> This is obviously true (i.e., sales figures show millions of people are
> buying these books). Is this just voyeurism from the middling masses or does
> it represent a real liberal/progressive mass that is just not mobilized?
>
> Curious to see how others interpret this,
> Alan J
> Detroit
I follow this stuff pretty closely, in fact, whenever I got a copy of the Sunday Wash Post I always turned first to the bestseller charts (sometimes after reading Boondocks).
My conclusion is that American liberals, leftists, and progressives are more interested in whining about all of those right wing books and the media monopoly than they are in publishing the books to reach the millions who are interested in lefty views. The audeince for conservative crap is pretty limited. There is just a limited supply of right wing extremists to buy the latest Anne Coulter book. On the other hand, there are millions and millions of people who are hungry for leftist ideas, if we can only get our shit together to put something out there.
Just look at the success of Michael Moore's books and the new Al Franken
book. Or Barbara Ehrenreich's book. I'm a co-editor of Alternative Press Review and when we publish an issue the copies fly off the shelves of bookstores across the country. Many other left and radical magazines do as well, as long as they are the ones who publish interesting stuff and not obscure academic theory or intra-tendency debates. Left websites are doing well too, which I think is th best measure of how desperate people are for left ideas. The Counterpunch and Zmag websites are quite popular. My website, Infoshop.org, continues to see an incredible growth in traffic (6 million hits in May) and the traffic on the Infoshop News website is so heavy that the poor server can't handle all the traffic.
If you publish it, they will come.
Chuck0