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I'm personally opposed to funding culture through taxation. I completely respect other views on this, but after many years considering it, I'm personally against it. Firstly, it's unaccountable and anti-competitive, Salt struggled for years to build sales and find readers, with very little capital, whilst some of our competitors were awash with cash and staff and able to effectively isolate Salt's writers. Secondly, it's bad for innovation, as most funded businesses tend to ossify and stagnate, and many see funding as their primary income and so fail to develop sales and marketing functions, and indeed, a relationship with an audience or audiences. I don't know of any clear mechanism which can fairly distribute government funding to literary presses -- there's simply no measure of value there, and one has to recognise that new presses start up weekly. I think there is a profound argument for government providing seed capital for arts businesses, to help them develop, but it is ultimately desirable that the business is run on a sustainable economic model based on demand. Unsustainable arts businesses should be better managed, rescued if necessary, turned around where possible, or closed. I personally don't want government-sponsored culture, I want culture to be owned and generated by demand from the people. It's a lie that people don't want high culture unless its subsidised. It's a lie that art needs subsidy. Strong words, but I firmly believe that. They might not want government-sponsored art, but they want art that has a direct relationship to them. Propaganda can be good, by the way. I just mean that some art is provided without demand to subvert our experience. We must recognise it as such, and judge for ourselves if it serves a purpose. I've no problem with non-governmental patronage -- even governments don't escape this. It's very important to know who is paying for our art as it tells us as much about our society as the art does itself. Often more. POD is a different thread. In the UK, we stopped using it, though we're turning it back on for small order library supply. We print for stock and have a UK wholesaler acting as our trade distributor. This was key for developing shop sales. I don't know any UK shops who stock purely from POD. We're moving to hardbacks now for British authors. In the US there seems far less concern about POD. The key issue is whether stocks are returnable. We're about to sign with a major distributor to take some books out of POD to test a new model there. Australia is all from stock, non-POD. Technically, many books are now printed digitally, there are two print revolutions going on both related to the same technology. Litho printing is being replaced by digital printing in some areas, and supplemented in others; generally for run below 600-800 copies. These are increasingly supplied in batches to warehouses and distributors. The POD revolution is a supply chain revolution, where a an order is fulfilled and despatched without being taken into stock. This is normally understood as a single copy model. The big change is the eradication of WAREHOUSE and DISTRIBUTOR. Most sales are direct to the consumer. I don't know any trade publisher worth over £1M who isn't using both approaches for parts of their list. Best as C