I keep hoping the corporations will realize that publishing is not, in fact, a sane or normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. The practices of literary publishing houses are, in almost every way, by normal business standards, impractical, exotic, abnormal, insane.
Parts of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. And how-to books and that kind of thing have good market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature: art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It is seldom a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.
So why don’t the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at least the literary departments of publishers they have bought, with amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don’t they let them go back to muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay the printers, the editors, modest advances and crummy royalties, and plowing most profits back into taking chances on new writers? There’s no hope of creating new readers other than the kids coming up through the schools, who are no longer taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons; not only is the relative number of readers unlikely to see any kind of useful increase, it may well keep shrinking. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it? Why don’t you dump the ungrateful little pikers and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?
Is it because you think if you own publishing you can control what’s printed, what’s written, what’s read? Well, lotsa luck, sir. It’s a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt.
From Ursula K. Le Guin’s 2008 essay “Staying Awake While We Read” as collected in The Wild Girls.
Biblioklept 