He's got the words, but who's got the money?

With the printed word under siege, how can publishing companies continue to support serious writing? The answer is a version of the TV licence, according to the veteran publisher André Schiffrin

THE PRINTED word finds itself in the midst of a strange sort of upheaval. In an instant, historically speaking, its mighty and unassailable agents of production and dissemination – publishers, newspapers, bookshops – have, in much of the western world at least, found the ramparts of their supremacy being aggressively chipped away. Some have already buckled and fallen.

Manhattan, which in the postwar years had 333 bookshops, now has barely 30. Publishing has changed so radically that in Germany four out of five books are now produced by a conglomerate. It no longer sounds foolish to predict that the era of the book as we know it – a codex of bound pages – may itself be coming to an end.

But what's strange about these shifts is not only their speed but also how little serious debate they have stirred about the public good. Conglomeration in publishing, book scanning and the fast-changing media landscape are some of the major cultural questions of the day, yet often they seem to excite merely a dialogue of the deaf between earnest evangelists for a vaguely-defined digital future, hopeless fatalists and those who hope the fuss will pass. "We are in a transitional stage – more and more people seem to recognise this, but almost no one has offered a vision for the next stage, or a way to get there," writes the publisher André Schiffrin in his latest book, Words & Money.

Schiffrin is well placed to survey the changing landscape. Born into a publishing family in Paris – his father, Jacques, founded the classic Pléiade editions you’ll find in every good French bookshop – his family fled the country when he was a child with the arrival of the Nazis. Schiffrin followed his father into publishing, and, as head of New York’s prestigious Pantheon Books for 30 years, he signed up such authors as Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Eric Hobsbawm and Jean-Paul Sartre.

But the buyout of Pantheon’s owner, Random House, by Condé Nast in 1980 immediately changed the culture at Pantheon, Schiffrin says. The old model, where “a publisher’s job was to find the best writers and publish them, and pay for it with the bestsellers you could find”, was replaced by an insistence that every book should turn a profit. The annual profit target jumped from 3-4 per cent to 10-12 per cent.

When they felt it had become impossible to publish the serious books that had made Pantheon’s name, Schiffrin and all of Pantheon’s editors reacted by resigning en masse, an act that led to protests and pickets outside the New York office. In 1991 he founded the New Press, an independent not-for-profit that now publishes about 80 titles a year.

In Words & MoneySchiffrin situates the shifts in publishing on a wider canvas that takes in the pressures being felt by newspapers and some of the creative industries. The concentration of publishing in a small number of large firms with little appetite for serious but modest-selling books degrades the civic and intellectual climate in much the same way as the closure of newspapers, bookshops and art-house cinemas, he argues. The causes of each industry's problems may differ, he admits, but perhaps their remedies could come from the same sources: the state and the citizen.

The current transition, Schiffrin believes, marks the end of an era of traditional profit-centred ownership, which has failed to preserve the kind of diverse and independent culture we know we need. In publishing he sees the New Press’s success as a model for others, while endowed newspapers supported by state subsidies – in the form of a tax similar to the television licence fee – may, he suggests, be the best way to safeguard good journalism.

Why not legislate, as some countries have done, to protect independent bookshops? Why not tax Google’s profits or its advertising revenue to help the press gather the very news that attracts so many of its readers, just as TV ads are already taxed in France to support the film industry?

“The question I try to raise in the book – and I think it’s a crucial one – is why do these media have to be based on advertising, at least as far as papers are concerned,” Schiffrin says in his Paris apartment, where he and his wife spend part of each year. “Because that’s just a private tax. You’re just paying it from another pocket. And so gradually, I think, people have to come to say, ‘Look, somebody’s going to have to pay for this stuff, because it is essential to have an investigative reporting press. And how are we going to pay for it?’ ”

Some of his solutions may seem utopian to readers in the English-speaking world, Schiffrin admits, but they are policies that have been in place in some countries for years. He cites Norway, where a daring cultural policy – helped by North Sea oil but also by political decisions taken in the early 20th century – have ensured a buoyant arts and media scene. With a population of 4.6 million, Norway puts out 224 newspapers, 82 of which appear four or more times a week, and the circulation of the dailies is the highest per capita in the world.

“Norwegians have long agreed that a diverse press is an essential part of a democracy,” Schiffrin says. So national and minority papers that do not pay dividends can receive state subsidies and, more significantly, are exempt from VAT, a privilege worth more than a billion Norwegian kroner (€126 million) annually.

To maintain an independent publishing industry, Norway’s arts council guarantees publishers a minimum sale on certain volumes and distributes them to the country’s libraries, ensuring broad access for readers. And, most radically, there’s public ownership of the cinemas. About 90 per cent of Norway’s cinemas are municipally owned, which means that while people in Oslo or Bergen can watch as many blockbusters as they wish, cinema owners can also choose other films that won’t make them a cent.

Schiffrin is no Luddite; he is excited by the internet’s promise, and by its potential to convey news that traditional media ignore or just no longer cover. He also believes newspapers must take some responsibility for their own problems. Many of them reacted to the contraction in advertising by cutting back on their areas of strength, which meant fewer sections, fewer journalists and more shallow coverage. He chides them for their parochialism and failure to interrogate themselves.

In the US, he argues, papers lost credibility with their poor coverage of the build-up to war in Iraq, by buying into the hubris that set the groundwork for the economic crisis, and by failing to speak to younger readers. “I have seen no serious analysis of the relation of the content of the media to the growing lack of interest among the young,” he writes.

Some will contest Schiffrin’s starting point: that entities such as bookshops and publishing houses are worth preserving. Do we really need tiny publishing houses to run off a few hundred copies of a poetry volume when the internet can be used to reach immeasurably more people at little cost? Except that doesn’t happen, Schiffrin replies. “There are tens of thousands of people who put up their manuscript on the web, hoping that somebody other than their cousin will read it. The figures show that nobody looks at those.”

Nor does he accept that online book-buying adequately replaces the bookshop. “I always say a good bookshop is one where you don’t find the book you were looking for; you find the book you didn’t know you were looking for. That you can’t do on the internet.” Bookshops also double as important cultural spaces in towns and cities, he says, which makes them doubly worthy of our protection.

A formidable barrier to a state-subsidised press, however, would surely be journalists’ fears of political interference. Would it not upset the delicate, naturally antagonistic relationship between press and power?

“Right, and that’s where the BBC model is what you want,” he replies. “You want an independent tax base. That money goes directly to a trust that pays for the press, and it has no governmental control at all. That’s the model in Norway and other countries. I think that’s the obvious and logical answer,” he says, before adding with a smile, “but that in politics means nothing.”

Words & Moneyby André Schiffrin is published by Verso