Aaghgh death of book, death of book, agh agh

Bloggers I like (John Green, Dear Author, Smart Bitches etc) are all discussing the way the US publishing industry has recently been exploring the nether reaches of the U-bend in the Crapper of Fate (pls xcse coarseness, but that's how they all make it sound). Apparently book sales have collapsed and all is doom and gloom. But but but - I checked out an interesting site run by Morris Rosenthal of Foner Books - here is his industry sales review which runs up to Oct 2008 (when the fact that a hedge fund was chief shareholder in one of the biggest US conglomerates, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt screwed them royally): http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm

Check out the table about 2/3 of the way down the page - it shows the sales, and for the last 5 years, US book sales have run around $16.5bn per year...This year it looks as though it will be less because November saw a 14% plummet, and who knows what December brought - although maybe Santa bought a few books - he was certainly generous with the printed matter in our London/Brussels axis.

But the thing that baffles me altogether is this constant moan about the decline of the market - there have never ever been so many readers in the world - literacy rates may be proportionally lower globally especially since cute folk in organisations like the IMF and World Bank have helped poor countries switch money out of essentials like education in favour of paying interest on 'strucutural adjustment' funding. But overall, the number of people who learn to read continues to increase, little by little. Of course, their disposable income for books is shrinking at the moment, but the fact of the matter is if the right books are published, people will buy them and they will buy them more than ever right now, because books are a much better way of escaping the glooms than DVDs, say, or reruns on TV.

This is because reading is interactive and requires us to lose ourselves in a different time and place. The problem is that publishers at the moment have been burned by their own stupidity so badly - offering humongous advances for rubbish that won't sell (hmm, step forward sleb bios of ex-Big Bro contestants and Strictly Come Dancing judges), while failing to understand that by and large, fictions readers don't want more of exactly the same, but do want something just as good, if not better. Which is a subtle distinction that requires a punt every now and then, the kind of punt that takes imagination and people who understand about books. Which hedge fund managers by and large don't. Nor, clearly, as we are all discovering to our cost, do they seem to know much about their own business.

What all this means is publishing fewer books, more of which are crummy, thus deterring readers. What publishers need to do is publish more varied and interesting titles and build up small niche markets with print-on-demand technology offered through amazon and other retailers - because everywhere there are niche markets. And they need to ditch their sales guys and the big cars and get the authors out there pimping their own books, because no one can sell a book like a passionate author (take a look at John Green, frex). So - drive down the unit costs of book production - but not the editorial costs, because the one thing most books need nowadays is a lot of pruning and sometimes, slashing and burning, - save the planet by cutting down on paper costs and lumping around big heavy boxes of books which then get pulped, and get authors to work their markets through their own websites and through readings, offering courses and all the other things that most writers have to do already because so few of them as it is can make a decent living out of just writing. Plus, maybe, just maybe, some detailed research into the various genre markets.

Romance is alive and well because the romance genre, long snubbed, has gone out and built its own market through magazines and websites and now blogs and webrings, from AAR to great author pages. The readership is faithful and focused and is prepared to shell out for books because in tough times, you can save up for a couple of weeks, or a month and go out and buy 3-4 books in a hit. And if you are lucky, one or two will be good enough for re-reading, but otherwise, most romance readers have their stash of keepers that they will wheel out when the going gets touch (just as I did last week with one of my favourite Ibbotson books, The Morning Gift). There are lessons to be learned from the Mills & Boons of this world, who generally seem to be able to ride out recessions...

Not a book or a movie, but a place

Today, I visited Aargh Ink, Jenny Crusie's blog, after a brief pause and found she had written about the wonders of maps, which are things that we very much love in this household too, which made me think of this place, which is definitely my favourite museum in Belgium, and is in my top five, along with John Soane's house and various art galleries.

You may not recognise, or even have heard of, the Plantin-Moretus museum, but it is the most wonderful place. Of course, I would say that, being a total bookaholic, because this was one of the first book-factories in Europe. Christophe Plantin was a Frenchman who came to Antwerp because it was a centre of humanism and translations of the Bible and music, and he set up a printing house. He had a daughter, and when she married, her husband and descendants carried on the business, and their name was Moretus.

There are wonderful things in this place - on the ground floor are the presses and the proof-reading rooms, the bookshop and a study reserved for Justus Lipsius, who used to come and stay and have great thoughts. Upstairs is a warren of staircases and panelled rooms with prints and maps and globes, the first recorded image of a potato and illustrations of polar voyages complete with Esquimaux and polar bears. There are wonderful family portraits and illuminated Bibles, and Plantin's own sonnet on worldly happiness:

Sonnet

Avoir une maison commode, propre et belle,
Un jardin tapissé d'espaliers odorans,
Des fruits, d'excellent vin, peu de train, peu d'enfans,
Posseder seul sans bruit une femme fidèle,

N'avoir dettes, amour, ni procès, ni querelle,
Ni de partage à faire avecque ses parens,
Se contenter de peu, n'espérer rien des Grands,
Régler tous ses desseins sur un juste modèle,

Vivre avecque franchise et sans ambition,
S'adonner sans scrupule à la dévotion,
Dompter ses passions, les rendre obéissantes,

Conserver l'esprit libre, et le jugement fort,
Dire son chapelet en cultivant ses entes,
C'est attendre chez soi bien doucement la mort.