Book Business: Publishing: Past, Present, and Future

Jason Epstein has led arguably the most creative career in book publishing during the past-century. In 1952 he created Anchor Books, which launched the so-called quality paperback revolution and established the trade paperback format. In the following decade he was co-founder of the New York Review of Books. In the 1980s he created The Library of America and The Reader's Catalog, the precursor of on-line bookselling.

In this short book, based on his W. W. Norton Lectures given at the New York Public Library in October 1999, he discusses the severe crisis facing the book business today -- a crisis that affects writers and readers as well as publisher -- and looks ahead to the radically transformed industry that will revolutionize the idea of the book as profoundly as the introduction of movable type did five centuries ago.