Anyone who – for good reasons – dreads pollution and extinction in the material environment for books ought to be toiling hard to nurture the virtual environment. Otherwise, all the tears shed for the looming loss of choice and creativity will be – crocodile tears.. In this book Mois?Na? editor of Foreign Policy, turns the spotlight on a large and widely ignored problem: the growth of dangerous, corrupting and simply evil areas of the international economy. Arms smuggling, the illegal drugs trade, human trafficking, terrorist finance – all have expanded to an alarming extent, as the entrepreneurs of the illicit have exploited the opportunities opened up by new technologies and globalisation. At present, the same advocates of diversity who deplore the shrinking of high-street book stocks also oppose the expansion of the virtual-browsing service offered by internet giants such as Google (Google Print) and Amazon (the “Search Inside” facility).Yes, huge questions of copyright and control have yet to be resolved. But if publishers refuse to trust the masters of the web, then they should do the job themselves. So publishers (and non-celebrity writers) urgently need to get their online story straight.
“It occurred to me that I could lie about the West in a much more interesting way than any of these people were lying,” Doctorow once said. Whether it’s Michel Simon’s tramp throwing away his wedding clothes and dressing up in scarecrow’s outfit at the end of Boudu Sauv?es Eaux (1932), or the jealous gamekeeper running amok through the country house in La R?e du Jeu, there are many Chaplinesque moments in his movies. At the same time, he deals far more frankly with sex than Chaplin ever did.Arguably, the richness of his work lies in the extraordinary range of influences he soaked up. There was his father who, he claimed, “taught us never to shut our eyes to anything, for he was open to any impression, all the time hoping to reach out to a kind of truth”.
At Christmas, stores worked frantically to teach shoppers that the true value of a much-publicised new book with a cover price of £18 or £20 is, let’s say, £6.99. It amounts to voluntary death by a thousand cuts.Tempt consumers to buy their Sharon Osbournes and Jamie Olivers in this way, and pretty soon Sharon Osbournes and Jamie Olivers will be all that they can buy. In this climate, for publishers and writers to worry unduly about whether the Competition Commission allows wounded Waterstone’s to buy winded Ottakar’s in May smacks of fretting over the condemned prisoner’s final hearty meal. If current trends persist, we may soon return to a pre-Waterstone’s world, with a couple of dozen serious bricks-and-mortar bookshops spread over the entire country.Except that, now, the internet promises all its vast opportunities for unlimited stockholding. Far from resisting this assault, the retail chains – and the corporate publishers whom they now bully – have opted to act as their own Sweeney Todds. He offers bold advice about trusting to intuition, and spurning market research: “Waterstone’s was aimed at me.” He delivers splendid broadsides against “the current state of capitalism”.
