In an essay about international publishing models at Stanford’s Arcade, novelist and scholar Lee Konstantinou outlined how the government of Norway helps writers.
His example was drawn from Regionalism and the Reading Class, a sociology book by Wendy Griswold. Check it out:
Norway buys 1000 copies of every book a Norwegian author publishes. It provides a $19,000 annual subsidy to every author who is a member of the Authors’ Union. The Association of Bookstores is allowed to have a monopoly on the sale of books—but is prohibited by law from engaging in price competition. It requires, by law, that bookstores keep books in stock for two years regardless of sales. And it exempts books from its very steep sales tax. Not surprisingly, Griswold finds, “Norwegians everywhere read, and they read a lot; Norway has one of the world’s highest reading rates.”
What do you think? Could this state-led effort to support writers ever work in the United States? (Via PapushiSun)