"The editor has initiated a discussion as to the health of an industry, of which the national importance is altogether out of proportion to its size-the book trade." These words were written in March 1927 by John Maynard Keynes, prompted by the editor of the Nation. Seventy-five years later, at the request of the editor of this magazine, I find myself following nervously in Keynes's footsteps.
The prominence of the publishing industry remains disproportionate to its economic weight. In 2000, its domestic retail sales were just shy of £1 billion, and publishers moved stock worth a further £1.17 billion to export markets (mainly the US, the Netherlands, Ireland, Australia and Germany). But even for an industry accustomed to public attention-and anxiety-these have been a turbulent few years. Harvill Press, dedicated to publishing the world's most significant writers, bought itself out of HarperCollins, found the going too tough and in March 2002 was bought back into the conglomerate fold by Random House. In May, John Murray, established in 1768, finally relinquished its independence and was acquired by Hodder Headline, which is owned by WH Smith. Fourth Estate, the most inventive independent house of the 1990s, was absorbed into HarperCollins, in a reverse takeover that saw Victoria Barnsley move from head of Fourth Estate (sales around £10m) to chair of the British publishing arm of News Corporation (sales around £200m).
British publishing is now more than ever dominated by giant conglomerates, with even larger proprietors: Random House and Transworld (owned by Bertelsmann), HarperCollins (owned by News Corporation), Penguin (owned by Pearson), Pan Macmillan (owned by von Holtzbrinck) and Hodder Headline (owned by WH Smith). On the next rung of the revenue ladder, Little, Brown is now Time Warner (after the marriage of its proprietors, AOL and Time Warner), Orion is controlled by Hachette Livre (part of the bizarre French military-publishing group, Lagardère) and Simon & Schuster is owned by media giant Viacom.
Add to this the fact that 2002 has seen significant job losses, and the view that British publishing has had the creative juices squeezed out of it is more widely heard than ever. "Publishing," writes the novelist and former fiction publisher of Duckworth, Alice Thomas Ellis, "is not as much fun as it was 30 years ago: various houses have gobbled each other up, countless editors, weary of being harassed by accountants, have fled to become agents, and mature authors complain that they find themselves at the mercy of 12-year-olds. In addition, vast sums are lavished on already-rooted and blooming authors, leaving nothing to nourish potential seedlings." Furthermore, publishers are selling "fewer and fewer copies."
Keynes began his investigation of the publishing industry by assuming that "No one... could maintain that too few books are published." This in turn meant that "few authors of merit nowadays are prevented from seeing the light." As the number of original titles published in Britain in 1927 numbered 13,810, compared to 119,000 in 2001 (of which about 75,000 were general trade books), it is still harder to sustain the charge that good writers are being passed over. And there is evidence that volumes are actually rising. In the first half of 2002, the number of books bought in the US rose by 1.6 per cent to 557m copies.
Quantity is not everything, but the doomsayers' view that the consumer is being denied a wide choice of books (and thus points of view) is hard to sustain. One could argue that non-mainstream thinking is not published by big houses and therefore not widely available, but to do so would be oxymoronic: what is mainstream if not that which is widely available?
With its over-educated, overworked, underpaid legions, publishing is an industry bedevilled by pessimism. This pessimism blinds people to the fact that we are living in a golden age of book publishing in which quantity and quality rival anything in the past, in which books have never been so well published and in which they occupy a more boisterously visible place in the general culture than ever before.
The first complaint of the doomsayers is that publishing's high-minded ideals have been blunted by big money. This takes many forms, ranging from a general (and well-founded) mistrust of the way that large, profit-hungry media businesses conduct themselves, to the visceral anti-capitalism of those who feel that the pursuit of profit itself is the enemy of fine writing (and, by extension, thinking). Yet the history of publishing shows that the modern industry was only born when new technologies encountered those keen to make money.
