Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Habib.

Friends, if you know anything about me, you know that I love reading.

I also love buying books.

Those are two completely different activities as far as I'm concerned.

And sometimes you read books that you've bought and sometimes you have a ton of books on your bookshelf or even your nightstand that you want to read, but you still get the urge to just go to a bookstore and buy

books and see all those books on the shelf at the store. Bookstores are really interesting

places or places where all these different voices gather, these different kinds of people and they face each other

across the aisles through their works. And all these different ideas collected in this place.

And the ideas are circulating. New books come in, old books go out. And they all also bring

in art and design through the covers. And they're sectioned off

in different and interesting ways in different stores. All that obviously is mediated by the bookstore

and the booksellers, but it's also mediated by this huge business of publishing. Now, I really want to talk about bookstores at some point on this show,

but before I get there, I wanted to talk about publishing

as a sort of extension of the last episode I did,

which was an episode with Sarah Maria Griffin on what it's like to be a working writer.

Something that working writers have to deal with is that vision

of having your book in the bookstore and crossing through the river of sorrows or the moat

or whatever it is of publishing to get there. Publishing is a very confronting thing for writers, and it's also highly

mystified. We, even as writers, don't really know a lot of the processes. We certainly don't know

the histories of it. I wanted to talk with somebody who did, and I asked Professor Dan Sineken

on to the show to talk about all of this via his amazing book, Big Fiction,

How Can Galameration Change the Publishing Industry and American Literature?

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