An interesting opinion piece by Tamara Pearson, author of the novel, The Butterfly Prison (Open Books, 2015). She is an activist, journalist, and editor living in Latin America—
The publishing industry’s focus on profits amounts to a censoring of a diversity of viewpoints and experience.Books are lives compressed, humanity summarised into screaming or striking stories. One would think the book world would be a safe haven from inequality, but instead the traditional publishing industry – the big corporate publishers – is perpetuating prejudice and limiting ideas by elevating certain authors, characters, and thoughts above all others, with significant social consequences.The big publishers are big businesses with monopolies over a product, as much as other industries. They are driven by profit, rather than the social importance of books, and only publish books that are a sure thing, causing quality to be lost to lowest-common-denominator marketability. Sure things are books by celebrities, books with a guaranteed (forced) market such as text books and required readings in schools and universities, books on popular genres such as horror and romance, and books by authors who have already been very successful. Just as food monopolies limit food choice and news monopolies restrict our understanding of current events, the book corporations have a monopoly on the ideas, identity, history and perspectives available to us.Publishing industry profits are strong and stable: the rumours that they have been hit by the digital book boom are exaggerated. Publishing companies’ profits sit at around 10 percent, and higher for digital books, which is a middle of the pack profit margin compared to other industries. The US publishing market is worth US$30 billion. According to Forbes, Amazon’s current annual revenue from book sales is US$5.25 billion. Meanwhile, the number of independent book stores, which usually try to sell books for their literary or intellectual quality rather than profitability, have decreased by 50 percent over the past two decades: from 4,000 to under 2,000 in the US. Independent publishers are also struggling.
Read the rest of the post at the link below…..
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