Publishing is an Industry Bedeviled by Pessimism

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 bedeviled 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 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.

From "Good Books"
Toby Mundy
Prospect Magazine, October 2002