Quote:
Originally Posted by tubemonkey
As to funding, that should come from the private sector - personal wealth, grants, foundations, etc - not the publishers.
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Aren't the big publishers more "private sector" than givers of grants, and foundations?
Most books published nowadays did not receive any upfront money. Besides self-publishers, there are
thousands of small publishers out there, and I don't think they often finance visits to research libraries, or extensive structural edits. If you want to read books that were not, may I say, monkeyed with by the alleged Manhattan mafia, there are hundreds of new indie titles a day to pick from.
I'm not against people reading those. I just don't think the government, or Amazon, should be pressuring the few publishers who do, sometimes, pay decent advances, to shift to the Amazonian royalty-heavy model. And sensible publishers will charge what their own marketing researchers tell them are the optimum prices, not the optimum prices Amazon finds helpful in driving sales of general merchandise.