From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield. The new media are

thriving. The old media are dying. That seems to be the theme of our program from week to week to

week. But of course, it's all much more complicated than that, because increasingly the old and the new

are merging into one another. This week, we were playing a show we first aired last fall,

which was devoted entirely to the oldest of old media, books.

Chances are you'll be buying one soon,

but where and how you'll buy it and in what form are open questions.

Nowadays, some 60% of all books are not bought in brick and mortar

bookstores. They're purchased at airports or checkout counters, Walmart, or Costco, Toys R Us,

or William Sonoma, or online. In case you were wondering, 11% are purchased from Amazon.com.

The rest are bought at bookstores, but mostly the big chains.

The membership of the American Booksellers Association, which serves independent bookstores,

has dropped from more than 5,000 to roughly 1,700 in the last decade.

Should we decry the state of publishing today?

One of the reasons why it's fashionable or why it's common to decry its state is because most of the major publishing houses are now owned by conglomerates and foreign conglomerates at that.

Sarah Nelson is editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly. And they're publicly traded companies for the most part.

So there is a demand on the part of editors and publishers to have double-digit growth.

You know, it used to be a rich family owned a publishing house.

And they published books because they wanted to publish them,

not because they expected to make 12%.

I mean, in those days, private equity was Nelson Doubleday opening his checkbook.

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