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421 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1975)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0421 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE The printed word remains a key means of communications and of access to knowledge throughout the world. It is especially crucial in the Third World, where the mass media are not well developed. Even in industrialized nations, books and journals remain the basis of communicating new knowledge and transmitting culture, despite the growth of television and other elements of the mass media. The process of translating knowledge from the pen or typewriter of an individual to its printed form in a book or journal is known as publishing. It is with this process and its many ramifications that this issue is concerned. Publishing is usually ignored by the intellectual community. Little is known about even the most basic facts of the book trade. Statistics are scarce and unreliable. Few studies have been conducted on the nature of selecting books for publication, or even on the production process of publishing. Little is known about the nature of editing or the individ- uals who work in the publishing field around the world. Few persons have studied the economics of publishing or the complex problems of book distribution. This issue is predicated on the importance of publishing in the creation and transmission of knowledge. The publisher, as Lewis Coser points out, stands as a gatekeeper of knowledge. Publishers mediate between those who create knowledge and the intended public. They are at the same time technicians who prepare manuscripts for the printer and binder, artists who often invest a manuscript with style and turn it into a book, businessmen who calculate whether a particular manuscript has a sufficient sales potential, and arbiters of public taste who decide what written material eventually sees the light of day. If knowledge is power, then publishers are in a strong position. Publishing is a complex, enterprise, and we are concerned in this issue with only a limited element of publishing. The contributors deal largely with that segment of publishing which adds, directly or indirectly, to the stock of knowledge in a society or with the transmission of that knowledge. Thus, we are concerned with scholarly publishing, with textbooks, and to some extent with trade publishing. We are not con- cerned with mass market paperbacks, comic books, or pulp fiction. These elements of the publishing enterprise are important, but they fall beyond our. scope. Publishers do not function in a vacuum; they are affected by legal, economic, technical, cultural and personal relations. In an attempt to understand the publishing industry better, the contributors to this issue deal with many diverse but vitally important aspects of the pub- lishing enterprise-the effect of new technologies on the industry; the relationships between editors and authors; the relation between uni- versity presses and the academic world; the relation of large commer- cial publishers to small presses; and the interface between publishing and the broader cultural community. These details of the publishing enterprise are presented in a variety of national settings. Although publishing takes place in a national context, publishers ix

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