This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Bob Garfield is out this week, a week that we are devoting to the business, the future,

the very definition of books. Two years ago, we did the same thing, and the business landscape has changed,

but one thing that hasn't is fear and loathing. Then, as now, the most common complaint

is that there are too many books.

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 one old complaint.

Historian Adrian Ballet wrote that in 1685.

Plummeting book prices is another.

Next week, we'll see the first anniversary of what the publishing world calls 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 bloodbaths were occurring at a random house, Hout and 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.

Colin Robinson has recently started a publishing venture with a friend John Oakes called Orr Books,

named for their initials, and to suggest an alternative

...