In Worldly Goods, Lisa Jardine describes how Venetian printers of the 1470s produced books aimed at collectors, selling them on subscription with runs of around 300 copies. Prices were high: an edition of Cicero's work sold for three ducats which, according to Jardine, was a month's salary for an artisan. This method was highly capital-intensive and by the mid-1470s, eight of the 12 printer-publishers in Venice had failed. However, in 1472, bankers from Germany and Florence became interested in the commercial potential of the new technology of moveable type and provided the working capital for the new industry.
Between 1495 and 1598, the Aldine Press changed publishing forever. Its founder, Aldus Manutius, noted that the humanist movement had aroused an interest in reading in many hitherto unbookish types. Manutius printed cheap "pocket editions" for the new readers. To keep costs down, he increased print runs from 250 to 1,000. By 1595, the Aldine Press had published over 1,000, mainly classical, works.
Even when the printing process was no longer novel, books were still perceived as precious objects. Racine famously learned the Greek tragedies from an Aldine edition more than 150 years old. It wasn't until the first stirrings of the industrial revolution that modern publishing was born. Its birthday can perhaps be traced to 23rd March 1714, when English poet Alexander Pope contracted to Barnaby Bernard Lintot, publisher-printer of Gray and Steele, to write a translation of Homer's Iliad, for which he would receive 200 guineas a volume and 750 free copies.
In some ways, Lintot's ideas differed little from Manutius's 125 years before: his plan was to publish one volume a year for six years, on a subscription basis. But displaying the sensitivity to cash flow of a modern publisher, Lintot saw this as a means of financing the translation as it went along. He also prefigured modern publishers by marketing the books as fetish objects, produced with the finest materials to maximise the sensual pleasures of ownership. Pope's was one of the first publications to make a virtue of its production values. It was thus one of the first works in Britain to be properly published-conceived with a clear vision of how it should be packaged and sold.
So successful was it that in 1720, three months after the final volumes of the Iliad were published, Pope began to translate the Odyssey. This venture was also a success and Pope discovered a degree of financial independence from publishers and patrons unknown to almost all of his peers. In this sense, he was one of the first modern writers-able, more or less, to live by his pen alone. This liberty enabled him to produce his masterwork The Dunciad, which attacks the mass media industries of the early 18th century: printing, publishing and journalism.
Although Pope's independence as a writer owed much to publishing's new commercialism, his anxiety was that "Dulness" was set to triumph over the culture and in its wake would come philistinism and moral confusion. There are many today who hold this view: that "Dulness" is being advanced by risk-averse accountants; the threat of the electronic book (e-book); the dumbing down of culture; the end of resale price maintenance; the power of bookshop chains and the likelihood that, Harry Potter notwithstanding, the under 20s will grow into adults who do not read at all. Before investigating whether the forces of "Dulness" have taken hold, it is worth considering how modern publishing works.
Authors are paid by publishers for the right to publish their work in book form and sell it through bookshops. Other rights can be bought: the right to sell the author's work to a book club; to sell serialisations and extracts to newspapers; to produce an audio edition; or to sell the translation rights. With each exploitation, the author receives a percentage of the revenue.
The contract will specify the level of advance against royalties. It is always paid in instalments, usually a percentage on signature of the contract, a percentage on delivery of the manuscript and another on first publication. The author will receive no more money until the advance is "earned out," when the author begins receiving royalties. If the advance is not earned out, the publisher writes off the difference.
Once the author has created a work, the publisher takes it to market-meaning mainly bookshops, and three large wholesalers, Gardners, Bertram and THE. The bookshop market is now dominated by five chains: Waterstone's (roughly 35 per cent of book chain sales), WH Smith (31 per cent), Ottakars (7 per cent), Blackwell/Heffers group (5 per cent), and the Borders/ Books Etc group (5 per cent). Internet booksellers, such as Amazon, have 4 per cent of the whole market. The publisher's sales representatives present their titles to the bookseller-centrally in the case of some big chains or direct to the shop with smaller outlets, which still represent 17 per cent of the market. In some cases, head offices impose specific quantities of selected titles on all branches-called a "scale out." WH Smith and Borders buy all titles centrally. Waterstone's and Books Etc are moving in this direction.
