "Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future" (published, conventionally, by W.W. Norton; 188 pp.; $21.95) which is part critique of the trade's current state of affairs, part memoir, and part portrait of the brave new world he believes we're on the cusp of. Much of the book is a lament, for Epstein writes that his career "has traced the long, downward, but by no means barren slope from [the] Parnassian moment" in the 1920s when writers like Joyce, Eliot, Thomas Mann, Theodore Dreiser and Kafka "created once and for all the vocabulary and themes of modern literature."
Epstein attributes the imagination and boldness of a small group of upstart Jewish publishers with responsibility for introducing American audiences to much of this great new literature: the profligate Horace Liveright, who created the Modern Library; his young colleague Bennett Cerf, who, with his friend Donald Klopfer incorporated that asset into part of the backlist of their new firm, Random House. Years later Random bought the smaller but highly prestigious company started by the aristocratic Alfred A. Knopf. At Viking, it was Harold Guinzburg, and at Simon & Schuster, Richard L. Simon and Max L. Schuster. And there were others.
Epstein refers several times to the Jewishness of these publishing pioneers, but he never suggests what the connection may have been between their background and their work. Nor does he state explicitly what may otherwise be obvious to most readers: That he himself is Jewish. Asked about this, he replies, "What else could I be, an Eskimo?" adding that "I'm not a practicing Jew, or in any way interested in the subject." If his Jewish predecessors and mentors formed the companies that changed the face of American publishing, it was because they were hardly welcome at the old-line houses. "Even when I went to work at Doubleday in the 1950s," he adds, "it was perfectly clear that ... sooner or later, I'd have to leave."
Jewish they may have been, but Epstein notes that these maverick publishers were "highly assimilated." At the same time, he says they did have "that Jewish energy, that intelligence. I don't want to sound chauvinistic, but they were smarter than their gentile colleagues." They were, he says, "willing to take risks, cultural risks. Publishing Joyce, Lawrence, and people like that."
Epstein's book also analyzes the syndrome caused and exemplified by the concentration of ownership in the hands of a few conglomerates; the domination of the retail end by the chains, most notably Barnes & Noble; and the fact that the whole business is in thrall to a few bestsellers each year, which, ironically, often don't even make them money. In order to justify their claims to be "superstores," the chains have to rent vast amounts of floor space, which can only be paid for with the high-volume sales that bestsellers guarantee. As time goes on, therefore, the selection that even the superstores can afford to offer is declining, and new titles that haven't sold are sent back to publishers for refunds after half a year.
Epstein doesn't think the "digital future" will have much impact on the distribution of bestsellers. Rather, he sees the main benefits of e-publishing in ensuring that backlist books aren't squeezed out of print. With an electronic marketplace, "everything can stay in print forever."
THAT'S WHERE MICHAEL Smolens enters the picture. Fifty-three years old, the New York-based Smolens says that "for 30 years I have set up capital-intensive manufacturing facilities in high-risk environments, mainly in the field of textiles." These environments have included Haiti, where until George Bush I imposed an embargo in 1991, he owned a plant that was the island nation's largest employer; Mexico, Hungary, Jordan and Azerbaijan. By late 1999, says Smolens, "I wasn't learning anything, projects were getting hard to fund, and I wasn't working with smart people." The smart people he was missing were those middle-level management folks in their 20s and 30s who, he noticed, "were very hungry for knowledge, who wanted to do things better."
He latched onto the idea of finding a means to provide access, via digital technology, to knowledge, to the three billion people of the emerging countries. Smolens notes that "98 percent of the information available in the world exists in only the language in which it was created. I came up with a high-powered, highly impractical and audacious plan to use technology to print one book at a time, in different places in the world, in multiple languages. We would serve it up in digital form, and also in audio form, since 2 billion people can't read."
A mutual acquaintance told Smolens he had to meet Epstein, who, in the early 90s, had tried to use pre-Internet computer networks to market his Reader's Catalog of literature. With two other partners, the two set up Three Billion Books. Over the course of a year, Smolens - who uses the kind of lingo you'd expect from a global entrepreneur who wants to bridge the "digital divide" - took the Jason Epstein crash course in publishing. (The two own homes near one another in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and one fringe benefit of the "course" were the meals cooked for him by his tutor, who's also a gourmet chef.)
Though he still wants to publish books in multiple languages, Smolens realized that "you have to do something out of the box that's practical." If you consider the print-on-demand machine practical. At this stage, "we haven't had any publicity, haven't approached any potential investors, but we're just about ready to answer all the questions" that will inevitably come with revealing their product to the world. What we have," he explains, "is a proprietary machine that we think is prime-time - which I can't talk about," he quickly adds. "It's extremely early in the paradigm shift," that is the shift from conventional to electronic publishing, "and that's extremely dangerous. That's a time when people can lose billions."
One complex and timely issue related to electronic publishing of all kinds is that of rights. In fact, now, in what promises to be a landmark case, Epstein's longtime employer, Random House (for whom he continues to edit a number of authors) is suing an upstart called Rosetta Books for copyright infringement. Rosetta directly approached several Random authors, among them Kurt Vonnegut and William Styron, and paid them for the right to sell electronic editions of some of their old classics. Rosetta claims that the original contract between Random House and the authors does not specifically reserve electronic rights to the publisher. Random insists that its exclusive right to publish the works in book form implicitly includes e-books.
Epstein sees the merits in both companies' arguments, calling the case, now before a federal court, a "metaphysical" one about "when is a book a book." He notes that most publishers, including Random, have, since 1994, been "demanding in their contracts that authors grant them the right to publish in digital form." Nobody, though, he adds, "went to the bother and huge expense of buying digital rights to its backlist."
But, he tellingly wonders, if Random House was convinced that digital rights automatically reverted to them, why would they be going out of their way to specify that point in new contracts? "On the other hand," notes the editor, "publishers' contracts also provide that authors will not permit to be published competing editions of their works." Among other things, he says, "it means that the author won't authorize somebody to publish in different format what the original publisher has done."
Epstein believes that Random House would do far better arguing the second point, that of competing editions. But the veteran firm apparently feels that it has to argue, and win, on the first point, because otherwise it may find itself in a position of having to pay authors for digital rights to all the 20,000 titles on its backlist.
Smolens is understandably vague about precisely what Three Billion Books is developing, and how much money it's costing. What he will say is that "We're creating a pipeline, hardware and software, and we've been in touch with people with access to a lot of content. The rights problem," he acknowledges, "is very complex." He knows of about five other companies in the world that are developing similar technology, but says he thinks competition is healthy. In any case, Smolens and Epstein believe that their literary equivalent of a cash machine can be just that for them and their company.
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