MY NEW YEAR ALWAYS BEGINS WITH A clear-out, including books. I love books, but not as wall coverings. The ones I know I will never read again go to Oxfam.

I was intrigued to read about the ReaditSwapit website. Here, you register books you have finished with, and agree to swap them for books other people have finished with. The founder, Andrew Bathgate, clearly well-motivated, but too young to have heard of that marvellous institution, the public library, says: “We wanted to create a site that would enable people to gain access to books, without having to spend any money.”

Good idea — but what am I going to live on? In the music industry, this kind of thing would be called “file sharing”, and technically illegal. Of course I want people to read my books, but I also want people to buy my books. I am not exactly sure why it is all right to expect writers to work for free, or why the Swapit site is seen as such a great idea because a guy was “moaning about how much he spent on books” and realised that other people must feel similarly hard done by.

He means well somewhere, I know he does, and the site is free, and the users have to arrange the swap themselves, and maybe even find true love. At the heart of it, though, is a real and serious fight about “content”, and especially about how books are faring in this cut-throat, cut-price world of ours.

Manufactured goods are now made cheaply abroad. Food is part of a ruthless and sustained price war. Air travel does not represent the true cost to the environment, and is cunningly subsidised by the public purse in the form of “incentives”. We live in a la-la land of “massive reductions”, usually paid for by exploiting developing countries, trashing the planet and rigging prices. When it comes to books, we believe in three-for-two promotions and “special discounts”.

Here’s a fact: buy a book of mine for £12 and the chain bookstore will take at least £6, often as much as £8, of that money, or it will negotiate a deal with my publishers so that it can offer the book for £8, taking at least half for itself, and leaving me with the terrifying high-discount royalty on all those copies. Which means, if I am lucky, about 50p.

The reason that authors try to secure high advances these days is not because they are rich and greedy but because the royalty system is now about as complicated as Gordon Brown’s tax system. A writer can sell tens of thousands of copies, and make comparatively little, because of chain-store discounting.

Writers are the new farmers; as primary producers we see the profit going to the middleman.

Publishers know there is a problem. Independent booksellers know there is a problem — their books are often more expensive than those at the chain stores because they cannot secure the huge discounts from the publishers.

Even chain stores know that there is a problem because, well, let’s just say it shall we, books are not a commodity, like everything else. Books are different.

The price problem is affecting the kinds of books that are being published — publishers are becoming more risk-averse because they have to guarantee a fairly high print run in our crazy “pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap” market. This is fine for Dan Brown and Jamie Oliver; it is not fine for new writers, or for “difficult” or “different” books.

My own strategy is to buy from independent stores, lend books to friends and encourage the friend to buy the book, or others, by the author.

Like most book lovers, I am a great haunter of second-hand bookshops and, while I know that the money I spend there won’t benefit the writer directly, such shops offer a limited and eclectic range, and are part of the passion for books — not a way of avoiding having to pay for them.

The great thing about public libraries is that they provide free reading alongside the Public Lending Right. Although 2p a lend may not sound much, it adds up to valuable income — and in any case the principle is important. Books are not free. Writers need to be paid.

So as you breeze into a year of new reading, with a paperback about the same price as a sandwich and a cup of coffee, spare a thought for the writer, many of whom really do live on fresh air.

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