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 much more complicated than that because increasingly, the old and new are merging into one another.

This week, we're devoting the program to the oldest of old media, books.

Chances are you'll be buying one or two this holiday season, but where and how you'll buy them

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 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,

...