… over the last couple of decades. Technical revolutions, societal revolutions, cultural revolutions. I gave a long talk at UIUC recently where I told the story of one of them, as context and contrast with current revolutions. The story itself is worth telling in this forum. It’s long, so sit back.

I want to first talk about a surprisingly little-known phenomenon in Eastern Europe, that I observed in the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Empire.

Between 1990 and 1994, I worked a lot with scholarly publishers across Eastern Europe, including some seminars organized by Peter Kaufman, from whom you’ll hear later. My deepest experience was in Czechoslovakia, before it split.

The Soviet scholarly publishing model was to have every university publishing its own stuff–introductory biology coursebooks, collections of essays, lecture notes, monographs, research–at the professor’s behest. There was heavy subvention from the universities, which were of course subvened by the state. There was no economic feedback system, because there were no cost recovery systems beyond a token fee of a quarter or so per “scripta,” as the class publications were called. Traditional hardbacks cost the equivalent of a pack of cheap Czech cigarettes.

Editorial selection scarcely mattered. Every year, a few works were designated as worthy of being put in hardback, usually in an attempt to give their universities a medium of exchange — trading books for books from the outside, non-Soviet world.

The overall system separated to the point of immeasurability, by massive bureaucracy, all publishing costs, and in fact discouraged cost containment systems based on merit or audience. Instead, decisions were [often] based on old-boy status. By having the right connections, an important professor could arrange to have 50,000 copies of his book on the aerodynamics of bat wings printed, in Czech; this was to his advantage, because his royalty was based on numbers printed, rather than numbers sold.

Other publishing houses published scholarly work in philosophy, science, metaphysics, etc.; they had somewhat more freedom of choice of what to publish, but their work was also heavily subsidized by the government, and even in smaller specialty houses, prices and print runs were at the whim of, ahem, important people.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, there were warehouses with hundreds of thousands of copies of the writings of Stalin which nobody would ever buy. And the warehouses also held about 49,800 copies of that bat wing book.

In the prerevolution days, a socially supported, exceedingly expensive publishing industry created very inexpensive books, and that deeply affected the Czech culture. New books came out once a week, and the bookstores were like flowers in a field — every square had bookstores, every tram stop had a cardtable selling books. When I first spent time in Prague, about nine months after the Velvet Revolution, I saw everyone — and I mean the butcher and the hardhat and the professors alike — reading on the trams, the metro, the streetcorners, and lining up to pay a few crowns for new titles — and not escapist trash, but history, philosophy, science, metaphysics, in Czech. This system of subvention created a highly literate, well-educated populace, who read ideas for fun, all the time.

In the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet centralized economy, suddenly universities, whose subventions were being completely reconsidered by new governments, were telling their “presses” that they had to become self-sufficient in two years, and many were told they had to start giving money back to their universities. For most of the Czech university policymakers, their naive recipe for capitalism was a pinch of slogan-level ideas picked up from Dallas reruns and the Voice of America, a dash of Hayek, then spiced with understanding gleaned from dinnertable conversations over the years.

Their consequent policies had no consideration of the realities of publishing costs and cost recovery, no understanding of the infrastructure (like editorial selection, distribution, and warehousing, not to mention computers, databases, predictive knowledge of the market) required to have a viable publishing marketplace, no understanding of the place of scholarly publishing in the educational system, and no recognition that in a revolutionary economy, nobody would have spare money to make discretionary purchases.

Four years after the revolution, the prices for books had become ten to fifty times as expensive as they used to be. The publishers who were surviving were subvening their own translations of Derrida by publishing – literally – soft-core pornography.

Bookstores closed down everywhere. Publishers closed down everywhere. And people stopped reading every day. By 1995, nobody was reading metaphyics on the tram. A quarter of the university presses I knew of were closed, over half of the small scholarly publishers I’d known, well over half of the bookstores I knew of in Prague were closed, and the scholars I’d befriended were telling me that they couldn’t get anything published anymore — there were fewer outlets than ever.

Neither model was right–the absurd redundancies and inefficiencies of the Soviet system were far too costly, but its result was a marvelously high level of intellectual discourse. The follow-on naive-capitalist model was far too brutal and had consequences that they are still feeling–far fewer high-level publications in their own languages, far fewer high-quality scholarly publications in general (a significant problem in a small language group), and cultural costs that are hard to quantify but easy to identify as causing a sort of poverty in the intellectual culture.

What this has to do with the current revolutions may not be fully clear, since it’s about content scarcity, not content abundance. But the story is also about how a society can change its habits and patterns, and how quickly that can transform the culture. In those three or four years, among the unintended consequences was that quality content, and a society of ideas, was trumped by convenience, capital, and entertainment.

Posted: 12|13|07 at 8:36 am. Filed under: Bookstores, Publishers, Publishing, Reading. New here? Follow this entry via RSS 2.0. Pinging is currently disabled.