Fascinating stuff this, well worth reading!

I think most of the best-sellers list is the literary equivalent of daytime television. This is a world in which Danielle Steel is mysteriously more valuable than Shakespeare. Now, she may be more valuable than Shakespeare for a period of days, months or even years, in purely economic terms. But over time? We have the Royal Shakespeare Companys collection of Shakespeare works, which pays a royalty each year, a strong royalty. So the business were in is to identify and capture and anticipate the value of books that are inherently classics, future classics. If publishers did the same there would be less of the wild weekend in Las Vegas approach to acquisition that distinguishes the industry and its decline.

via Andrew Wylie – WSJ.com.