The hard question, I think, is: long-form writing benefits enormously from a second set of eyes, or a second-third-fourth-fifth-sixth set of eyes—a copy editor, proofreader, etc. When I do a book manuscript and hand it over to Penguin, the amount it improves after I’m nominally done with it is astonishing. I can handle a process of going over it and over it and over it to get a 2,500-word essay, like the Eisenstein one, into that sort of form. I can’t do it for a book-length manuscript. Yet, once the book moves away from the bottleneck that allows the publisher to charge for the scarcity, which is where the copy editor’s fee comes from in the first place, I don’t know how writers of the future, at whatever length, take advantage of those capabilities.
