Verso Books recently published an essay called “Bad Nostalgia” by Miriam Gordis calling to think through the challenges of the publishing industry through the lens of labor. The author asks, “What would it mean to interrogate labor as the engine behind conglomerate publishing and the core of its system failure?”
To that end, let’s sketch out some back-of-the-envelope math around the labor of publishing a book, which I’ve measured in dollars per hour. Putting these numbers together, you can see why economics is the “dismal science.”
