The New Economics of the Art Book

When Steidl entered preliminary insolvency proceedings in July, many read its predicament as symbolic of a wider decline in the art-book industry. After all, if the publisher often described as ‘the Gold Standard’ could no longer make the numbers add up, what hope was there for everyone else?

‘First domino to fall?’ wrote TBW Books, an independent photobook publisher in California, commenting on Instagram. ‘If the big cat’s not eating, what does that mean for us kittens?’

American photographer Roger Ballen articulated what many were thinking when he wrote on another thread discussing Steidl’s fate: ‘People are not growing up with books but with a phone in their hands [with] which they can experience imagery at no cost whatsoever… in the end it’s a world overwhelmed with images.”

And despite Steidl’s exit from proceedings a fortnight later, seemingly still in a position to pick and choose a new investor, the whole debacle – including unpaid wages, reputational damage and lost rights to license works by Günter Grasse, one year ahead of the Nobel laureate’s 100th birthday – serves as an eye-opener to the precarious position of contemporary art-book publishing.

William Eggleston, The Democratic Forest

The Democratic Forest by William Eggleston, edited by Mark Holborn and published by Steidl in 2015

Nobody doubts that high-end illustrated publishing has become more difficult. Production costs have risen sharply. International shipping has become vastly more expensive. Energy prices remain high. Distribution networks have weakened, while export markets have become increasingly unpredictable. Steidl’s founder and owner Gerhard Steidl blamed the latter in an interview with Deutschlandfunk Kultur’s daily arts podcast, Fazit, saying that US tariffs and Chinese censorship had halved export sales.

But those cost and logistical factors alone cannot explain what is happening. ”The bigger problem is simply that there are too many books being published,” says Rudi Thoemmes, a veteran antiquarian bookseller and Bristol-based publisher who recently launched a new venture, Foxed Editions, specialising in overlooked historical material.

Meanwhile, the barriers to entry have also fallen. “What has changed is that it’s now possible to produce high-quality books in relatively small print runs of 300 to 600 copies and still sell them for under £40,” says Thoemmes. “Twenty years ago that simply wasn’t possible as a commercial enterprise.”

The result has been extraordinary creative diversity in photobook making. Commercially, however, that abundance has created new pressures. Hundreds of titles now compete every season for the attention of a specialist readership that remains relatively small, and which is probably shrinking. Rising production costs result in higher prices, while at the same time, artists and publishers have been experimenting with formats that push their books into new price brackets.

At the Still Point, four volumes presenting photographs from The Manfred Heiting Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2022. Courtesy Steidl

‘More and more photographers are producing an ever-growing number of ambitious projects for a group of collectors and photobook enthusiasts that is barely expanding and is steadily growing older,’ says Manfred Heiting, a Los Angeles-based collector, editor and historian of photography, in an opinion piece published in Profifoto, a German magazine. ‘The result is an increasing number of good books aimed largely at the same buyers. A photobook priced at €65 to €80 can still find an audience. But when it must cost €130 to €150 simply to cover its increased costs, an ambitious cultural product quickly becomes a luxury object.’

An industry insider, who insists on speaking anonymously, tells The Art Journal: “People are buying fewer books generally, and they’re definitely buying fewer photobooks. The decline, which was already happening, was tempered during COVID because people’s consumption changed. There was a sense that maybe actually it wasn’t so bad. But we’re over that period now, and the market has plummeted.

“There’s the commercial publishing model on one side, and the one-man band on the other. You either have to sell 10,000 copies, or you have the 750-copy model. There’s basically nothing in between. The model of selling 5,000 copies has largely gone.”

The small independents – the ‘one-man bands’ – came to prominence with the rise of social media and the wider public adoption of online buying. However, says the insider, “the direct-to-consumer model, which everybody talks about as a kind of saving grace, is completely compromised – no, made impossible by the cost of shipping”, which has become the biggest challenge of all.

Meanwhile, some of the sector’s more established publishing houses have survived by finding wealthy patrons rather than corporate owners: American billionaire and financier Leon Black acquired Phaidon Press in 2012, while Swiss billionaire businesswoman Vera Michalski (sister of collector and philanthropist Maja Hoffmann) absorbed French art publisher Delpire Editions into the Libella group of publishing houses.

“Editorial skills have become more widespread, for better or worse,” says Mark Holborn, the veteran book editor and designer who worked on Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) and Chris Killip’s In Flagrante (1988), and countless others since. “We’ve all become more sophisticated about appreciating qualities of production, so we understand the potential of printing a bit better. But printing is getting more expensive. Paper is getting terribly expensive. And the trade model is very dependent on China. There is really good printing coming out of China, using Heidelberg presses just as the best European printer might, but you’re subject to scrutiny by censors.”

Holborn points to the problems recently encountered by the V&A outlined in a Guardian investigation that found that the museum had given in to demands of Beijing’s General Administration of Press and Publication to censor its exhibition catalogues.

“We’d all be self-publishing if there wasn’t this question of distribution,” says Holborn, “because publishers would be redundant. But publishers create the model for distribution, and they handle all that difficult and expensive stuff like warehousing and accounting… You have to have a handful of bookshops where you have this encounter with the physical object. But to actually start moving numbers, you’ve got to have a strategy for how you present the projects online.”