I would agree that these are the true bestsellers as they continue, after all this time, to sell and achieve commercial success. Feather and Woodbridge say: 'The bestseller lists, which reveal so much about changing taste and about the commercial culture of the trade, consist of recent titles which have been selling strongly since their publication.' (Feather and Woodbridge, 2007). I would argue that a book that has been selling strongly since their publication 200 years ago is more entitled to the label 'bestseller' than one which sells well for a few weeks during a craze or fad, and then gets left on the shelf.
The second reading this week was about Publishing on Demand (POD). Ann Haugland discusses the new technologies in her paper Opening the Gates: Print On-Demand Publishing as Cultural Production. Haugland explains how POD is an advantage for publishers, as it allows them to save content digitally, which allows them to both make copies of out-of-print books, or keep books in print longer. (Haugland, 2006)
Haugland goes on to explain a new use of POD, publishers that are using the new technologies to publish anybody who wants to. These are subsidy publishers : authors - not the house- bear the costs of publication. (Haugland, 2006).
Critics have dismissed the new techniques, calling them new versions of vanity presses that have exsisted for years. However Haugland explains that unlike vanity presses, these publishers are connected to legitimate book institutions, such as Books in Print, Amazon and Ingram. This means that the books that are published are available to readers everywhere. (Haugland, 2006). As Haugland says, 'it's big business': the largest of the major houses, AuthorHouse, as of May 2006, have more than 33,000 books in print. (Haugland, 2006). I went to AuthorHouse's website, and found on the homepage:
'When you publish with AuthorHouse UK, your book will be available for order on Amazon.co.uk, Waterstones.com and more than 25,000 retail outlets worldwide.
As the industry leader, we are proud to have helped thousands of authors realise their dreams of publishing and distributing their books. Find out more and get a publishing consultation at no cost!'
As Haugland says, 'In the past few years, thousands and thousands of people whose work would have remained in desk drawers or diaries have made their writing public...POD technologies enable an extraordinary and interesting new cultural new practice - a form of popular culture centered on production rather than consumption. (Haugland, 2006).
However, although I agree that POD can be a good thing for publishers, as it eliminates risk factors such as whether to take a book out of print or to publish another several thousand of them (Haugland, 2006), I think that it could impact on the quality of books available to readers.
As Haugland says: 'Critics complain that POD publishers are flooding the book field with titles that have gone through no quality check and have no market, written by people whose work is not worthy of publication.' I agree with this sentiment. If people have decided to self-publish, it makes me think that they have either been rejected by publishers, meaning that their work is not worth publishing, or their either too lazy or think too much of themselves and their work to consider other peoples' opinions, and are simply vanity publishing. For this reason, I think that the new use of POD is simply vanity publishing on a larger scale, and a way for people who would normally have to distribute their books themselves (mainly only to their family or friends), to have their books made a available to much wider audiences.
Sources...
Feather, J., & Woodbridge, H., 2007. "Bestsellers in the British Book Industry 1998-2005" in Publishing Research Quarterly, Vol. 23 No. 3, pp. 210-223, New York: Springer
Haugland, A., 2006. "Opening the gates: Print on-demand publishing as cultural production" in Publishing Research Quarterly, Vol. 22 No. 3, pp. 3-16, New York: Springer
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