For reasons to do with the over-provision of bookshops in Britain and the fact that the core group of book buyers (buying more than 16 per year) remains static, at around 22 per cent of the adult population, market share has become very important to the book chains, which compete furiously for customers. Price is the obvious way of driving traffic into the shop (or website) and scale outs are increasingly crucial to the commercial success of a book. Although there have been bestsellers which were not bought centrally by the big chains, these are rare. Publishing is the art of differentiating Book A from the other 119,000-odd titles published each year and the participation of a work in a booksellers' campaign ("Book of the Month"; "3 for 2"; "2 for £10" and so on) means the book will be far more visible to the browsing public. This can be decisive in whether it goes on to enjoy a long, prosperous life. Price promotion is good for the consumer but means reduced margins for the publisher.
The bookseller buys a title from the publisher on a discount from the cover price. If a work is £10 and is taken by a book chain, it will be at a basic discount of about 50 per cent. That is, the retailer gets £5 and so does the publisher. Not all retailers receive the same terms: bigger chains with more clout, volume and overhead require better terms than small independent shops. It is also true that since 1995 and the abolition of resale price maintenance (aka the Net Book Agreement, which prevented bookshops from selling titles at below the publisher's listed price) publishers' discounts to booksellers have risen inexorably. The book chains' increasing commitment to price promotion and the arrival in the marketplace of supermarkets selling large quantities of a few popular titles has placed additional pressure on publishers to give higher discounts. In the few years since the end of the NBA, some titles featuring in specific promotions are supplied to the shops at discounts of 60 to 65 per cent. Publishers agree to this because although the terms are painful, selling the book at low margin is better than not selling it at all. This upward pressure on discount (and downward pressure on publisher's margins) looks set to go on. But whatever the discount level, if the bookseller cannot sell the book, he is free to return it to the publisher.
Sale or return (SOR) was established in America during the depression as a means of indemnifying the bookseller and has been a feature of publishing ever since. It should be an incentive to the retailer to take risks and stock more unusual or unknown work, because if they cannot sell something, they can send it back to the publisher's warehouse. The great American publisher Alfred Knopf characterised this as "gone today, here tomorrow." Returns are a brutal fact of a publisher's life. In the US, the rate of return for most houses exceeds 40 per cent. In Britain, the rate among general publishers is more like 25 per cent, but the figure is rising, at least for hardbacks. These copies face either the pulping machine or the unsentimental hands of the remainder merchant.
This pressure on publishers' margins caused by rising discounts to booksellers, combined with the fact that publishing operates SOR and that unearned advances are (rightly) sustained by the publisher, means that the publisher, rather than the author or the bookseller, bears the bulk of the risk in the publishing process. This does not prevent the doomsayers from declaring, inexplicably, that the large houses that dominate British publishing are risk averse. These large houses have many flaws, but caution with other people's money is not one of them. It requires courage (of a kind) to acquire the memoirs of Chris Evans for £500,000, or the thoughts of daytime television presenters Richard and Judy for around £600,000. In the scramble for big sales, large publishers often take this kind of hyper-expensive position on a book. When large houses decline to publish more difficult "literary" works, it comes down not to risk aversion (betting half a million on Chris Evans is a risk) but to a broader type of conservatism. Conglomerates' overheads are high: smart headquarters, large numbers of staff and vast marketing expenditure all tie up significant amounts of cash. (TimeWarner in the US has to allocate a staggering $100,000 in overhead costs against each book.) Against this, of course, conglomerates also enjoy huge economies of scale and usually boast profitable backlists. None the less, in the face of toughening trading conditions and high costs, the big houses are on a constant search for sure-fire success. And because large commercial organisations, even devolved ones like Random House, struggle to innovate, this more often than not means genre publishing: celebrity, romance, thrillers, crime novels, chick lit, lad lit, science fiction and fantasy.
