PT104 · S4 · Q18 Book publishers have traditionally

The argument is saying that today's publishers are more interested in profit than were publishers of the past (Relative). This answer is saying that both today's publishers and yesterday's publishers are interested in profits (Absolute). This is like when people alarmed by the climate crisis encounter skepticism from others who say, "What are you so worried about --- the climate is always changing." Yes, but it's never changed like this. Similarly, this author would respond to this answer choice by saying, "Yes, publishers have always been interested in profits. So has been every person engaged in business. But publishers have not previously been this interested in profit, to the point where they don't even both publishing books with intrinsic value anymore."

It's possible we might stretch this answer into this type of objection: "Since these artsy books that weren't expected to be cash cows often turned out to be pretty profitable, the publishing industry learned that it is good money-making practice to publish these artsy books. Thus, if the author were right, and publishers today really were more interested in making money, then we would see at least as many, if not more, of these artsy books being published. Since we don't see as many artsy books being published, I guess publishers aren't as interested in making money as the author thinks." Phew. As you can imagine, if it takes that long to justify our thinking, we're overstretching. The fact that many of these artsy books ended up also being profitable doesn't hurt the argument. When a publisher assesses that a certain catalog of artsy books are not likely to be profitable, they're not thinking "it's impossible that these will make money". So the fact that some of them were a pleasant financial surprise does not suddenly make "publishing artsy novels" a strategy that profit-hounds would pursue.

This concept of authors with specific demands for their publishing contracts has no bearing at all on this conversation. We can't connect this answer at all to the topic of "fewer books of intrinsic value being published". And it's a very weak claim to say "there have always been people who are X". We can say, "there have always been people who think the earth is flat", but that's not necessarily an important quantity.

We could interpret this answer as a weakener by saying, "Aha --- you can tell that publishers aren't more concerned with profits nowadays, because look at how profitability is declining. They're apparently cool with being less profitable, because their real goal is to find and disseminate literature of value." We could also interpret this as a strengthener by saying, "You can see that publishers today are more than ever worried about making money. After all, they've had declining profits in the last few years so they're #1 focus now has to be financially righting the ship."