Man Is The Media.
Only $10.5 Billion to Save the Book Industry: Lay Off 137,500 American Writers
December 13th, 2008 by Martin
According to Paul Greenberg in New York TImes, it could cost as little as $10.5 billion to solve the writing crisis.
“According to the industry tracker Bowker, about 275,000 new titles and editions are published in the United States each year. Let’s say we want to eliminate half of them. Assuming it takes about two years to write your average book, we would offer book writers two years of salary at the writers’ average annual income of $38,000 a year. Add it all up and you get a paltry $10.5 billion to dramatically reduce the book overcapacity.”
He makes an interesting argument that the crisis in publishing partly is owed to “overcapacity”: Too many writers to go around crowds up the workspace. I wonder where they all would go, if they would be bailed out. I guess we would get an awful lot of terrific bloggers.
Paul Greenberg is a writer, currently writing a book about fish.