The effect of corporate conservatism tends to be that "mid-list" books-those written by good writers who none the less lack marketable attributes (lively personalities, original stories)-are being squeezed. In addition, sales and marketing departments can make innovation difficult-although editors can usually get their way with a commission if they are determined enough and the advance is not enormous. The company that employs me-Grove Atlantic-has recently published avant-garde fiction by two important writers, John Barth and William Gaddis, when there was little appetite among the conglomerates to do so. We have also become the publishers of the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Literature, Kenzaburo Oe, after his previous publishers, Picador, chose not to continue with his work. Yet the underlying point is that these writers are being published in Britain-simply not by one of the conglomerates.
It usually falls to the small independent houses to try new things: Canongate Books enjoyed global success by re-issuing key books of the Bible in a funky format with original introductions by such eminences as Joanna Trollope, Bono, PD James and the Dalai Lama. Prior to joining the HarperCollins empire, Fourth Estate pioneered new types of hardback publishing-books such as Longitude and Fermat's Last Theorem-at low prices and in irregular sizes. The book trade is now awash with similar micro-histories and quest narratives. Wordsworth Editions gave Penguin a fright by reissuing out-of-copyright literary classics for £1 each. After trying to sue Wordsworth (claiming that it had re-branded its range to look "confusingly similar" to Penguin Classics), Penguin poached their editorial director, Marcus Clapham, and sales director Clive Reynard, for their own budget operation. They have both since been made redundant.
That said, independents are also bound by commercial imperatives and if they do not have a lucrative backlist, like Faber, or a generous proprietor, they need a lot of luck or skill to thrive. It is true that independent publishers are often mavericks, unencumbered by the need to maximise shareholder value. But independent publishers are still in business-some rewardingly so (Profile Books made a profit from its second year in 1997). Successful publishers balance the needs of proprietors or investors with their own passions. For some, those passions manifest themselves in the attempt to publish great work that will endure; for others, it is the pursuit of mega-sales. For most, the truth lies somewhere in between.
Thirty years ago, figures like André Deutsch and William Collins were at the centre of the publishing universe, wise patron-businessmen who operated in a retailing environment dominated by independent bookshops and with authors who were happy to accept tiny advances. Books looked different, too, more often than not cheaply produced with ugly dust jackets. (Anyone disagreeing with this should go to their nearest secondhand bookshop and find titles from the 1960s and 1970s.)
Today, the businesses built by men like Collins are part of large media conglomerates. None the less, the centre of gravity in the industry has swung away from publishers towards authors and, for big names, their agents. The agent has in the last 15 years become an increasingly powerful figure. Stanley Unwin described literary agents in the following terms in 1946: "For this profitable occupation no qualifications are required. I know of only one agent who has actual publishing experience, and is adequately informed about such vital matters as the cost of production, advertising etc. It is rare to find one with a thorough knowledge of any foreign language, though they mostly claim to be experts in dealing with translation rights. In point of fact, most of them are out of their depth if they attempt to handle anything but fiction, memoirs, or popular works..."
It would be hard to sustain this view today. Now literary agents involve themselves in the editing of the submission and in the sale of sub-rights, such as serialisations. Many have experience in publishing houses before becoming agents and the most famous-figures like Ed Victor, Andrew Wylie and John Brockman-are nearly as well-known as their authors. Although it would be unfair to blame agents directly, they are central to understanding the huge imbalance amongst British writers between the have-lots and have-nots.
In his 1927 essay, Keynes described authors as a "humble tribe, pleased enough to see themselves in print without paying for it" and wondered "how many authors are there in England who can reckon on earning from their books above £500 per year?" His answer? "Very, very few." The picture today is different, although mixed. When the Society of Authors surveyed its members in 2000, it found that three-quarters earned under £20,000 from their writing, and only 5 per cent earned more than £75,000.
