The Life and Times of a Navy Husband

So this afternoon I stumbled across the beginning of an essay by Jonathan Franzen that I really wanted to read in full.

The academy as nursing home for terminally ill arts: better that the novel die with honor in the gutter than enter those gates, where candy-striped theorists will offer it the illusion of warmth as they lead it in slow dances, play bingo with it and wink at each other when it roars from its geri-chair about the power it once had. The philistine quotient is probably no greater within the ivory tower than outside it. But it’s hard to resist nostalgia for a general audience that expected some entertainment for the money it spent on books; hard not to prefer a system in which wage-earners subsidized good authors for dubious reasons to a system in which tenured professors subsidize dubious authors for good reasons.

Sounds interesting, right? The problem is, the essay—”I’ll Be Doing More of the Same”—ran some time ago (1996) in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, and I don’t happen to have a copy lying around.

A search of the Intarnets led me to Questia.com, which wanted me to subscribe to read the full version. Fat frakking chance. Then I saw a link to Amazon.com, which offered to allow me to download the article electronically…

FOR FIVE DOLLARS AND NINETY-FIVE CENTS!

It’s a 2,000-word essay. Who’s gonna pay six bucks for it? Maybe a desperate college student the night before his term paper is due, but no one else. However, if it cost 50 cents, or even 99 cents, I’d be all over it. No problem. I’d tap that “Buy now with 1-click” button in a heartbeat.

Print publishers need to figure this out. They are going to die a miserable death unless they make this easier for us.

You, Publishing Person, go read Chris Anderson’s book, The Long Tail. Go. Do it now.