book publishing?

Books are everywhere. You pass by libraries, by bookstores, by resell-it stores with shelves of books along the walls, by crowded antique stores that have dusty books hidden in the back with golden filigree on their spines. You read all the time. Look at that, you're reading right now, and you probably read something on your phone today before you left your house for work or school. The point is, there are millions of books in the world, but where did they even come from? Do people still like them, are they still current? What is the point of them? Are they as impactful as they were when looking through the history of publication?

The history behind the mass publication and distribution of books is immense and can be looked at critically to understand how it impacts consumerism and societal opinion today. But the history of book publication, and even how books came about is riddled with juicy little details that can change your view of literature. History is a window to look out of your own bubble and understand how something came to be. Something so simple as publishing a book, even self-publishing, has a history that twists and turns. And me being a little bit of a history nerd, I am going to walk down the road of books and their publication, and how they came to be on the shelves. I also want to ponder if all of them deserve to be on the shelves.

Book publishing today is not as competitive as it used to be, as publishing houses gained popularity and wealth their acceptance of literature to publish has increased. Which, while gaining popularity as shelves overflow with published books, may be detrimental to the overarching importance of books today. The quality of published literature is seeing a decline. While reading rates increase, the quality of the books read by the masses decreases, leading to less of a cultural experience in books and more of an explosion of AI generated novels and novellas, and books written that sadly resemble amateur efforts at the prose of classic literature.

This is a journey I am taking to learn and explore new things.

One that will be updated as inspiration, or due dates, strike.

On y va!