The Chicago economist Robert Frank has tried to explain this gulf. In his book The Winner-Take-All Society, Frank observes that in every field that is market tested, there is a widening gap between those at the very top and the rest. Applied to publishing, this means that the top authors are receiving unprecedentedly high advances, while writers still awaiting their breakthrough book are often struggling to keep their place on the bigger houses' lists. (Some argue, implausibly, that this is bad for the winners as well as the losers. The claim is that young talent is tied to a golden treadmill which requires writers to produce book after book within a certain time period, with no account taken of the mystery of "artistic rhythm.")
Although it is hard to get firm figures, it is almost certainly true that advances for established names have gone up. The last two years have seen Donna Tartt receive a reputed £1m from Bloomsbury for the rights to her new novel; Michael Crichton receive £35m from HarperCollins for two books; while Random House acquired world rights to Bill Clinton's memoirs for a sum estimated at around £8m-thought to be the biggest ever advance for a single work of non-fiction. Meanwhile, celebrities like Victoria Beckham and Robbie Williams have also received giant sums- "healthy seven figures" from Penguin for Posh and around £750,000 from Random House for Robbie (whose book went on to sell about 800,000 copies).
We expect John Grisham or Tom Clancy to be well rewarded, as their books sell millions. What is remarkable is that more literary writers are also getting a share of the spoils. The story of Martin Amis's advance of £500,000 from HarperCollins for The Information filled column inches. Since then, writers such as Alain de Botton, Michael Chabon, Arundhati Roy, the late WG Sebald, Zadie Smith and Graham Swift have all been recipients of advances in excess of £100,000, with the authors in many cases moving on from the publishers who helped to establish their names. This is another sign that the power is now with the writers, rather than the publishers. (Good, serious, non-fiction ideas are also well rewarded-consider the £500,000 reputedly paid by Transworld for a book by Gavin Menzies about how China pioneered the age of exploration. Or the £1m plus that Simon Schama got for his history of Britain.)
Contemporary books are often printed on better paper, the jackets are better designed and, despite occasional disasters (especially in fact-checking) editorial standards remain high. Writers are better rewarded for their work and the media is bursting with book reviews and related features (the Guardian has recently launched a new book review section of formidable ambition and seriousness). Consider the media attention devoted to recent works of some gravitas such as Francis Fukuyama's Our Post-Human Future, Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles and Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Baby Hunger. Bookshops have, for the most part, better range and display than ever before. For the first time the consumer can look forward to real price competition.
Even translated fiction, its rarity in British publisher's catalogues long held as a sign of the narrowness of the literary scene, is quietly making its presence felt. In spite of Harvill's loss of independence, Sandor Marai's Embers and the work of WG Sebald and Alessandro Baricco have all been published successfully by Penguin. Work as diverse as Sophie's World (first published in Danish) and Michel Houellebecq's misanthropic novel Atomised have also enjoyed success. There appears to be an appetite among literary publishers for more translations: Serpent's Tail had strong sales with Catherine Millet's joylessly unerotic The Sexual Life Of Catherine M, while Canongate has a successful international list, comprised entirely of work in translation.
None the less, the doomsayers still charge the industry and, by extension, the population with dumbing down. This view assumes that cultural mores are shaped from top down and that what is literary is good and what is commercial is bad. The anti-elitists maintain, on the contrary, that taste is driven by forces that influence the culture from the bottom up. It's an irreducible question. I suspect that the balance lies in the middle, but that big, transformative changes are driven from the bottom upwards. That is, publishers publish an enormous number of books, based upon their enthusiasms, passions and feel for the zeitgeist. If they have read the temper of the times correctly and can persuade the all-important media of this, then the retailers in turn are likely to support publication, thus increasing the chance that the book will enjoy commercial success.
