Chapter four: Publishing and me
I have worked in a sales division of a book store company for nine years. When I started to work, I didn't think that I would work for this company for a long time. For most people, Book is what to read, not to sell. Actually, I didn't have any interest in this job at first. Still now, I am not sure that this job is the best one for me. But humans are designed to be flexible to the condition we are in. I could find the interesting point of my job.
Books treat knowledge. Therefore, I can keep in touch with a lot of knowledge in my job. Some knowledge are useful, but some are useless and boring. But we can learn something from even useless knowledge. It is meaningful to know that it is useless.
My customers are University professors, Company engineers, doctors, researchers, teachers, lawyers, librarians and so on. They have their own special knowledge. I can learn many things through my daily job. This is the best point of my job.
I can say that book sales is to circulate knowledge in a society. Any great knowledge can't be conveyed freely in our society. It has a price. Once it has a price, it is conveyed very smoothly, because many people try to sell and advertise it.
We can watch the top ten rankings of books in a newspaper or a magazine. The top one is often a religious book in Japan. Even religion has to sell what it wants to say. So, I think that book-sales is very important job.
I can sell any kinds of book; novels, magazines, school textbooks, comic books and so on. But it is not my mission to sell them. These books can be bought in many bookstores. My mission is to sell minor books. These books are difficult to sell. This is why a book salesman is needed.
But, I haven't heard that a book salesman exists in foreign countries. Everybody knows a car salesman, a house salesman or an insurance salesman. But when they hear of a book salesman, they say "What is it?" I can understand such a question. The job to sell minor books, is also minor.
I am going to explain the background of publishing world in Japan at first. There are about 20 thousands bookstores in Japan. It doesn't include convenience stores, which sells many magazines and comics. In fact, the company selling publications most is a convenience store company; Seven-Eleven. But we don't regard a convenience store as an authentic bookstore. So, I can say that bookstores are about 20 thousand.
This number is twice as much as that in America. When thinking that Japan is small, we can know that there are too many bookstores in Japan. I don't know the exact reason for so many bookstores, but anyway we have good circumstances to know and buy a book.
About 60 thousands of books a year are published in Japan. This number doesn't include magazines and journals. So, 200 new books are born everyday.
Nobody can read all publications now. In addition, the staffs in a bookstore can't even put all books on a book shelf. The space of shelves is limited. The bookstore has to select what should be displayed. Therefore, some books aren't even put in a bookstore even after publication. These kinds of books are regarded as minor books.
Moreover, foreign books are regarded as minor books too.
As we know, Japan is an internationally popular country now. And, we study not only English but also other languages in a school. But the market of foreign books is small. Therefore, selling foreign books become my job.
Why doesn’t Japanese read foreign books? The main reason is clearly, the problem of our foreign language level. But I think that we have another reason. We have very rich translation culture in Japan. Many important foreign books are translated to Japanese soon. So, Japanese readers don’t have to read foreign books which are difficult to read for them. If they wait for a while, they can read the same books in easy Japanese. I think that this culture is strongly related to the first main reason, the problem of our foreign language level.
Too many translated books don’t motivate us to study foreign languages.
For an interesting example, many University students study English literature as their major, but many can’t read English. They graduate without reading original books, but reading translated versions only.
Computer book is a genre of book which is translated to Japanese in the fastest way, because IT technology is changing rapidly. My friend (He is an IT engineer.) told me that the technology of half a year ago has already been old-fashioned in the world.
So, publishers have to translate the books very fast. This is why the foreign language level of Japanese IT engineers are not high, even though their intellectual level is basically high.
This translation culture in Japan is certainly easy for us. We can get much information and knowledge very smoothly. But the bad point is the negative influence in our language study, as I said above. And sometimes we suffer from wrong translation, or bad translation. Some translated books are more difficult to read and understand than the original one. So, we can see the same book translated again and again, in a book store.
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Going back to the explanation of the background of publishing world in Japan, we have about 5 thousands publishers. I think this number is very big. Thinking about other industries, most of them don’t have 5 thousand maker companies.
Why are there so many publishing companies?
It is related to our right of free speech. To insure the right, we must have not only the freedom to write, but also the way to spread out publications. So establishing a publishing company is free in our Constitution. Although making a new company is regulated by many laws generally, publishing is not. Thus it is very easy to be an owner of a publishing company.
But in fact, most of 5 thousand companies are small. Employees of a company are under 10, sometimes even one.
I know some one-person publishers. They are the presidents of the company. In addition, they are salesmen, editors, telephone operators and sometimes even delivery drivers. They have to do everything, so they are very busy. But they don’t look tired.
They make books they like, and sell them. If their sales go well constantly, their job should not be stressful.
Their weak point is that they can’t make popular books, because it is difficult for them to compete with big publishers, which release a lot of popular books.
So, small publishers have to find a minor area where big companies don’t exist. But on the other hand, minor areas are difficult for business.
One of my partner publisher published a translated “Sharlock Homes” book recently. It is a reprint of the translation of about 100 years ago, when Japan was in Meiji period. It’s so maniac. I guess that the copyright fee of the original is almost zero. So, the publication is very easy.
But, who wants to read such an old translation of “Sharlock Homes”?
From my experience of book sales, this book is going to be out of print soon, unfortunately.
However, I can understand the significance of the old “Sharlock Homes” to some extent. We might be able to trace the history of Japanese translation culture from it. The book might help us to understand modern Japanese language more deeply, compared with old Japanese.
Thus, even though the book wouldn’t be sold so much, the publishing of it is meaningful. I can say that my job, is to find the supporter of minor books.
For minor books, the biggest supporter is a library.
Therefore my biggest customer is a library.
