Book publishing is experiencing a Dickensian mix of wild optimism and gloomy despair do seem to characterise much of what is written and said about publishing nowadays, said Caroline Michel of HarperPress at the Guardian World Book Day Forum. According to Michel, two key issues facing the industry are that of second hand retailing, and the delicate dynamic between creativity and commerce.
Amazon and other online retailers are developing the second-hand book market to the point where it too may soon become a threat. The second-hand market also affects current bestsellers: the retail price is of The Da Vinci Code £6.99, but buyers can find second-hand copies for £4.14 on abebooks or for as little as £3.50 on ebay. If they can't find the book they want online, they will probably find it at Oxfam, now the largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe with estimated sales of £15m a year. Needless to say, neither author nor publisher earns a penny from second-hand transactions.
We may be better served by looking to the other creative industries to see how they are addressing the problems that soon might impact on us.
The music industry, for example, has been struggling with the delivery of online music ever since the first incarnation of Napster, and is just beginning to see a way forward that will be acceptable to customers and profitable for them. Napster has been reborn in a new legal form selling digital music alongside Apple, Microsoft and others. And customers are buying it. Book publishing as a whole has its very own potential Napster crisis in the growing practice of book crossing: books passed from reader to reader and tracked and organised on bookcrossing.com.
There are parallels between publishing and the film industry too; an increasing dependency on blockbusters is the most obvious. In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Louis Menand wrote, "A blockbuster is a Hollywood tradition, but blockbuster dependence is a disease. It sucks the talent and resources out of every other part of the industry." The lessons here are to do with tensions that have always existed between creativity and commerce. We all have - and treasure - our "tent poles", to borrow a film industry term. They are only a danger if they distract us from the fact that tomorrow's blockbusters need quite a lot of our attention too. Or, more particularly, if we lose sight of the fact that you can only sell sameness for so long. Creative industries are based upon and dependent upon originality. There is no magic formula, and from time to time we are given unexpectedly sharp reminders of this. Who knows why the Decca Record Company turned down the Beatles? Or why Universal and United Artist rejected Star Wars? Or why almost every publisher in town passed up the chance to publish William Golding's Lord of the Flies, or JK Rowling's Harry Potter?
Whatever the answer, it is reasonable to suppose that the people who said no were very confident that they knew what the market wanted, and that this wasn't it. To work in any of the creative industries is to work in a world where certainties are in very short supply.