The dumbing-down argument says that we have both superabundance and cultural decline. There are two responses to this. The first is to play percentages and argue that unless there exists proof of falling literary quality-and given the philosophical impossibility of even defining terms, this is hard-one must assume that a significant percentage of books published today are as good, innovative and challenging as they have ever been. That lots of bad novels are published is nothing new: Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy was worried about the effects of escapist literature, as was Orwell before him. The biggest names in literary fiction-Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker-are selling more copies than ever. McEwan's Atonement has been a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic, as was Zadie Smith's startling debut novel, White Teeth, and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Authors in the literary middle market, dominated by writers such as Sebastian Faulks and Nick Hornby, are selling in the hundreds of thousands. Who knows if any of these writers will have greatness thrust upon them by future generations? It is impossible to guess which of today's books will be revered by our great-grandchildren. Indeed, given the metaphysical crisis besetting university literature departments, the idea of a canon may be on its last legs. Those seeking to predict which works will endure should remember that William Faulkner, now considered by many to be, with Saul Bellow, the most important American writer of the 20th century, struggled to find readers during his early career. But obscurity does not point to future greatness either: Dickens was a commercially successful writer before he was established as a literary great.
The second response to the charge of dumbing-down is simply to go and look at the quality of what is being produced, especially in non-fiction where it may be easier to form objective judgements. General publishers have always tried to satisfy the public's autodidactic impulses-Charles Darwin wrote bestsellers after all-and its appetite for serious non-fiction shows no signs of being sated. Popular science is not, as is sometimes said, a new genre: mainstream science books have been making a splash for decades (Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962; Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene in 1977; and Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time in 1988). What has happened recently is that more high quality books than ever before are being published, on a greater diversity of subjects, written by people, such as Stephen Hawking, Mark Ridley and Martin Rees, who are actually making science. Well-funded institutions dedicated to increasing public awareness of science have failed to make much impact on public consciousness and coverage of science in the media continues to be patchy. But for the reader seeking to understand the latest scientific trends, there is a multitude of accessible, authoritative, entertaining books. Recent publications by Steven Pinker (evolutionary psychology), Steve Grand (artificial life), Steve Jones (genetics) and Martin Rees (cosmology), to name a few, provide compelling accounts of the cutting edge of the discipline.
History is booming and its most successful proponents-David Cannadine, Linda Colley, Norman Davies, Orlando Figes, Mark Mazower, Richard Overy, Simon Schama-are fine writers and outstanding scholars, and that list could be three times longer. Biography too is flourishing: recent years has seen memorable lives of Karl Marx (Francis Wheen), Hitler (Ian Kershaw), Marie Antoinette (Antonia Fraser), LBJ (Robert A Caro) and Berlioz (David Cairns), among others. Peter Ackroyd's books (on Dickens, London, Blake) have sold in huge quantities, yet are far from undemanding.
Despite these reasons to be cheerful, there is radical change ahead and not all of it is looking good-at least for publishing companies. The story of publishing up to this point has been one of three inventions-writing, paper and printing-and a social revolution: mass literacy. Today, paper has been joined by other media to convey the written word, including digital audio and the computer screen. The electronic revolution has already swept through reference publishing; computers are ideal for searching dictionaries, encyclopaedias and atlases.
Where general fiction and non-fiction are concerned, the story is more complicated. Despite the e-book scare of a few years ago, paper is still going to be the primary means by which most works of this kind are published, especially among people who today are over 25. The publishing industry, even with the presence of powerful corporate proprietors, lacks the critical mass to have much of a say over the future development of e-book formats and it is likely that there will be a profusion of different devices. It has had to watch and wait while the technology has developed. Now two of the pre-requisites for successful e-books are nearly upon us-improved battery power and display technology. Future e-book devices will also probably have a "voice" function to enable the script to be read to you while you are driving or lying on the beach.
