A writer at the fair

Starting my own publishing house is an idea that bubbles in the back of my mind. That's largely what takes me to the London Book Fair. I'm just back from its third venue in three years, the much more comfortable Earls Court.

My publishing idea simmers on, takes different forms, but as a writer it's a relief to have a team of publishers do all that work. I met with my Simon and Schuster editor plus the publisher of my last novel, while agents presumably were working on my behalf in the rights centre. All as it should be.

A sustainable publishing debate I attended seemed somewhat stuck on the question of sustainably harvested or recycled paper (happily Simon and Schuster has the paper of my new biography authenticated as sustainable, so I can sleep easy). Google hauled in three publishers to add to the propaganda of their Google booksearch. Springer and Cambridge University Press have shipped tens of thousands of books out to Google, at Google's expense, to be digitized. They see it as an effective marketing tool for their unsupported backlist. It seems clear to me that they'll never bother to digitize their own stock when e-commerce for books takes off (Springer admitted to difficulty in even locating copies of 10,000 of their backlist titles), and Google will be left holding a vast library of digitized material for sale from its own commercial site, handing a portion of the proceeds to publishers till the copyright expires and they have it all for free.

Hey ho. I'm a writer. I guess I can leave them all to it.