Big publishing houses often buy out small, independent publishers, just to push them (and their books) into oblivion! The #internetArchive was helping to keep those books from being lost to history!

The End of Progressive Book Publishing in the Age of Monopoly Capital?

Tom Engelhardt 09/28/2022

"After all, like Pantheon, at the moment of its demise, it was a lively, deeply progressive operation, churning out powerful new titles — until, that is, it was essentially shut down when Sara, a miraculous publisher like André, was shown the door along with her staff. Bam! What did it matter that, thanks to her, Metropolitan still occupied a space filled by no other house in mainstream publishing? Nothing obviously, not to Holt, or assumedly Macmillan, the giant American publishing conglomerate of which it was a part, or the German Holtzbrinck Publishing Group that owns Macmillan.

"How strange that we’re in a world where two such publishing houses, among the best and most politically challenging around, could find that there simply was no place for them as progressive publishers in the mainstream. André [Schiffrin], who died in 2013, responded by launching an independent publishing house, #TheNewPress, an admirable undertaking. In terms of the #DispatchBooks I still put out from time to time, I find myself in a similar world, dealing with another adventurous independent publishing outfit, #HaymarketBooks.

"Still, what an eerie mainstream we now inhabit, don’t we?

"I mean, when it comes to what capitalism is doing on this planet of ours, book publishing is distinctly small (even if increasingly mashed) potatoes. After all, we’re talking about a world where giant fossil-fuel companies with still-soaring profits are all too willing to gaslight the public while quite literally burning the place up — or perhaps I mean flooding the place out. (Don’t you wonder sometimes what the CEOs of such companies are going to tell their grandchildren?)."

#Libraries #Publishers #Books #Corporations #Monopoly #Censorship #Copyright #Authors #BookPreservation #History #Culture #SmallPublishers #IndepedentPublishers #ProgressivePublishers

https://www.juancole.com/2022/09/progressive-publishing-monopoly.html