I suppose we all have hobby horses. Some independent booksellers who comment on this blog regularly seem to be obsessed by Amazon's discounting policy and the thought that publishers are encouraging it by granting bigger discounts. I cannot speak for other publishers (and it would of course be wrong to discuss such matters between ourselves) but we grant the lowest possible discounts to all distributors and retailers. It would be madness to do otherwise. Of course, we could choose not to do business through certain channels which use discount to their customers as a marketing tool but that would result in our turning away around 80% of our business. I imagine our authors would be less than pleased at a reduction of 80% in their sales and their omission from best seller lists and they would abscond. That would leave us with a reduction of sales of 100%. Not a great way to run a business but at least we couldn't be accused of failing to support small independent book shops.

However. my hobby horse is public libraries and their apparently unstoppable demise through lack of investment in books. Major parts of Macmillan's business operate in a town called Basingstoke in the county of Hampshire 'rolling green hills, tranquil villages and ancient forests'). It is a relatively prosperous part of the UK. The library service is the responsibility of Hampshire County Council through its Libraries and Discovery Centres department. They have set up a Library Review Panel to:

• Assess progress of the service in meeting the challenges

• Gain current perspectives of national professional organisations

• Discover how other library authorities are meeting challenges and/or reversing trends

• Assess progress with the 'Discovery Centre' approach

• Inform future thinking

All well and good but they might save a lot of time and money if they simply looked at their own audited accounts sent to me by the industrious Tim Coates.

The number of books held in stock has declined by 24% over the last eight years.

Spending on books has fallen by 35% before taking into account anything for inflation.

Total library spending has increased by 43%.

Spending on books as a percentage of total spend has fallen from 13.6% to 6.23%.

The cost per visit to to libraries has increased from £2.03 to £3.28.

What does this mean? The libraries under their management stock fewer books and thus attract fewer visitors. At the same time they have been spending more money on the management of the libraries. The result is that they have become less efficient at what they do and cost the taxpayer more than they should.

What should the Library Review Panel recommend? Transfer responsibility for individual libraries to well-qualified, knowledgeable and committed librarians, cut out the local government (and central government for that matter) back-office strategy committees and bureaucracy, and spend more money on books and clean and safe buildings. Abolish themselves. I'm sure it's much more easily said than done but we need action now not words.

This excellent piece by Katherine Rushton in The Bookseller  tells the national story much better than I could. I've just spotted this great piece in today's Observer by Rachel Cooke and I reprint just one paragraph to give the flavour:

'It would not be exaggeration to say that this piece of wimpish guff makes me feel physically ill. The person who made it clearly has no idea how parlous the situation is. I do not have the space to go over all the closures, recent and mooted, here. So let me give you just one recent example. Earlier this month, a man called Yinnon Ezra, who is head of leisure services at Hampshire County Council and also, more interestingly, a recently appointed board member of the MLA, blithely announced: 'We have to ask whether fiction should remain in libraries when most people buy books.' When asked whether it disagreed with this statement, the MLA (the central government quango with responsibility for libraries) refused to do so.'