The crisis in non-fiction publishing
The mainstream may be getting dumber by the day, but we are living in what looks like a golden age of publishing for, of all people, the university presses.
.. we have scads of books telling us about the importance of mindfulness, or forgetfulness, or distraction, or stress. We have any number about what one recent press release called the “always topical” debate between science and religion. We have a whole subcategory that concern themselves with “what it means to be human”.
These are not books that always make our understanding of the world deeper and more complex. They are books that argue that one equation will make sense of economics for us, or tell us why human societies prosper or fail; that “the modern world” came about because of six ideas, or one historically traded commodity, or one decisive battle; they tell us that the key to life on Earth is X, Y or Z. The disproportion between the size of the question proposed, and the simplicity of the pretended answer, is the primary marketing hook.
.. The university presses are turning towards the public because with the big presses not taking these risks, the stuff’s there for the taking.
.. He describes an arms race between inventory management technology and reprint technology in which the former is winning: Amazon and Waterstones will simply order a small run of books and order more only when they run out.