Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Coming up with the Goods

It seems unanswerable, doesn't it, the statement made so often in response to complaints that nowadays good novels don't always find publishing homes: 'Publishing is a business, not a charity'?

How can you deny it? Why would anyone continue publishing if they had to make losses?

But as I read an edited version of Jeremy Paxman's Edinburgh Festival castigation of the BBC for a loss of standards, in which he stated: 'Youth... This is the great motive force in contemporary television. Why do they want to find it? The motive is the same everywhere. Money' - well, another thought popped into my head:

There's business and there's business and there's money and there's money. After all, you wouldn't defend a grocer or a food wholesaler for being so obsessed with money he drops his standards and cheats his customers, or even poisons them, would you?

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