British consumers spend about £2bn a year buying 250m books. About 70,000 of the 120,000 titles published each year are aimed at this consumer market. So the average book sells between 3,000 and 4,000 copies and has a budget – including royalties, printing, marketing and distribution – of about £30,000.

Now imagine that you were given a monopoly of the book trade and a modest budget and obliged to make books available free. You would not publish 70,000 titles. You would produce a few high-quality books, finely written and well edited – the sort of books you would yourself like to read. They would still have to be popular: for 2,000 titles to satisfy current demand, each would have to attract 100,000 readers. Since few authors would be published, those who were would become celebrities. Fortunately, you would not have to pay them much because there would be nowhere else for them to go.