Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. John B. Thompson. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2010. 432 pp.
For many younger J&MCQ readers, books in their traditional form are fast becoming a feature of the past. You (and you know who you are) use your iPad or other reading device, and hardly ever set foot in bricks-and-mortar bookshops anymore. You are gazing at Internet and other screens for hours on end.
The older among us (your reviewer being one) still enjoy an old fashioned book—even a heavy, hardbound one. We’ve built considerable collections over the years, often going back to titles we need or appreciated when we first read them.