Eric Wolff went to work for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company after graduating from college in the spring of 2005. As he described it at the time on his Facebook page, he spent the following summer reading books that “warn of the inadequacy of the American Dream, and how it tempts generally good, intelligent people to sell the better parts of themselves for lives they later wish they could relive.” By reading these books, Mr. Wolff hoped he would be able to escape such a grim fate.

Two years later, he left McKinsey and enrolled instead in the Columbia Publishing Course, the immensely popular, six-week book-biz training seminar that has been taught since 1988 by former publishing executive Lindy Hess. After the course concluded, Ms. Hess—who serves as a mentor to many of industry’s most prominent figures—did for Mr. Wolff what she tries to do for all her students at the end of each summer: helped him find a job as an editorial assistant.

He landed at Little, Brown and Company and while he sensed that its parent company, the French publishing giant Hachette, worked relatively well—that its editors were more disciplined than its competitors when it came to acquisition and apparently more talented at picking out cheap books that turn out to be surprise hits—Mr. Wolff said he knew just as well that Hachette was vulnerable to the same blunders as the competition, often investing in “expensive brand-name flops” and “overpaying for prestige … unproven hype … and countless small, unprofitable ‘passion’ acquisitions that distract people from profitable operations but are the reason most people—at least at the literary houses—stay in publishing.”

Such observations were above Mr. Wolff’s pay-grade, however, and when he tried to raise them with Hachette’s CEO, David Young, he was not encouraged. Frustrated by the bars on the cage in which he read manuscripts and took messages for the editor he assisted, Mr. Wolff decided to return to finance, and in June took a job as an analyst at a small West Coast–based hedge fund.

His plan was and remains to become wealthy enough to return to New York and use his capital to erect a healthy new publishing empire in the midst of the infected, hobbling ones that exist at present.

Writing from Chennai, India, this week, where he has been stationed since the fall, Mr. Wolff, now 26, predicted that the constellation of corporately owned publishing houses that dominate today’s industry—Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Group, and even the relatively vital Hachette—will not survive the current upheaval intact.

“Truth is, there isn’t a whole lot of reason for a big media company to own a book company unless it wants to be in that business,” Mr. Wolff said. “Corporations generally want growth stories, and there’s no growth in books.”

His hope, he said, is that the CEOs of those corporations will realize they actually don’t want anything to do with books anymore and jump ship. Then trade publishing will “return to what it once was, and what it is probably best suited for: a prestige business for rich people.”

 

MR. WOLFF WAS SAYING this about one week after Jeremy Dickers, the president of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s parent company, an Irish multimedia concern formerly known as Riverdeep, told The New York Times that he was open to selling off the trade divisions of the company if the right offer came along. That remark was made in the wake of the revelation that editors at Houghton’s trade division could no longer acquire new books because there was no room for it in the budget—an order that led yesterday morning to the resignation of publisher Becky Saletan. The stunning measure followed several years during which Education Media and Publishing Group Limited, as Riverdeep is now known, was buying up publishing properties and sculpting them into what its CEO, Barry O’Callaghan, had hoped would become a lucrative complement to his core business of educational books and software. Facing overwhelming debt, Mr. O’Callaghan must now consider unloading the part of his publishing empire that draws its meager revenues from authors like Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer and J.R.R. Tolkien.

The fact that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade division is tacitly for sale is not a new development; such had been the case, despite the reluctance of its leadership to admit it, ever since 2007, when Riverdeep completed the merger that created HMH. Other publishing houses whose owners are thought to be losing interest in the book business include CBS-owned Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, which News Corp.’s chairman, Rupert Murdoch, considered selling last year to Random House.

How long can these publishing houses expect to remain part of companies whose enthusiasm for holding them up has so clearly waned? Might an undoing of the corporate consolidation that seemed at one point so irreversible be on the horizon? The possibility has young publishing professionals like Mr. Wolff using their imagination, and wondering why those global giants now saddled with cumbersome publishing properties felt moved to get tangled up in books in the first place.

