*The corporate masters of publishing houses can’t afford literature. They seem to have worked themselves into a corner as dire as that of real estate. Their industry got financialized and it hyper-evolved to the point of collapse.
*Unfortunately, since they’re simply culture rather than banking, they can’t expect a bailout. The risk here is a burnt-out cultural landscape that resembles Socialist Realism. It’s like a soft-power unilateral disarmament. The apparent logic of maximized profit creates a gray and chilly society where nothing pays off but banks, guns and jails.
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/11/express/is-publishing-doomed-john-b-thompson-with-williams-cole
(…)
“Thompson: Absolutely. The publishing industry is in trouble—but not just because of the digital revolution. The real trouble for the publishing industry, in my view, has more to do with the gradual unfolding of this economic transformation that led to this structure of publishing, where we now have five large corporate groups and a small number of retail chains dominating the industry. These corporations have to achieve growth year on year, and when that top line revenue begins to fall, as it did when the 2008 economic recession suddenly tipped the narrow profit margins into the red, it has devastating impact throughout and the only way that they can preserve the profit at the bottom line is to push people out, and to reduce their overheads and costs dramatically.
“You don’t see this in the small houses but the big corporations respond quickly, immediately, because their absolute priority is to protect that bottom line profitability, which they have to report to their corporate bosses. And so that was the real crisis in the publishing industry in the autumn of 2008 to the present. Now, it also happened to be conjoined with an upsurge in e–book sales. …”
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