New scandals, but books remain the same

updated 6:56 p.m. ET Dec. 18, 2006

NEW YORK - In 2006, everything and nothing seemed new in the publishing industry.

Scandals were hot, hotter than sales, whether the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed James Frey making up facts in “A Million Little Pieces” or the Rupert Murdoch-endorsed O.J. Simpson toying with fiction in “If I Did It.” Few could have imagined Winfrey chewing out Frey on the air or Murdoch pulling “If I Did It” because he found it in bad taste.

But the biggest news may have been something that didn’t happen. While Hollywood worried about online piracy, CD collections were being replaced by iPods and TV shows were downloaded from iTunes, the book world remained attached to a format older than all the other industries combined.

The bound, paper text.

“I think we have been blessed in that we’ve been able to phase in the digital age, to adjust and move along, and haven’t been hit as quickly as the other industries, where you’ve had all this upheaval,” says Patricia Schroeder, president and chief executive of the American Association of Publishers.

For all the industry’s efforts to be noticed online, whether through promotional videos or targeted e-mail blasts, publishers and readers alike resist the full Internet revolution. The Sony Reader was just the latest false start for the e-book market and computers remained a cold place to curl with a good story.

Schroeder and others acknowledge that an-all digital industry, however unlikely, makes business and environmental sense. No more delivery costs or worrying about how many books to print. No more copies sitting in warehouses, shipped to and from stores or destroyed altogether.

“You would create a world where essentially all books are always available to all people,” says Jack Romanos, CEO of Simon & Schuster. “And you would save millions of trees.”

But publishing has long been divided, committed by logic to change, while stirred in its heart by the timeless, traditional book — how it feels and smells and the world it evokes, captured memorably by John Updike last May at BookExpo America when he praised books as “intrinsic to our human identity.”

“I consider myself as multimedia-friendly as anybody, and if the Internet enables us to reach more readers, that’s a good thing,” says Liz Perl, publisher of Rodale Books. “But there’s a part of me that’s still bothered when they refer to a book as ‘content.”’

“It ends up coming back to a very simple emotion,” says HarperCollins publisher Jonathan Burnham. “I still get that profound pleasure the first time I get a copy of a book we’re publishing and hold it in my hands. And the force of that feeling is matched by what the consumer feels.”

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