“It‘s hard for me to imagine a big corporation that’s not already involved in books wanting to buy a publishing company now,” said Laura Owen, who spent a year working at independently owned Skyhorse Publishing after graduating from Harvard in 2006 and currently serves as the editor of the monthly trade newsletter Publishing Trends. “I mean, it’s funny. There must have been something that was more appealing about it then.”

Thirty-two-year-old Jofie Ferrari-Adler, who works as an editor at the independently owned house Grove/Atlantic Inc., said he questions the wisdom of a business model for books based on corporate ownership and consolidation because ideas about synergy and economies of scale, which he thinks emboldened big media to pursue publishing houses in years past, have proven to be wrong-headed or short-sighted.

“I wasn’t around when it started happening, and I have never understood it. And from all the things I’ve read and all the things I’ve heard from people with more experience in the industry, nobody seems to understand it,” Mr. Ferrari-Adler said in an email. “There just isn’t any real growth in this business, at least not the kind that shareholders want.”

He added that while he has no illusions about modern financial realities, he doesn’t see who benefited from the big media companies’ involvement besides a “pretty small group of huge authors who the big groups can afford to overpay.”

“Book divisions are a fucking blip on the balance sheets of these companies. What’s the point?” he wrote.

He added that he wishes there were more good souls—“book people, not businesspeople”—who are willing to “try to raise some money and buy some of these great old houses that nobody seems to want and run them like publishing houses instead of like some kind of big-growth businesses that they’re never going to be.”

This is basically what Mr. Wolff has in mind, and while he concedes that the more commercial houses might get along fine being housed in profit-driven global conglomerates, “prestige” shops like Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Knopf “don’t belong at big corporations.”

The question now, according to Mr. Wolff, is “how many very wealthy people care enough about books to buy or support a publishing company?”

Fordham business school professor Al Greco, who is writing a book about the changes book publishing has gone through during the past 30 years, said Mr. Wolff’s vision for the future is not impossible.

“What you’re talking about is going back to the old model. Could that happen? It could,” he said, noting, however, that he hadn’t seen any evidence that the big media companies were losing interest in publishing.

“Could a Warren Buffett or a Bill Gates or anyone who’s a billionaire buy one of these companies and take it private and run it as a personal operation devoted to good books regardless of commercial success? It could happen,” Mr. Greco added.  “It would just take someone with a different vision and a lot of capital to keep the house afloat.”

Mr. Wolff, for his part, contends that what he has in mind would not be so expensive at all.

“You do not need a huge fortune to run a publishing company in this way,” he said. “There are hundreds of incredible, accessible books that are stuck on backlists with no marketing budgets. Buying these or out-of-print books, if you can get your hands on them, costs a fraction of buying a new book.”

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Wolff’s teacher at the Columbia Course, Lindy Hess, remembered her former student as an ambitious young man who left the industry because of an outsize sense of idealism and impatience for how things really work.

Ms. Hess said she saw parallels between Mr. Wolff’s vision and Atlas & Co., the independent house founded last year by her friend, the author and editor James Atlas, which recently bumped into a budget shortfall that forced a postponement of its entire spring 2009 list while its proprietor looks for new investors.

“Jim is a brilliant writer and publisher, but his list really is eclectic in a way that represents his interests,” Ms. Hess said. “That’s what Eric Wolff wants, and it’s a very difficult way to run a publishing house. I don’t think that Eric’s idea or even Jim Atlas’s idea, which may be viable for Jim or may not be—I hope it is!—is viable for the industry.”

Most of her students, Ms. Hess said, understand that. 

“I don’t think people in my course think about Maxwell Perkins and the good old days,” she said. “Graduates of the course come into the industry with a real knowledge of the marketplace as it is. I feel my job is to temper their idealism with real-world business knowledge, and not to kill it.”

“This is a business,” she said. “We are not in the business of dictating public tastes.”

Tell it to Mr. Wolff.

lneyfakh@observer.com