While 19th-century publishing was competitive and individualistic, its growing volume pointed increasingly to the need for greater organization. A major problem, once booksellers had become distinct from publishers, was suicidal price-cutting in the retail trade. Though price regulation ran counter to accepted notions of free competition and met with fierce opposition, in the general interest of the industry it was inevitable. Like copyright, it helped to provide a firm structure within which fair prices could be calculated. The net price principle, first raised in the previous century by the German publisher Reich, was adopted in Germany in 1887 through the work of the Börsenverein, the trade organization founded in 1825. Under this principle, the publisher allows a trade discount to the bookseller only on condition that the book is sold to the public at not less than its “net published price” as fixed by the publisher. In England, a first attempt to introduce the net price principle by the booksellers in the 1850s was condemned to failure by the Free Traders; but toward the end of the century some publishers, led by Alexander Macmillan, began to replace the variable discounts by fixed prices. To press for the new system, the Associated Booksellers of Great Britain and Ireland was formed in 1895, and the Publishers Association was created in 1896. These two organizations then worked out the Net Book Agreement (1901), primarily through the efforts of Frederick (later Sir Frederick) Macmillan. The principle has since been generally adopted, although only to a limited extent in the United States. At roughly the same time, the founding of the Society of Authors (1884) in England and the Authors’ League (1912) in the United States helped to standardize fair dealing over contracts and the payment of royalties to authors. Trade catalogs
The trade also became better organized in the provision of comprehensive catalogs of current books. These began as early as the twice-yearly book fairs at Frankfurt (first catalog 1564) and Leipzig (first catalog 1594). So great was the value of the Frankfurt catalog that an English edition was published in 1617–28. Eventually, all such semiprivate ventures, as A Catalogue of all the Books Printed in the United States (1804) or English catalogs deriving from The Publishers’ Circular (1837) or Whitaker’s (1874), became national lists, such as the Bibliographie de la France (from 1811), the U.S. Cumulative Book List (from 1898), the Deutsche National-bibliographie (from 1931), and the British National Bibliography (from 1950). Development of copyright law
Copyright, too, underwent considerable development. By the end of the century, most countries had some provision, and various terms of protection were tried, running from publication or from the date of the author’s death. The United States first enacted legislation in 1790, France in 1793, and Germany in 1839. Moves toward an international code began in 1828 in Denmark. They took the form of reciprocal treaty arrangements between individual countries by which foreign authors received the same protection as did native authors. Britain joined the movement in several arrangements between 1844 and 1886. In 1885 a uniform international system of copyright was initiated by the Berne Convention. The customary term of protection is the author’s lifetime plus 50 years. Most countries subscribed to the Convention, but not the United States or Russia. The United States continued to protect its domestic printing industry up to 1955, when it joined the Universal Copyright Convention (Unesco 1952). While the Berne Convention prescribed a minimum level of protection, the Universal Convention was based on the concept of “national treatment”—each member country treating works by citizens of other member countries as it would those of its own citizens. Thus the United States was able to enter into an international agreement without the necessity of immediately revising its own copyright law. Since the Universal Convention contained a provision that the Convention would not be applicable between any two countries that belonged to the Berne Union, it served primarily as a treaty between the United States and the countries that recognized international copyright. The Soviet Union became a party to the Berne Convention in 1973. The early 20th century
In the 20th century, the effects of state education in the more advanced countries became increasingly apparent. Standards of living rose, and, as in earlier times, these two conditions brought increased use and publication of books. During the late 1890s and early 1900s, many new publishing houses were founded. In the industrialized countries, though wages were rising, a small business could be staffed economically, and printing costs were such that it was economically feasible to print as few as 1,000 copies of a new book. It was thus comparatively easy to make a start, especially because the long-term credit that printers were prepared to grant made a minimum of capital necessary.
Book publishing grew to a substantial industry, consisting mostly of small units in the Western world but also embracing a number of large concerns, many of which were public corporations employing staffs of 1,000 or more. Specialization became frequent, particularly in educational books, as the needs of the new school populations were realized. Some companies, such as Macmillan, in both its British and American houses, had begun to issue schoolbooks almost by chance; then, as their sales grew most profitably, they developed separate departments for school and college textbooks. Others, such as The American Book Company and Methuen in London, had begun specifically with educational books in mind. For more than one leading London firm, India, despite its high illiteracy rate, began to grow strongly as a market and to repay the care and expense involved in setting up separate Indian branches. The first literary agents
A new factor at this time, which was to change the financial climate for fiction publishers in particular, was the advent of the literary agent. The first agent began business in 1875, and between 1900 and 1914 many more appeared. Reasonable though it was that authors who were unable themselves to handle their business with publishers satisfactorily should employ a professional to bargain for them, the higher rates of royalty and larger advance payments thus secured cut seriously into a publisher’s profit. The increased cost made it considerably more difficult to finance the most speculative part of the business, the encouragement of new talent. The system of literary agents began in Britain but spread rapidly to the United States and also to the Continent, though in the latter it did not assume so great an importance. Keenly resented at first, the literary agent, by pressing for higher payment to authors he represented, may have been indirectly responsible for the greater selling efforts that some publishers began to make early in the century. Sales methods