The free-thinking reader is not dead, but found online
As most book publishers bow to bestsellers and celebrity culture, serious literature can still thrive thanks to the internet

This article appeared in the Guardian on Thursday March 06 2008 on p32 of the Comment & debate section.

It is by Stephen Page, Publisher & CEO of Faber & Faber.

Judging by recent media interest it would seem that the big story for books this year will be the arrival of the ebook, and with it a necessary demise of the book - if not today then in time. Not surprisingly, innovation is catching the eye. However, while digitally delivered reading will in the long term have a major effect on how we read and, perhaps, what is written, it is likely to have very little effect on reading in 2008. What is having a profound impact on our reading culture is a much older, less-appealing story; the rising dominance of the mass market.

Writing on World Book Day a year ago I found myself anxious about our narrowing cultural choices. Over the last year my concern has risen further. As has proved the case for film, music and television, the book world is now experiencing a concentration on fewer books derived from an obsession with bestsellers and celebrity, and an increasing sense that what is good is that which sells large volumes. As a result most serious or marginal books now begin life with a decreasing exposure in bookshops.

Last autumn was, as a result, difficult for publishers who support a broad canon from good commercial books to more literary or quirky titles. Like Lear's diminishing retinue these ever-decreasing circles are dangerous. Clearly a huge range of books currently gets published but something fundamental is shifting for publishers and writers which is threatening the range available to readers and the livelihoods of most writers. For example, the only serious piece of non-fiction in the top 100 for 2007 was Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. Where was the history, literary memoir, science? Buried under a pile of celebrity biography, cookery and misery memoir?
Market forces are of course at the heart of this shift, so is it pointless to complain? Well, no. It does not have to be this way. Alongside a belief in the wilfulness of readers and writers, my hope for the richness of our future reading culture lies in a cocktail of new technology and strength of range-holding booksellers.

Technology, often feared by the bookish world, is a growing friend. As the mass market has risen so has the reality of a technologically connected society. This doesn't just mean Facebook. Global communities are gathering around common interests online, just as intellectuals gathered in cafes in 1900s Vienna. They are gloriously beyond corporate control and naturally antipathetic to the reductive mass market. We are only at the beginning of this social revolution. I am not an advocate of the life led online, but as broadband reaches all generations, genders and income brackets, so this will develop usefully. It won't be all of life but it must be a place where niche interests can develop, robbing the mass market of a portion of its control. Literature can thrive in these places.

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