Cynthia Cochran is an associate professor of English at Illinois College. She holds a doctorate degree in English (rhetoric focus) from Carnegie Mellon University. She teaches creative and expository writing and English Studies and has been integral in the development and operation of IC’s Campus Writing Center.

After admiring its library, we visited its press, which has published over a million copies of 600-plus small-run literary titles since its inception. A tiny staff uses only two photocopiers, one of which is very old, for this work. We watched as a lone employee hand-collated pages for a new book and used a hard wooden tool called a bone to press the folded pages. As a writer and writing instructor interested in the role of publication, I was fascinated and touched by the center’s dedication to the printed word in a poor country where paper is a somewhat rarified commodity. But Cuba is a very educated nation with many readers and, to meet their needs, the center plans to digitize some publications while continuing to publish printed work.

Why do people employ such painstaking effort to preserve and disseminate the written word? Publishing output is extraordinary: In 2022, the few giant publishing houses and a growing number of small, independent presses sold nearly 800 million copies of printed books. Sales in 2022 for the three main services (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple) topped 525 million ebooks and 188 million audiobooks, according to Publisher’s Weekly. Add to that all the newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, brochures, instruction booklets and other ephemera published every day.

The world needs publishers and publishing. Why? Of course, students and professionals need to read for obvious reasons (for example,  we need operating manuals for all our gadgets). So publishers meet these needs. They also fulfill people’s desire for pleasure reading. While it is commonly known that reading books for pleasure has been a declining pastime for the past twenty years, it surged in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, and book sales continue to rise, including books of fiction. But for pleasure-reading and reading for news, many people — especially teenagers — turn to social media.

And here is one of the most important roles of publishing: ethics. Publishing with integrity has the power to mitigate the propagation of falsehoods, including those spread on social media. Publishers disseminate and preserve information, ideas and stories. While individuals and groups can spread lies on social media, and while there are some publishers who profit from trivial or untrue “news” without fact-checking, plenty of publishers seek to publish with integrity. People are designed to be curious, thriving in part by seeking the truth. Publishers’ role in this process has been to vet material to make it accessible to people. They act as gatekeepers -- perhaps guided by ethics -- deciding which information is spread, which knowledge conveyed, which stories and histories told and preserved. In countries with some degree of freedom of the press, high literacy rates and public libraries, people have access to a range of perspectives on the events and ideas of the day because of reasonably trustworthy publishing sources, even if some are not so trustworthy. 

But perhaps the most important reason that we will always need publishers is so we can communicate and think with others about complicated ideas. By gathering and disseminating ideas through great literature — both fiction and nonfiction — publishers allow us to build on past and present ideas to create a future. We even use publishing to collaborate with future people: ideas that take decades or even centuries to explore need publishers to connect generations. 

And this endeavor is why some Illinois College students choose to concentrate on editing, publishing, or writing in their English major or minor. I love to witness an iconic moment when students first realize that the words they write for class may help solve a real problem, may lead to publication, may become a drop of wisdom for current and future readers. 

When a recent six-day storm left me without electricity, I thought about the importance of publishing and reading. By candlelight and cell phone beam I read an amazing novel, Hugh Howey’s “Wool.” Ironically, this dystopia (first self-published and now a best-seller) is set underground where light, paper, books and even electronic messages are rare and costly. I thought about Cuba’s publishing efforts. I thought about ways to encourage students to take advantage of amazing opportunities at Illinois College to read freely from our own Schewe Library. And I marveled that what my students write today — their ideas, stories and histories — may be read by students of tomorrow, as long as we continue to publish.