If you asked someone in the business of business, they would tell you that the business of books is in trouble. Readership is down, profits are way down and Internet retailers are massively screwing with traditional distribution models. The good news is that help is on the way. The bad news is that the savior of literature is Dan Brown.

If you fancy yourself cultivated, there’s a fair chance this suggestion has you all hot and bothered — and not in that good way, like when you read Danielle Steel. But calm down, I’m not suggesting that the guy should win the Pulitzer. Far from it. I fully recognize that Dan Brown sucks.

Mr. Brown is to literature what the New York Mets are to baseball and Glenn Beck is to journalism: a well-paid embarrassment. His novels are big, steaming turds of overwrought, hackneyed pulp, dressed up on high-quality paper stock and disguised behind the veneer of subversive (read: dubious) history. And while it’s unfortunate that the country’s most invaluable purveyor of fiction is such an unmitigated hack, that’s just how it goes.

Anyway, that’s all old news: by now most people hopefuly understand that Brown’s novels aren’t that good. He’s still, however, America’s most important writer, and for one simple reason: His golden touch.

Did you know that since the success of The Da Vinci Code, Mr. Brown has actually amassed more money than God? (FACT.) He’s earned more revenue for his publisher, Doubleday, and their parent company, Random House, than any other author in history. And his new book, The Lost Symbol, just sold the redoubtable volume of 2 million units in its first week alone.

Dan Brown, and writers like him, earn publishers outrageous sums of money. And that means, when push comes to shove, they’re the only reason the houses will print good books anymore.

Once upon a time, publishing houses were small, entrepreneurial ventures. Though they earned relatively meager profits, they dedicated an extraordinary amount of energy to adding the best — not necessarily the most marketable — writers to their ranks. Business might not have been as robust or efficient as it is under the current regime, controlled as it is by five corporate titans, but the system worked — and it managed to preside over an era replete with literary classics.

By contrast, today’s publishers have gotten in the bad habit of putting too many eggs in too few baskets. Hoping to maximize profits, quick-and-dirty, they offer gargantuan seven-figure advances to the most commercially viable writers, hoping to acquire their inchoate “blockbusters” and, subsequently, make bank. In doing so, however, these companies hedge their fiscal security on the success or failure of a few highly anticipated, but as-yet unwritten page-turners.

When a major investment doesn’t pan out, and cost-cutting ensues, it’s not the popular writers that suffer; it’s the adventurous, experimental and underappreciated ones who end up receiving smaller advances and less marketing support — if they even get book deals at all. Editors used to have broad discretion to discover and publish talent, but more and more they’re finding their autonomy curtailed in favor of the bottom line. As one publishing insider was quoted in New York Magazine last year, “Forget literary taste; everything is cost-benefit analysis.”

So it would be naïve to denigrate Brown, while pining for more quality fiction, because if Dan Brown fails, the next Faulkner could very well fall through the cracks.

Given all of this, you have to wonder if, in the long run, commerce and culture might be mutually exclusive ideas. The notion that the free market leads to the socially optimal outcome is usually pretty sound, but there’s the necessity of selecting out the bad ideas in favor of the good ones. The market only works if the consumer properly appreciates what he or she is buying.

That does not happen in the market for books.

People like convenience, and they prefer instant gratification. They don’t like grappling with the epistemological conundrums posed by an unreliable narrator. Who has the time to read difficult novels, anyway? To wrestle with the intricacies of postmodern narratives? No thank you! Why not just pick up Tom Clancy instead?

There are those who would argue — AEM majors, I’m looking at you — that this is the appropriate outcome; that if a book can’t quickly recoup its costs and yield a tidy profit, then it doesn’t deserve to be published. But sometimes the most important books are the ones that will never be read by the majority of the population. James Joyce, who famously penned some of the most frustrating — and revered — literature ever written, influenced the likes of Philip K. Dick and Arthur Miller, Garrison Keillor and Woody Allen.

So who’s to say the next great populist writer won’t find inspiration in the notoriously oblique, and infamously long, Infinite Jest. And who are businessmen to say that a difficult, but rewarding, novel should never see the light of day?

If Dan Brown continues to be the last, great hope for American literature, then American literature is done. Publishers need to stop saying “YES” so resoundingly to the lowest common denominator, and start giving the green light to quality again. It might not look great on the balance sheet right now, but think of it as an investment in the future.

After all, talent trickles down.

Peter Finocchiaro, a senior in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, is a former Arts and Entertainment Editor of The Sun. He may be reached at pfinocchiaro@cornellsun.com. Everyone Choose Sides appears alternate Tuesdays this semester.