David Streitfeld has an interesting piece over at the Times about the shock wave of layoffs that just hit book publishers, and — cue scandalized tone — he doesn’t even blame it (all) on the recession. Instead, he points at the readers, and it’s not that we’re not reading. It’s that we’re reading so differently, and just like every other media business, book publishers are furiously spinning their wheels to figure out how to adapt:

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it wouldn’t be acquiring any new manuscripts, a move akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat… Don’t blame this carnage on the recession or any of the usual suspects, including increased competition for the reader’s time or diminished attention spans. What’s undermining the book industry is not the absence of casual readers but the changing habits of devoted readers.

In other words, it’s all the fault of people like myself, who increasingly use the Internet both to buy books and later, after their value to us is gone, sell them. This is not about Amazon peddling new books at discounted prices, which has been a factor in the book business for a decade, but about the rise of a worldwide network of amateurs who sell books from their homes or, if they’re lazy like me, in partnership with an Internet dealer who does all the work for a chunk of the proceeds.

The great thing, as he says, is that “more books are available for less effort and less money than ever before.” The bad thing is that as consumers give less of their money to the bookstores, fewer publishing houses take chances on books, particularly by new authors, because they can’t be sure of selling them. Rock (the way we’re getting our books now), meet Hard Place (the economy).

Moonrat, a professional acquisitions editor at a small fiction press, summarizes the problem beautifully in her post, C[r]rash Flow (Or What Went Wrong in October in Book Publishing. She says, “Now you can see the ripples that are happening, the layoffs, the dwindling advances, the precautions about acquiring anything in this climate. If publishing companies are shelling out money to publish books that bookstores only bother to stock for a minute and a half [in an already miniscule profit-margin industry -Ed.], we are all going to hemorrhage money until there is nothing left standing.”

Now, I probably shouldn’t be talking. While I DID get several brand new books for Christmas, I also just spent $9.15, plus some shipping, to get three books and two dvds off Half.com. This is great for me, since I’m poor, but terrible for the industry, since authors, editors and publishers, who put all the work into making the book, don’t get paid for these copies.  Streitfeld says, “In theory, I want to support all of these fine folks. In practice, I decide to save a buck. ” And since I work in media, I feel doubly dirty. Like I’m looting from my brother’s house.

Newspapers are in a similar position, and flailing desperately for a way to make a profit. At most papers, the quality of the news is still relatively high (though continuing layoffs and the cutting of fact-checking departments are troublesome trends), but they’re not making enough money off it anymore, as readers go online and refuse to, or aren’t able to, pay for the privilege. More on that here.

So, what’s to be done? The brain must be fed!

Editorial Ass and several thousand others have proposed that we Buy a Book and Save the World. This means that you go out and buy just one book. From Amazon, from a bookstore, on sale, whatever, as long as it’s brand-new and retail. Used books don’t send any profits back to the publisher or author, so while my Half.com purchases are great for my own enrichment, they’re a little selfish in that sense. And if you’ve read ANYTHING in the past year that’s touched you, imagine if an editor read that manuscript but had to turn it down, and it never reached you.

Guys, I’m doing it. In fact, I’m working on a post with a list of all the books I intend to read in 2009 (with a few of my top recommendations from 2008), and I fully pledge to buy AT LEAST half of them in a way where some pennies will make their way back to the authors and editors. Can’t promise to pay full-price on all of them, or even that they will all get read, but if you get a book from me on your birthday, you know why.