“The recent changes in publishing discussed in these pages demonstrate
the application of market theory to the dissemination of culture. … The market,
it is argued, is a sort of ideal democracy. It is not up to the elite to impose
their values on readers, publishers claim, it is up to the public to choose
what it wants—and if what it wants is increasingly downmarket and limited in
scope, so be it. The higher profits are proof that the market is working as it
should.
Traditionally,
ideas were exempted from the usual expectations of profit. It was often assumed
that books propounding new approaches and different theories would lose money,
certainly at the outset. The phrase ‘the
free marketplace of ideas’ does not refer to the market value of each idea. On
the contrary, what it means is that ideas of all sorts should have a chance to
be put to the public, to be expressed and argued fully and not in soundbites.
For much of the
twentieth century, trade publishing as a whole was seen as a break-even
operation. Profit would come when books reached a broader audience through book clubs or paperback sales. If this was
true of nonfiction, it was doubly true of literature. Most first novels were
expected to lose money (and many authors have been described as writing a lot
of first novels). Nonetheless, there have always been publishers who regard
publishing new novelists as an important part of their overall output.
New ideas and new
authors take time to catch on. It might be years before a writer finds an
audience large enough to justify the costs of publishing her book. Even in the
long run the market cannot be an appropriate judge of an idea’s value, as is
obvious from the hundreds, indeed thousands, of great books that have never
made money. Thus, the new approach—deciding to publish only those books that
can be counted on for an immediate profit—automatically eliminates a vast
number of important works from catalogs.
(From The Business of Books, Chapter 4, "Market Censorship")
