This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Bob Garfield is out this week, a week in which we're offering an updated version

of a previously broadcast show devoted to the business, the future, the very definition of books.

The landscape keeps changing, but whenever we consider books, we encounter fear and loathing

and the common complaint that there are just too many of them. We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion

will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

Too many books is an old complaint. Historian Adrian Ballett wrote that in 1685. Plummeting

book prices is another. In the publishing world, December 3rd, 2008 stands out as the day when the

industry's struggles climaxed in some metaphorical bloodletting. They call it Black Wednesday.

On that day, Colin Robinson was a relatively recently hired senior editor at Scribner. That morning, I was called into my boss's office,

the corner office, and there were two of them were in there, and they said, would I close the door?

That's always a bad sign.

And they offered me the comfortable chair. And at that point, I thought, oh, this is it.

And similar blood baths were occurring at a random house, Houten Mifflin, Harper Collins?

There were a lot of layoffs that day.

Why they all decided to do it on one day?

I don't know.

Last year, Colin Robinson started a publishing venture with a friend, John Oakes, called Orr Books,

named for their initials and to suggest an alternative way of doing business. Because they say people still love books, but in

our excruciatingly cluttered media environment, people and books have a much harder time

finding each other.

First of all, there is a huge overproduction of titles. Writing books is incredibly easy,

much much easier than it used to be. You can get it edited electronically,

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