As months passed, that reading grew more problematic. Too many people were still becoming infected and far too many were still dying. Cynical, opportunistic politicians jumped on an anti-vaccine bandwagon, while the voters they claimed to represent were succumbing to the terrible disease. People were (and still are) inexplicably rejecting science, clinging to a demagogue-inspired belief that somehow, in some way, vaccines against this deadly disease threaten their “individual freedom.”

Like the record industry before it, the publishing industry is changing dramatically.  Of the Big Seven publishers (Random House, HarperCollins, MacMillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group (Little, Brown & Co, et al), and Scholastic), six of them–all but Scholastic– have proven to be too big to change their business strategy in a rapidly changing marketplace. The culprit was a combination of the predatory sales practices of online retailers (particularly Amazon.com) and changes in the media (MP3s in the case of the music industry; ebooks in the case of the book industry).