Not Comics: HMH Stops Acquiring

In a news item that still has the power to chill in the large freezer that is the current American comics and general publishing landscape of ailing bookstore chains, a newspaper industry that resembles the Hindenburg disaster and the possibility that at any second a slew of major publishers could make the move into on-line publishing in a way that allows them to keep the licensing hopes alive without having to invest nearly as much (or, if they convince people, anything at all) in that troublesome making of stuff, PW is reporting that Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt has told its editors to stop acquiring books. Further, this may be an acquisitions ban without a set end point, and it's entirely possible that other publishers could join them. That is... well, um... *brrr*.

I do think it's worth noting that the scary thing is that this is really early on in the financial difficulties that publishing could face, as they're confronted with multiple economic pressures -- lack of credit, a downturn in sales -- at exactly the same time they're facing a potential paradigm-changing emergence of on-line iterations of what they do while burdened with a fat infrastructure that makes them ill-equipped to take advantage but still big enough in terms of reach and resources to keep others from taking full advantage.

I don't believe in the phrase "Perfect Storm," but your friend that decided to buy a giant new house a couple of years ago and just took a year off to travel before coming back from Madrid to find out their job is no longer there, causing them to faint on the way to the mailbox to send off their insurance renewal form and thus getting hit by a cab that just came up on the curb? That may be publishing and a lot of other industries right now. One just hopes this is more a situation of a person deciding to stay home on New Year's Eve 1999 than the person that's on Oprah that had to go to the food bank three days after losing their $170,000 job.
 
posted 7:20 am PST | Permalink
 

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