"Everybody lies"

For reasons unclear even to myself, I've begun to restrict my posts on this blog to actual humor pieces. (Actually, I know why: I'm writing two more books, and just am not that chatty, even when I'm not.) However, while I'm getting the next one ready--and signing the contract for the Catalan edition of Barry Trotter--there's an article in the New York Observer that anybody interested in book publishing should read. It's about how the numbers are jiggered for every book. Fair enough--it's their right to shave it however they choose, but it allows them to mask a larger problem: the industry's willful failure to publish books that people actually want to read, at prices they can afford. Did you know that "Everything Is Illuminated," last year's massive fiction bestseller, only sold 100,000 copies in hardcover? In a country of 300 million, something's very wrong here--pricing, distribution, or product--maybe all three, I don't know. Anyway, we can't start revivifying words-on-paper until we take a clear-eyed look at what it is now, and what it is now is a land of reduced expectations, infested with arcana, not worthy of all the good smart people who are in it.There's no reason that books have to be irrelevant, it's how we're doing them that makes them so.