The International Media and the Political Economy of Publishing

FORMOST PEOPLE the term muss media conjures up an image of the popular press or broadcasting, and occasionally, for those with long memories, the cinema. Rarely does it include that strangely neglected industry, book publishing. Yet publishing is the oldest form of mass communication, and although it has in many instances remained a small-scale, almost cottage industry, the economics of twentieth-century communications have pushed publishing along most of the paths followed by the larger media. Despite this, most analysis of the publishing industry remains sublimely unaware of these parallel developments and of their implications for publishing itself. Discussions of mass communications rarely spend much time on the apparently peripheral trade in books. Oddly, researchers in academic media studies have largely ignored the medium right under their scholarly noses. These twin gaps-in discussions of publishing and in media studies-are important because they have prevented the analysis of two impor-tant developments which in themselves make nonsense of any analytic separation of publishing from the other media. First, diversification among media enterprises has enveloped a large part of the publishing industry, so that it has increasingly become part of the growing media conglomer-ates. To understand the behavior of publishers it thus becomes vital to understand the changing economics of all media sectors. Second, the inter-nationalization of media industries has often been led by publishing; it was the earliest medium to develop an export trade and still is in many ways the most international medium. The expansion of capital and dis