The end of the novel?

'For a commissioning editor, the pressing question is this: when most books are sold on the net as downloads, how will this change their content? My hunch is that will finally spell the end of the novel. Of course there are good, perhaps even great novelists writing today. But in contemporary fiction there seem to be no monumental novels that dominate our mental landscape in the same way as the masterpieces of Dickens, Thackeray or George Eliot. Few titanic novels wrestle with the great questions of life and death and seek to alter our perceptions of them...

The great new literary form that will replace the novel will, I believe, arise on the net and will take on its wild frontier spirit, its intellectual risk-taking, its two fingers at academic control-freakery, but it will also help forge a new form of consciousness in a much more fundamental way that has to do with the form of the internet.'

Mark Booth, Publishing Director of Century, part of Random House UKPenguin Random House have more than 50 creative and autonomous imprints, publishing the very best books for all audiences, covering fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, autobiographies and much more. Click for Random House UK Publishers References listing, in the Independent on Sunday.