“The reading public is best served by diversity”

April 9, 2024 2:46 PM

A detailed, yet accessible, take on the history of book distribution (mainly but not wholly by small presses), written by Julie Schaper in 2022.
posted by cupcakeninja (2 comments total)

A few times in recent months, I've started a post on the blue about Dan Sinykin's interview with Public Books about what he calls conglomerate publishing, but gave up because there were too many entry points to the discussion. One was that I thought he had some worthwhile thoughts about the structural dilemmas of small (especially nonprofit) publishers that will be of interest to MeFites in this conversation. His overall, Adorno-adjacent take raised questions for me about publishing, of course, but also authorship (for lack of a better term, as you'll see in the article), and things much further afield (like piracy, performance, citation practices, even the weird web trend.) It's deep and wide, that interview, and makes a good companion to the article in the post.
posted by criticalyeast at 6:06 PM on April 9 [1 favorite]

I remember the 1990s as an amazing time for books. And what it became is just such a loss.

In the late 80s I had worked at a B. Dalton, and been exposed there to Ingram and microfiche and the rest of the book-distribution system. Then in the 90s I was living in Boston, just out of college: being able to walk across the city and choose among Waterstone's and Border's and Walden Books and smaller shops was just...an embarrassment of riches.

I worked in a prepress shop, and we had one of the very first full-color digital presses (an Agfa ChromaPress). I was quite sure that all of my beloved bookshops would shortly add a print-on-demand kiosk, and I could get any book in the world on short notice.

In my dream, the distributors would pivot into digitizing old titles, becoming media libraries that could put out physical editions or POD or electronic-only, with variable quality and language and embedded media.

Clearly, my vision was overly optimistic. *sigh*
posted by wenestvedt at 8:59 AM on April 10 [2 favorites]