Publishing business has not changed so much in the last hundred years as it has in the last ten years. The Eighties marked the new high which has been carried through the Nineties into the new millennium. Companies were bought and sold and again bought and sold at a frenetic pace. Independent publishers with brilliant track records found themselves at the wrong end of the bargaining table and just disappeared or their lists got integrated with the parent company. Just to keep track of these changes, the British trade journal, The Bookseller, ran a report, 'Who Owns Whom in Publishing', in the Nineties. Now they have given up, because publishing has grown to become a sub-division of the burgeoning communications and entertainment industry. What does all this mean? First, and obviously, that publishing has become more global than ever before. This has a host of implications and the trends are all there to see. Three major developments of the Nineties that would significantly affect the structure of publishing in the new millennium and also its international operations need careful analysis. Publishers have to think big. Small printings, scholarly and serious literature that don't sell more than a hundred odd copies worldwide is out. Also, profit margins and rates of return of investment have to be high . Higher printings and higher margins have meant poaching for and buying up 'bestselling' authors, but for a steep price. As a result, publishing companies have had to pay huge advances to authors and, sometimes, even before they had written a single word. But any decent book, mass-market or upmarket, takes three years before publishers can hope to see any revenues from it. What has been most damaging to publishers is that they have increasingly found themselves playing banker to both authors and booksellers. This is particularly true of India. The net effect is that publishers have started to hand out cash, rather than bringing it in. The book divisions of the conglomerates have to generate cash surplus quickly. Book divisions that could not generate a surplus had to be hacked. Cash crunch has become the prime problem in publishing houses today. One way out, apart from tighter credit control over booksellers, is to diversify, or go into journal/magazine publishing. But subscriptions may not come and readers may get their requirements through retail trade. And when publishers fall back on traditional trade outlets, they would have to reckon with the same old problem of unsold copies coming back and delayed payments. But perhaps there is another way out. When authors have to be paid more and printings made larger, a logical solution would be to establish chain bookshops that would be able to handle the mammoth size and get all the kinds of books displayed like high merchandise. There aren't many in India - Landmark and Crosswords come immediately to mind - but bookshops as part of superstores are bound to come up. In the new global supermarket, books are one more commodity and must find their place among everything that is sold.