USA Today book reviewer Deirdre Donahue was kind enough to send me some of her thoughts about yesterday's post about how tiresome complaints about the degradation of publishing have become. "To me, the issue is how publishing can erect original, competitive platforms in order to launch new writers based on their own merits (i.e., books)," she wrote. "Instead we all fixate on how many celebs from other, more powerful platforms (TV, music, radio, journalism, porn, web, whatever) simply use books to expand their brand by adding the bestselling author tag to their media presence. Book publishing should do a better job of growing and promoting its own stars. And book media has a real responsibility to readers to showcase new talent."

And that's the thing. The emails I've "banned" from consideration don't offer any solutions along those lines. Quite the opposite: When an editor says, as the one quoted yesterday did, that he or she is "pissed off... about having to stoop to the bubble gum minds of readers who don't know what books should all be about," all I see is cynical defeatism. Can somebody with that much contempt for his or her customers be relied upon to advocate for the good writers who might have a chance of breaking away from the pack and developing a meaningful readership? I don't think so; I'm not saying they never would, but it seems to me that, with so little respect for the people he or she serves, an editor who sees his or her job as pandering to "bubble gum minds" would, whether out of fear or laziness or cynicism or what-have-you, increasingly gravitate towards such self-styled compromises and thereby perpetuate the cycle.

"I think a lot of people just can't believe those job slots once filled by Edmund Wilson and Max Perkins ain't never coming back," Donahue added. "But instead of indulging in nostalgia, we should focus on how to keep books from turning into the literary equivalent of classical music—an intense passion shared by a devoted minority." Now there's a thought; heck, as Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker two months ago, even classical music is figuring out how to avoid that trap. This is the paragraph that leaps out at me, rereading that essay:

"Some recent articles have asked whether the Internet can save classical music. Classical music is, in fact, saving itself; Internet activity is merely the most immediately visible evidence of its refusal to fade away. Younger musicians, in particular, are using every available means to reach a potential public that is far larger than the one that already exists. They are not haunted, as older musicians often are, by nostalgia for a time when Bernstein appeared on the cover of Time and Toscanini was a star of NBC radio. Instead, they see the labyrinth of long-tail culture as an open field of opportunity; they measure success in small leaps."