For the next decade or two, the paperback book will continue to be one of the most cost-effective, portable storage devices ever invented. Upmarket hardback non-fiction is increasingly pleasing to the eye and touch and the market for these titles is also likely to remain immune to the challenge of e-books. Nevertheless, the e-book will develop a growing following-a US report claims that 180,000 electronic titles were published there in 2001-and will sit alongside other forms, such as the audio book and the bound copy as it gradually becomes established. As with all technologies, there will be generational differences. The over 35s may still retain an attachment to wads of printed paper, but for younger generations, this affection may be more fickle.
When the shift towards electronic books gets underway, the news for publishing companies is likely to be mixed. Most of them long to reduce the sums they spend on warehousing by digitising as much of their inventory as possible. The idea of printing on demand, a technology that may come to dominate the production of text-only, one-colour books, is also attractive as a means of keeping expensive stock holdings to a minimum. However, for established authors, the appearance of an e-book readership offers the chance effectively to bypass the publisher and dramatically increase earnings.
In such a world, as Jason Epstein suggests in his recent Book Business, the author buys in editorial advice and places a handsomely packaged work on his (or Amazon's) website for fans to download for a fee. Writers like Michael Crichton and Stephen King would then buy-in marketing and publicity and become their own publishers. Less well-known authors will find the going tough, as the established companies gradually cease to receive the large revenues from the sales of their brand name authors and will also turn to web publishing. The old publishing houses will continue to pursue the sale of rights and will develop sophisticated direct marketing techniques. We are approaching the time when anyone with an interest in a particular subject will know about a forthcoming book on it.
This has several outcomes: the number of available titles will expand and so will the number of entities recognisable as publishers. This in turn will change the role of the bookseller and the agent. I expect a big reduction in the number of bookshops in the next ten years. Booksellers that flourish look likely to offer print-on-demand services, and to carry many more secondhand and remainder-priced books together with other products. Agents representing established authors will become more like brand managers, nurturing authors to their first online publication, securing investment in that publication and opening up opportunities for the author to further his brand.
There is a final, bigger and more recalcitrant question: will future generations read anything, in any format? This is not actually a question about reading per se—since the spread of white-collar work and the IT revolution, more people are encountering more text than ever before. It is about desirable reading (quality fiction and non-fiction) versus less desirable reading (tabloid newspapers, websites, manuals, airport bonkbusters, and so on). On this question, the evidence is more sketchy. Most people continue to read in their spare time. According to "Social Trends 2002," more than 71 per cent of women and 58 per cent of men over 16 had read a book in the four weeks prior to being interviewed. These figures are surprisingly consistent across the generations: although the group that reads least is young men aged 16 to 19, book reading in this group still stands at 51 per cent and edges higher for men aged 20 to 24. An Arts Council survey in 2000 found that 70 per cent of people read a book at least once a week. The report also found that only 2 per cent of children declared that they read less because of the internet and CD-Roms, though this figure is surely going to increase.
To return to the present, the publishing universe is most amenable to that which is novel and that which is proven because the media and booksellers respond most enthusiastically to those two criteria. The media loves novelty, but also lovingly embellishes the reputation of established brand name writers. Booksellers are also interested in the new new thing. It could be a work that is stylistically or formally innovative; it could be a new kind of story or a new understanding of something familiar. It could even be a strong argument (such as Naomi Klein's No Logo or Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation). Whatever it is, it has, in some way, to be original.
The future, it seems, belongs to writers, readers and entrepreneurs. There will be as many or as few masterpieces published as ever, but they will enter the world through proliferating channels. More publishers will exist and some of them will also be famous authors. For less well-known writers, making a living from the written word is likely to be hard, but no harder than it is now. From the industry point of view, as it sits on the tail-end of the longest economic boom in postwar history, all this seems somehow unimaginable. From the consumer's point of view, the golden age is set to continue. But for publishers, ordinary writers and booksellers, the next few years could be the last great days of publishing as we have known it since the 16th century.
