"An irresistible book about Grub Street, authorship and the literary marketplace."—Washington Post Book World Jason Epstein has led arguably the most creative career in book publishing during the past half-century. He founded Anchor Books and launched the quality paperback revolution, cofounded the New York Review of Books, and created of the Library of America, the prestigious publisher of American classics, and The Reader's Catalog, the precursor of online bookselling. In this short book he discusses the severe crisis facing the book business today—a crisis that affects writers and readers as well as publishers—and looks ahead to the radically transformed industry that will revolutionize the idea of the book as profoundly as the introduction of movable type did five centuries ago.

A volume that concentrates on the substantive gaps in the IB/IM field and addresses whether these gaps are resolvable with the theoretical and methodological toolkit.

The world’s foremost business thinkers explore organizations can be redesigned to survive and thrive in tomorrow’s hypercompetitive global environment.

With growing populations across the world consuming Earth’s limited oil and natural gas reserves, the environmental and economic toll of energy dependence becomes an increasingly global concern. The development of renewable forms of energy—solar, wind, water, and geothermal, to name a few—offers alternatives to fossil fuels. Consumers are embracing these new modes of energy delivery and use. This extensive volume examines the possibility of a cleaner and more energy efficient future by detailing the historic and emerging technologies behind some the most promising alternative resources.

This publication traces the corporate path to power and influence in the modern world, and explores whether corporations of the future will become superpowers in their own right or, like the dinosaurs, give way to superior forms. It examines how the emergence of empire-building firms in 16th century Europe gave way to the dominance of American corporations in the 19th and 20th centuries, which is now under threat as new types of corporations arise in China and elsewhere. The book offers surprising insights, such as why the explorer Sebastian Cabot incorporated while Christopher Columbus did not, how the US Constitution’s silence on corporations gave rise to America’s industrial dominance, and how a 19th century company making matches emerged as the Amazon of its day only to later lose its technological edge. It also discusses the many ways in which societies attempt to reign in corporate power, and the strategies of corporations to bypass controls. The text, furthermore, considers the startling ways in which new social movements, emerging business models and developing technologies—from bitcoin to artificial intelligence—will shape the corporations of the future. This book will introduce readers to the legal concept of a corporation, along with the economic and societal factors that gave rise to it as the primary means of conducting business in the modern world. With its broad sweep of history, current relevance, and insightful look to the future, this text will appeal to both scholarly and general audiences.

Part-memoir, part-history, The Business of Books is an irascible, acute and often passionate account of the collapsing standards of contemporary book publishing. It has appeared throughout the world in seventeen different editions. Book jacket.

To understand business and its political, cultural, and economic context, it helps to view it historically, yet most business histories look no further back than the nineteenth century. The full sweep of business history actually begins much earlier, with the initial cities of Mesopotamia. In the first book to describe and explain these origins, Roberts depicts the society of ancient traders and consumers, tracing the roots of modern business and underscoring the relationship between early and modern business practice. Roberts's narrative begins before business, which he defines as selling to voluntary buyers at a profit. Before business, he shows, the material conditions and concepts for the pursuit of profit did not exist, even though trade and manufacturing took place. The earliest business, he suggests, arose with the long distance trade of early Mesopotamia, and expanded into retail, manufacturing and finance in these command economies, culminating in the Middle Eastern empires. (Part One) But it was the largely independent rise of business, money, and markets in classical Greece that produced business much as we know it. Alexander the Great's conquests and the societies that his successors created in their kingdoms brought a version of this system to the old Middle Eastern empires, and beyond. (Part Two) At Rome this entrepreneurial market system gained important new features, including business corporations, public contracting, and even shopping malls. The story concludes with the sharp decline of business after the 3rd century CE. (Part Three) In each part, Roberts portrays the major new types of business coming into existence. He weaves these descriptions into a narrative of how the prevailing political, economic, and social culture shaped the nature and importance of business and the status, wealth, and treatment of business people. Throughout, the discussion indicates how much (and how little) business has changed, provides a clear picture of what business actually is, presents a model for understanding the social impact of business as a whole, and yields stimulating insights for public policy today.