“Today’s corporate weather-makers” amongst the conglomerates in the book business “hate ‘book-lovers’, as they sneeringly refer to them,” says Boyd Tonkin in a commentary for The Independent. He says the conglomerates “despise curious readers committed to the range and quality of what they buy” and instead put “extra resources . . . into snaring the fitful attention of affluent but apathetic semi-readers who . . . made an exception for The Da Vinci Code. So let’s have much more of the same brain-shrinking junk.” Thus, he says, “These feather-bedded pashas spend a lot of time (as the modern elite invariably does) angrily accusing anyone who disagrees of ‘elitism’. The pretext offered for their looming onslaught on standards and choice will be the need to expand the book market beyond its loyal but increasingly ‘mature’ base.” Says Tonkin, “The book market certainly needs to expand. What it requires is creative innovation, not mad downmarket plunges.”