Tomorrow kicks off the 12th year of Small Press Month, highlighting and featuring the smaller fish in the huge ocean of publishing. So let’s hear it for the folks still doing it for the love of it and loving what they sell. Don’t get me wrong, it is still about money and making a living, but there’s something almost perfect about a job that is built around creating and pushing products, you believe in and that you know contribute something to society. It’s about quality… not just appealing to the lowest common denominator.

In So Many Books (which should be required reading for anyone thinking about publishing, Gabriel Zaid notes:

“If not a single book were published from this moment on, it would still take 250,000 years for us to acquaint ourselves with those books already written.”

“Maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us. . . whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive”

Take that you multi-national conglomerates! You get the other 11 months… this one belongs to readers and smaller publishers alike.