Publishing in the UK
- rebeccaphillips-iad
- Oct 24, 2014
- 2 min read
I don't know what aspect of books I want to look into so I decided to start a wide search into anything book related that had been reported on, just to give me an insight on what the current market is like.
Key quotes from the article:
'UK publishes more books per capita than any other country.'
'UK publishers released more than 20 new titles every hour over the course of 2014, meaning that the country published more books per inhabitant than anywhere else in the world.'
'Leading literary agent Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown described the figure as “either a sign of cultural vitality or publishing suicide”. “Of course, it is utter madness to publish so many books when the average person reads between one and five books a year."'
'At independent publisher Canongate, Jamie Byng was also concerned by the statistic. “I think we publish too many books, Canongate included, and I think this impacts negatively on how well we publish books as an industry.'
'But Roland Philipps, the managing director of John Murray, was positive about the figures. “For the vibrancy of culture, books are essential, and if publishers are taking on more they must believe that voices are deserving to be heard, even if not all those voices make an impact with the consumer,” '
'Jenn Ashworth, who won a Betty Trask award for her debut novel A Kind of Intimacy, agreed. “More books and more people talking about books is always excellent,”'
I personally have heard a lot about the closures of libraries and bookshops so finding this up to date article has given me a different outlook on the consumption of books.
There is a lot of 'talk' about people not reading as much anymore, but why would so many books be being published if people weren't reading them? What is the reason for the decline in libraries but rise in publications?
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