Present Tense: Every afternoon, The Irish Times'sliterary desk piles high with new books, with some 30 or 40 arriving every day - maybe double that in the run-up to Christmas, says Shane Hegarty.
They get released, stacked and sorted. But only a few get reviewed. Occasionally, we have a charity book sale in the office. There was one this week. And, for half an hour, staff swamped tables heavy with hardbacks, paperbacks, softbacks and pamphlets. It's always some sight to observe. We gather like sharks around chum. Like politicians around a baby. Whatever's not picked up there, is unlikely to be picked up anywhere.
The amount of books thrown into the market is staggering. Thousands of them flung at the front line in the hope that some will get through, thrive and bring back enough of a profit to fund throwing more unto the breach the following year.
From a reader's perspective, this mountain of books can be overwhelming: it explains the rise of book clubs. Oprah in the US; Richard and Judy adapting it for the UK; Marian Finucane - and now Ryan Tubridy - building Irish versions. Each gives crucial guidance to readers, as well as a foot up to authors and their publishers, to the point where they are becoming far more powerful than anyone within the book trade.
Perhaps the public grabs at these recommendations because bad books make for clumsy ornaments. Unread novels become clutter, dust gatherers, space swallowers. Unread books become ghosts on the shelves, nagging at you, pleading for recognition. You'll hover over Underworld- but grab Shopaholic & Baby. And the first flicks of the page will sound like an admonishing tut-tut.
At this point, when choice must surely be reaching a critical mass, there are hints at a solution. In the US, Book Swim(so-named because of the "ocean" of books) has set itself up as a print version of one of those companies that sends DVDs direct to your house. It's essentially a library crossed with Amazon, and readers can keep the book for as long as they need it. It costs from $23.99 (€18) a month, which means reading two paperbacks a month to make it worthwhile. It would still take you a long time to build that up in late library fees.
It's an interesting idea, especially in a week when Greene's Bookshop - open in Dublin since 1843 - is closing and becoming a purely online business. Its shop, with its cliff-faces of spines, will be replaced by a warehouse and online catalogue.
It is not the first to do this. In the age of the chains, and when supermarkets sell books at knock-down prices, it's become commonplace for independent stores to go online. Kenny's packed up in Galway over a year ago. But it will be interesting to see if either will get another 150 years of use out of their warehouses.
It's possible that we will soon be receiving our books as PDF files rather than by post. I say "possible", because while we may be on the cusp of a revolution, during which books will move from paper to screen, we could just as easily be starting another failed chapter of the e-book.
No one really knows, largely because the book remains remarkably good technology: resilient, popular, user-friendly. Years after you buy a book, it may be slightly yellowed, but it can be read without rebooting, recharging or updating software.
Margaret Atwood talked about this on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week recently. "You can't take your computer in the bath tub," she explained to presenter Andrew Marr. "And it's very uncomfortable to have your computer in bed with you." Plus, she pointed out, the human brain prefers reading words on paper. The definition is better. No pixels, no retina-scorching light.
Yet, the technology gap is closing. The 550-year-old cutting edge design may soon be challenged by e-books. Marr himself tried one out for the Guardian a couple of weeks ago, and admits to having moments when it didn't occur to him that he was holding a small computer rather than a bundle of pages.
The sense is that one of these months, someone may produce a gizmo that will have the impact on the publishing industry that the iPod has had on the music industry. And the publishers, currently holding out against the advances of Google's ambitious attempts to create an online library, will relent.
If they do, they may find a generation born into a digital world, used to staring at a screen, and without any nostalgia for print. They don't care about an album sleeve now, so why should they care about a dust jacket in the future? It may solve a problem for publishers as much as readers. You can throw millions of words at an e-book without the kind of costs involved in pumping reams out of a printer. And soon, perhaps, just as Sony is trying to convince us of the viability of its e-books, we'll be trying to convince our kids of the viability of print.
"You don't have to plug it in, and it doesn't need batteries," as Marr observed.
"And you can always burn them if you're cold," added Atwood.