At a recent meeting of British general book publishers there was a general moan about the state of the non-fiction market. Quality history, biography, politics, economics hardbacks sell bewen 2000 and 20,000 copies in hardback. UK sales of totally brilliant books such as Tom Friedman's The World is Flat are a tiny fraction of US even allowing for population differences. It appears that Americans are more prepared to purchase and read challenging books than the British.

At the more popular end of the market there are some huge sellers - Sharon Osborne, Katy Price etc - but there are large numbers of failures too. And these failures are usually very expensive. Every second-rate Big Brother famous-for-five minutes celebrity is demanding (and frequently getting) ludicrous advances from publishers desperate to find something to sell through supermarkets to to the mass market.

And so neither the up-market nor the mass market is performing. Add to this the demise of backlist sales, the pitifully small paperback sales and the legitimate demands of authors for a fair reward for their work. Furthermore in order to achieve this unsatisfactory state of affairs publishers are spending big marketing budgets and granting special discounts to retailers thus undermining their low profitability further.

In the words of the great Russian sage when asked how to solve the problems of their great Tsarist empire: I have the solution. Someting must be done about it.