Comments and other stimuli (from real life) have had me considering my post from the other day about the publishing industry and its motivations, etc. I have to admit, there is a tremendous selection out there now, and more than ever before, thanks to the near ubiquity of Borders and the internet (just discovered abebooks.com, truly the store to end all stores). But in the same way that the tremendous proliferation of available news still has people watching the same few networks, having more books within reach doesn't mean we're reading more different things. It makes me wonder whether the current publishing boom might simply be unsustainable - in the case of news, where cheap airwaves and the internet have made publishing literally a matter of a click or two, reporting and content have become the limiting factor. This is part of the reason blogs have emerged, and probably the main reason they started as so much delight in form (ie the primacy of the link) rather than in content. But with books, we don't have an annointed electronic format, so economies of scale still push publishers toward quantity rather than diversity.
Anyway, I still think it's deplorable that NU Press is closing the spigot on foreign lit in translation, but I guess it seems kind of absurd to be complaining about this in the middle of a publishing bubble and at a time of unprecedented availability and selection. Bemoaning the publishing industry's bestseller focus seems equally absurd, because the whole industry is on the verge of a massive transformation, as new technologies become available. Will this mean a complete democratization of artistic production?
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