A turn-up for the books

Are we living in the golden age of the printed word, as a leading publisher is claiming? Have bookshops really never had it so good? Robert Hanks puts the theory to the test

Our text today is taken from Ecclesiastes: "Of the making of many books there is no end." Do you know, I think that's as true today as it was when it was written, more than 2,000 years ago? If not truer. When John Maynard Keynes surveyed the state of Britain's book-trade in 1927, 13,810 new titles were being published every year. When Toby Mundy carried out a 75th-anniversary follow-up, the results of which are carried in the latest edition of the magazine Prospect, he found the equivalent figure for 2001 was 119,000, of which 75,000 were "general trade" books (ie, something you might conceivably want to read).

It is common for bookish people to lament the state of the British book trade. To paraphrase: gone are the days of the publishers who believed in the books. One by one, the small independent houses have been swallowed up by big conglomerates – Harvill goes to Random House, John Murray to Hodder Headline – whose only interest is the bottom line. What matters is what will sell, next month, next week, now. Risk-aversion leads to reliance on established authors and novelty acts, with an underpinning of genre books: chick-lit and lad-lit, how-to and self-help, spies and Nazis. Books don't get edited, careers don't get nurtured.

Holding this world-view involves a lot of squinting and averting of the gaze. Publishers have always been businessmen, sometimes fairly ruthless ones; for every old-style independent that goes to the wall, there will be a new contender – Profile, Serpent's Tail, Canongate. And how can a bunch of people who will gamble hundreds of thousands of pounds on Anthea Turner and Frank Skinner be called "risk-averse"?

Mundy, by contrast, is wide-eyed with wonder at the sheer plenty of the modern book world. Never before have there been so many books so diverse in matter, so well-produced, so easy to find, so competitively priced. For the consumer, this is a golden age. Only the poor publisher suffers, squeezed by a new breed of rapacious agents at one end, and heavily competitive bookshops at the other – the first demanding huge advances, the second massive discounts. And the book itself, as a "wad of printed paper", may be in decline: a new generation will turn to e-books downloaded from the web; and once this trend is established, bookshops and old-style publishing houses will go to the wall.

I can't reproduce all the detail of Mundy's argument, or his meticulously researched facts – you need to read Prospect for that. (One factual error, by the way: Mundy says that in Britain about 25 per cent of books are returned by bookshops to publishers; publishers assure me that the actual figure is about 15 per cent.)

As a consumer of books, I can only endorse his view that it is now easier to buy books than ever before. Growing up greedy for books in a large town near London, I remember the miserable choice on offer at WH Smith and the single independent bookshop – photo albums of kittens and ponies; technical guides to car maintenance and Battle of Britain aircraft; a lot of generic bestsellers; the odd Margaret Drabble or PG Wodehouse; and a clutch of Penguin Classics. Even in London, bookshops were dingy, hard to navigate and unfriendly (I still haven't shaken off my aversion to Foyle's).

Then along came Waterstone's, and the high-street book trade was transformed. WH Smith realised there was money to be made from books, and made more of an effort; then along came Books Etc, now owned by the US group Borders. Soon, every big town had its big bookshop; so, too, do quite a few of the smaller towns these days, as Ottakar's has spread to fill the gaps (it now has 7 per cent of the retail market). And if you can't find what you want in your local bookshop, it's off to Amazon.co.uk, or Amazon.com for that exotic US edition.

But it's worth entering a couple of caveats: the sense of a new freedom of choice is partly illusory. Increasingly, the big chains make their buying decisions centrally, so that what you find on the shelf from branch to branch doesn't vary much. This is not ideal for the buyer; it's awful for the small publisher. My friend Clive Boutle, who runs Francis Boutle Publishers, specialists in social history and Cornish language books, complains that the chains (with the honourable exception of Ottakar's) aren't interested in taking books from small publishers: it's too much administrative hassle, and small publishers can't afford the huge discounts big bookshops require from them to ensure their profit margins. While the big chains place repeated orders for one-off copies of his books, for people who are looking for them, they don't draw the obvious conclusion: the books might be worth putting on their shelves for the browser.

Another, more important caveat is that the present abundance of books has been achieved at some sacrifice of quality. Although Mundy confidently maintains that standards of editing are high, apart from the odd blunder, authors and publishers I have spoken to – none of whom wants to be identified – have no doubt that British editing is becoming slipshod. Dreadful factual howlers, appalling lapses of literary taste, heck, even entire literary careers have slipped through the net. Until a couple of years ago I wrote paperback reviews for The Independent on Sunday: checking reviews of the hardbacks, I regularly found that glaring mistakes had been pointed out, and left uncorrected in the paperback edition.

Perhaps Mundy's underestimation of this problem stems from his underplaying of the extent to which the dominance of cross-media conglomerates has changed the rules of publishing. It's not simply a question of the bottom line, but of a whole new attitude to publishing as an arm of the media, not some special, privileged industry; and now, publishing has to complement its owner's other interests: the most dramatic example was the dropping of Chris Patten's memoirs by Rupert Murdoch's HarperCollins, to safeguard Murdoch's TV interests in China.

And Toby Mundy's wide-eyed gaze doesn't take in everything in the garden. He doesn't mention schools and libraries, which have had their budgets squeezed in recent years. A friend who supplements his income through writing history textbooks told me that in recent years the steady decline in his income from royalties has been matched by a rise in payments from the Authors' Licensing and Copyright Society, which monitors photocopying of books: schools are no longer buying 12 copies of a book, but only one or two, from which they copy out bleeding chunks. This is important. Writing in The Independent three years ago, Robin Baird-Smith of Duckworth pointed to John Murray as a model of how an independent publisher should be run, noting that "its enlightened management decided decades ago to establish a strong presence in the educational market, giving them the security of a backlist". A strong presence in the educational market turned out to be no protection at all.

So everything in the garden is not as lovely as Mundy makes out. On the other hand, he may be too pessimistic about the future, at least as far as publishers are concerned. There is little evidence, as yet, that the e-book is going to take over: wads of printed paper have a number of advantages over electronic books, and the different models of e-book being talked about in the US are deeply unattractive: one-time use, payment per page or by the minute. (And do you know how much of the book market Amazon.co.uk has? Four per cent. The wonders of the web can be exaggerated.)

Even if the mechanical and financial difficulties are overcome, consumers and writers are still going to need a brand we can trust, somebody who can shout louder and draw attention to the new new thing: in other words, a publisher. Things are going to change; but they're also going to stay pretty much the same.