Guess what time period this quote describes:

Publishers had to improve the way they did business. So they tried several things: [. . . and] in general, they became less worried about literary merit and more about salability as the ultimate criterion in accepting a manuscript.

It could have be from last week’s New York Times, except with “publishers” perhaps replaced with “Amazon,” but the overall gestalt is there, complete with the carping about the lowering of standards when entrenched powers are losing their powers. But D. G. Myers wrote it in The Elephants Teach, and the quoted passage applies to the early 20th Century.

Someone out there is always lamenting the deplorable state of literary merit these days, but someone has been always been lamenting it, just like some old person is always lamenting kids these days. Don’t listen. The next big thing is probably not going to come from the old guard.