Giving up books for Lent

More bad news for people who like their reading matter to come with a spine: January sales for printed books were down 16 per cent on last year’s. There are lots of reasons for this — ebooks, better telly, a global pandemic of attention deficit disorder — but what’s often overlooked is modern publishing’s tendency to value quantity over quality.
 
Over 150,000 books were published in the UK last year, an increase of nearly 50 per cent on a decade ago. Not all of this is down to the growth in self-publishing. The book industry appears to have taken trendy longtail theory — increase profits by selling less of more — and swallowed it the wrong way. Instead of covering several bases well, the plan seems to be cover every base with any old thing, preferably multiple times. Or rather, churn out as much as you can and hope the mysterious power of the backlist combined with a few surprise bestsellers means you’ll break even.