I've been challenged by a commenter for this exchange in a recent interview with me.

Q: Are publishers an author's natural enemy, and is that the real reason for open-access journals?

A: No, readers are the author's natural enemy because most of them don't want to read a particular author's work, however good it is. There have always been open-access journals - they're usually called "controlled circulation" (or "organs of state propaganda"), and normally they are rather substandard. I'm sure that Public Library of Science and others are excellent, but I don't think they are the result of anti-publisher sentiment but rather a legitimate desire to make available everything to everyone for free. The problem is there is no such thing as a free lunch, and a good value one can be pretty sustaining.

Of course the question related to scientific authorship and the open access movement. My answer was slightly tongue in cheek and could be interpreted more widely. However, thinking about it more, perhaps there is some truth in it.

I remember Per Saugman, the early creator of Blackwell Scientific Publishing (sold recently for £600m), gave me a tip for authors demanding a higher royalty (the advance had not been invented!). His argument was that the publisher doesn't pay the royalty, the book purchaser does. And does the author really feel that his readers would be willing to pay significantly more for the book? Normally authors settled for the existing royalty and price on the grounds that the reader wasn't overkeen to pay the extra.

And then there's the nearly universal authorial complaint that their publisher isn't marketing hard enough. We all know that the best marketing is word of mouth. If sales aren't high enough it might be the publisher's marketing budget but it's more likely it's those pesky readers not spreading the word hard enough.

Sometimes readers even have the temerity not to like a particular book. Or they may find it of no interest. Or they just can't be bothered. Hard for the publisher to explain to the author whose world frequently revolves round the latest book.

Publishers are not authors' natural enemy. Authors and publishers and booksellers might do well to join forces and try to ally themselves with readers too. Perhaps that is the explanantion for the success of the Richard and Judy Book Club. Last year one in four of all books sold in the UK were recommended by R&J, an extraordinary statistic and evidence of the power of understanding the reader. Here are Britain's leading book marketers posing in front of a tiny proportion of the books they've been helped sell.