🚀 go-pugleaf

curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes:

>...it often happens that government-funded competition in a
>niche field is enough to drive the rest of the pack off the cliff.
>There are already damn few enough publishers who make a profit off
>lit; how many could go ten rounds in the ring with Uncle Sam?  

The fact is that the large majority of publishers of lit
already get grants from one place or another to survive.
Many of them are affiliated with Universities (the Georgia
Review, Mississippi Review, TriQuarterly, etc), and most
are non-profit.  At the other end of the scale are big
publishers, who are in the lit business because of the
educational market (for the "classics"), and because
some editors there have an interest in it, and can balance
the books against the bestsellers in such a way that they
can afford it.

Needless to say, cuts to education (a public good as well)
and govt. endowments have hurt the small presses.  The
only good news is that in the wake of the homogenization
trend in big publishers, more people have become interested
in the non-homogenous small publishers.  But this to me means
that funding is even more necessary, because the small
presses simply do not have the distribution channels
necessary to get to their potential audiences.

				Robert.

PS.  Since I'm sure by now that everyone is hitting the
     'n' key except me and Curtis, I'm going to call it
     quits on this thread, and I invite him to do the
     same.  We can harangue each other ad nauseam in
     person.  :^)