Publishers Weekly recently covered the ire being directed at Edelweiss over price hikes that feel detached from how our industry actually functions. With per-title fees creeping up toward $90 and annual fees ballooning, already thin publishing margins are being clobbered from another direction. And, for a platform that has become, for all intents and purposes, the default way publishers present their lists and the primary way that booksellers decide what to buy, the situation is, especially for small publishers, potentially catastrophic.

Where I’m at, however, is that while everyone in our community is outraged at Edelweiss, I’m far more upset at us. We should never have allowed a private company to become a monopolistic gatekeeper of our industry and the quasi-official catalog of American publishing. That is an insane position to have put ourselves in. And to have the go-to reaction be a number of other for-profit companies trying to spin up half-baked competition that will further fragment the market (and introduce unnecessary friction) is definitely not the solution.

If Edelweiss’ money grab has made anything clear it is that trade publishing made a terrible mistake in allowing a for-profit company to become the custodian of our most essential shared infrastructure; and this is our chance to fix it. We need the central nervous system of our industry to be shared, fair, and built by publishers for publishers. We need to establish something akin to a public utility or mission-driven non-profit organization.

This is not a far-fetched idea, it’s how major information utilities, like Crossref, ICANN, and OCLC, already operate. Imagine an Edelweiss-like platform that is owned not by a private company but by its users: publishers, librarians, booksellers, wholesalers, and authors. An organization that can’t jack up prices, be sold to private equity, or design features only available to the highest bidder.

Valsoft’s pricing blunder represents the best opportunity we have as an industry to correct a grave mistake. Now we need the cooperation and leadership to make it right.