Here’s some news that you may have missed from last week: World Book Night is to be extended to America. The American arm will be led by Carl Lennertz, currently with Harper Collins, and former head of marketing at Foyles, Julia Kingsford, is to become chief executive of the whole charity. The organisers hope that World Book Night is going to live up to its name and make the love of reading and books a global experience.
The event opened in Britain earlier this year and it was an unqualified success. The spectacle of thousands of people donating 1 million books to strangers on Britain’s streets was extensively featured in newspapers and trailed heavily on BBC 2 and Radio 4.
A few dissenters growled beneath the fanfare. As Emily Rhodes pointed out on these pages several months ago, in the eyes of some World Book Night undermined the notion that books have an intrinsic value and cost. Meanwhile, high street and independent book retailers are struggling to compete with mass market shops and online stores that undercut rigid high street prices.
The slow death of the high street bookshop is a smouldering tragedy; but it is a purely economic issue, the natural adjunct of an obsolete business model; a subject that Anna Baddeley examined recently. To suggest that World Book Night has in some way contributed to the continued trials of the real life Black Books misses the mark. Publishers admit that book selling is substantially aided by newspaper reviews or a chance plug on TV or radio; and World Book Night provided publishers with a whole night on BBC2 devoted to books. The highly publicised giveaway of 1 million books concerns rather more than a love of reading and books.
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