Inside books: Long live the classics!

Classics were predicted to be one of the first things to fall at the feet of eBooks. Traditional booksellers — like me — have been in a perpetual cold sweat, wondering how to make up the lost revenue for around a third of our sales. Classics publishers must have been positively feverish with worry.

The reason for the panic is thus: the great majority of classic works of literature are old — think Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, the Brontes — and, therefore, out of copyright. That means that anyone who has the time and inclination can publish Dickens online and nobody can come after them screaming copyright theft. So an eBook of Great Expectations, for instance, can be found, easily, for free. So why, with everyone bragging about their Kindles, would anyone bother going into a bookshop and buying a paperback edition for £7.99? Why spend money for something you can get for free?

You can see why we’ve all been quaking in our boots.