26 May 2014
Make of it what you will, but it's a plain fact of publishing life that more people will read the latest Star Wars franchise novel than all the books shortlisted for last year's Booker prize put together. The world is a noisy place, made all the more so by the democratising influence of the internet, where it sometimes seems that all seven billion members of the global village have self-published their own book. Confronted with this tumult of competing egos, you can hardly blame the average punter for sticking with entertainment brands scorched into their psyche by the lightsabers of multibillion-dollar marketing budgets.