Here's the initial statistic in a statistics-driven story. For the first time in 25 years--since John Tebbel's 1981 four-volume A History of Book Publishing in the United States--there's a title that looks at the book industry in "a comprehensive way," said Al Greco, perhaps best known here as the compiler of the Book Industry Study Group's annual Book Industry Trends. The new book about the book biz is The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century (Stanford University Press, $65, 0804750319), which Greco, professor of marketing at Fordham's Graduate School of Business Education, wrote with fellow Fordham professors Clara Rodriguez and Robert Wharton.

"It's a nutty business but a great business," Greco said in a conversation with Shelf Awareness. "It's a cultural business that's different. Hollywood talks about culture but couldn't care less, and newspapers have a cultural tradition but they're publicly owned and under major pressure."

One way the business is different from many others: it "adapts quickly and is willing to take risks," Greco said. "If there's a trend, we pick up on it. It's one of the wonders of the business. Editors look at cultural trends, the arts, pop trends, and crank out books in response." And another way the business is different: "most of the product doesn't work." Naturally Greco has statistics to illustrate this point: "Seven out of 10 new trade books lose money," he said. "Two break even. One makes money. The ratio hasn't changed for years, and it explains why we're a hit-driven business."

Several other titles in the past quarter century have looked at the publishing business, he noted. Michael Korda's Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900-1999 was "great," Greco said, and Jason Epstein's Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future was "very good but as good as it is, the only numbers in it are the page numbers." By contrast, The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century has what Greco called "a heavy emphasis on statistical data and analysis of that data. There are no war stories or someone's impression."

The book is popular among academics but is also intended for people in the book world or entering the book world who need to "make sense of it and understand the growth of the business and the forces that impact that business." He noted that so many book editors are English or history majors and have to learn the economics of book publishing "the hard way." So "to provide a framework for the business's growth after World War II," the book contains all kinds of tables of data going back decades, chronicling bookstore chains' market share; U.S. book title output; annuals changes in the consumer price index, gross national product and population; publishers' sales data; book unit sales; and more. (There's even a table of all of Oprah's book club picks.)

It's been a busy period to cover. Not surprisingly a major change in the book business is "the impact of technology, which is obviously moving the business in a faster way," Greco said. This explains RiverDeep's purchase last week of Houghton Mifflin. "Now RiverDeep has electronic products and textbooks," he said. "That technology will ultimately change el-hi but not trade." (The Sony Reader is not the e-book product that will revolutionize trade book reading, he maintained. "Who's going to buy that?" Greco asked.)

Retail changes loom large in the book. Among Greco's observations about this part of the business:

• Internet sales "seem to have plateaued at about 13%-15% of the total market, which varies from sector to sector and differs for trade versus scholarly books." Online sales have "certainly changed the business but they haven't grown the way some people thought they might."
• The number of independent bookstores has stabilized. "In 2005, the number of stores going out of business matched the number of stores that opened."
• Barnes & Noble and Borders, representing $9 billion of the industry's $16 billion in sales in bookstores, "remain the two key national players." They have become "destination spots. People go there. Even if they don't buy, they sit and have coffee and croissants and read a paper."
• There's been a sharp increase in sales to the channels "most people don't think about," including warehouse clubs, mass merchandisers, supermarkets, convenience stores. Wal-Mart alone is selling at least $1 million a week in books, while Target is "booming" and Hudson has more than 500 stores that "move a lot of books."
• There have been some "innovations and attempts to revitalize the old mall store universe."

Greco expressed great concern about the popularity of reading as a leisure activity. Since the late 1990s, the time spent annually by consumers reading books has been moving "down an hour a year every two or three years" while the hours people spend on "media" in general, including watching TV and movies, reading newspapers, surfing the Internet and playing video games, has risen. "Media usage of books should have gone up," he said. "The vast majority of people in the U.S. can read and write English. There is an 'installed base,' but usage isn't increasing.

"The industry has tried so far not successfully to get people to read more." He stressed that the NEA's 2004 Reading at Risk report "got a lot of press and should continue to get a lot of press."

And while some people think the book business is engaging in price gouging, Greco noted that most mass market titles cost $4.99 or $5.99, and used an unusual statistic to put the price in perspective. A mass market book, he said, costs "the same as breakfast at Denny's."

As for sales statistics about his own book, Greco said that in Amazon.com ratings, the book has "done pretty well. Some days it's 60,000, some days 100,000." But in a major irony, Greco doesn't yet have hard sales data on The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21st Century, saying, "We'll find out once a year."--John Mutter