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While bookstores play the vital role in book distribution, little attention has been paid to concentration and conglomerate ownership in the retail book trade. In 1958, one-store book firms accounted for nearly 80 percent of book sales; by 1982 that figure had fallen to 26 percent even though single-store retailers continue to account for a majority of all bookstore outlets. Today the chains control at least 54 percent of bookstore sales. Buoyed by discriminatory discounts and publisher-subsidized advertising campaigns, the chains' dramatic growth seems likely to continue despite the fact that they are less profitable than independent booksellers. The chains' marketing orientation fits well with changes in the broader publishing industry, as publishers seek to rationalize operations in order to improve the bottom line. As books become just another commodity, sold through increasingly centralized and monopolized channels, access for alternative and minority voices is being foreclosed.
Although the book industry as a whole has undergone dramatic changes in recent years, little scholarly attention has been paid to the evolving structure of the book industry, and particularly to the retail sector that continues to play the vital role in distribution of trade books. The increasingly dominant position of the bookstore chains has drawn much less attention than have similar developments among book publishing firms. This article examines the still-emerging patterns of dominance in the retail book sector and the collusion with leading publishers that facilitates them, and briefly discusses the implications for more democratic access to the not-so-metaphorical marketplace of ideas.
It has been clear for some time that the book publishing industry is highly concentrated. Maxwell J. Lillienstein, general counsel for the American Booksellers Association, noted the dominance of trade book sales by a relative handful of publishers more than a decade ago.l Through subsequent mergers and acquisitions the twenty largest American publishers accounted for 62 percent of domestic and export sales of all books of all types in 1992. These percentages refer to books in all distribution channels, from bookstores to textbooks to mail-order book clubs. Four firms-Bertelsmann, Time Inc., Reader's Digest and Random House-accounted for 40 percent of all general interest books sold in 1987. In 1990 Ben Bagdikian estimated that the six largest publishers accounted for more than half of all...