IN THE GOOD OLD days, book publishers had a pretty fair idea of what they would and would not print; since their names, often literally, went on the finished products, their reputations were as much at stake as those of their authors. But once publishing transformed itself into a business of battling behemoths, the clubby, gentlemanly code of ethics grew harder to enforce or even, in some minds, to justify. Do publishers still put a stamp of approval on their books, or are they now merely commercial conduits between writers and readers?
That question lay behind an event last week that...
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