Book Business: publishing past, present and future Jason Epstein W W Norton, 188pp, £16.95 ISBN 0393049841

Jason Epstein's book is the third in the past 12 months to describe the passing of an era in publishing. Like Diana Athill's Stet and Andre Schiffrin's The Business of Books, it records how an industry that once consisted of small firms, many of them led by the charismatic and wilful people who had founded them, became dominated by a few international media conglomerates; and how a community of serious readers, who had sustained the efforts of literary imprints, fractured. Athill's book is a literary memoir, recalling her career at the Bloomsbury firm of Andre Deutsch, and her relationships with authors including V S Naipaul and Jean Rhys, with a fine and unsentimental candour. Schiffrin's account of how his brand of radical publishing came to be sidelined at the conglomerate where he worked is an embittered but lively polemic.

Book Business is half-polemic, half-memoir. Epstein was a colleague of Schiffrin at Random House in New York. He, too, is critical of the role of the conglomerates in publishing, but he does not share Schiffrin's anger about their growing power. Where Schiffrin sees a reactionary, philistine destructiveness, Epstein sees the inevitable attempt of a capitalist organisation to maximise its investments. He is more concerned than Schiffrin with evoking people and atmosphere, but he lacks Athill's insights into character and her literary skill.

However, Book Business does contain some enjoyable vignettes. William Faulkner waiting, with manuscript as baggage, for a subway train to take him to his editor: "a coatless, white-crested, red-faced Mississippi bantam amid the colourless northern poultry". Terry Southern "sitting on a wooden table in the basement mailroom [at Random House] next to the postage machine, cackling in his exaggerated Texas drawl over scenes he was writing for Dr Strangelove". Edmund Wilson putting on a magic show for his family and the visiting Epstein, who becomes the sole member of the audience after Wilson's daughter grows bored. Wilson again, ordering half a dozen martinis at the Princeton Club and then asking Epstein if he would like the same quantity. Bennett Cerf, the Random House publisher, responding to a rival's promotion of a glamorous author with an advertisement featuring the elderly Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B Toklas, under the headline "We have glamour girls too".

Publishing, one infers, was once an easy, tolerant, civilised world, in which eccentricity was accommodated without fuss. Random House, when Epstein arrived there in 1957, was one of the larger US publishers, but was still essentially a cottage industry - "an unusually happy, second family". Then came mergers and consolidation, under the corporate ownership of RCA, Si Newhouse's Advance Publications (the owner of the Conde Nast magazine group) and now the German media giant Bertelsmann. Epstein does not, as Schiffrin does, despise these groups and everything they stand for. But he does deplore many of the trends of which they are part.

While publishing has consolidated, so has bookselling, with a few large chains rapidly increasing their shares of the market. But these chains, in order to finance their growing costs, have had to seek increasing rates of turnover from a business that traditionally hosts a wide range of slow- moving stock. Hence the difficulties of Waterstone's in the UK. A chain that once relied on the distinctive abilities of its shop-floor staff has sought to impose more central controls, ensuring the stocking of titles that computers say will make the best returns. The management is right: it does not make sense for shops to take up shelf space with thousands of titles that do not sell. But it seems that some quality essential to bookselling cannot be subjected to management efficiencies.

Meanwhile, publishers grow ever more obsessed with the bestsellers that the chains want, at the expense of their backlists - the titles of enduring value that will sell for years and years, and without which no publisher can survive for long. Eventually, Epstein writes, corporate publishing and bookselling will collapse under their own contradictions.

Just as conventional publishing falls into "terminal decrepitude", along comes what Epstein believes to be the technology to transform the book business, connecting writers and readers as never before: the internet. He does not mean Amazon: the world's largest online retailer, he argues, cannot survive in its present form. What he does mean is the potential to create huge online inventories of titles that, being digital, are forever in print, and which may be accessed at the click of a mouse. No more out-of-stock reports, no more long delays in getting hold of the title you want, and no more publishing dinosaurs. But it seems premature to write off the likes of Random House and Time Warner, which may prove to be more skilful in adapting to the new literary market place than Epstein predicts.

Nicholas Clee is editor of the Bookseller

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