"Will books, as we know them, come to an end? Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, s and will mean the end of . Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist."

"We like to think we're free in the ; that we're beyond the forces of advertising and social manipulation by market forces. But there is a new — the rise of 'the single person' as model consumer — that presents us with a paradox. What we once thought of as radical — staying single - may now be reactionary. The long-term relationship, like the job-for-life, is fast being deregulated into short term, temporary arrangements with no promise of commitment, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has been warning us for over a decade. It's hard for two people to be self-employed, with no promise of a stable future, together. Capitalism now wants us to be single."

"Communal living: Plato recommended it, 19th-century religious separatists tried it, anarchists and hippies spectacularly failed at it. Attempting to live with no an . It's supposed to erase greed and create equality. You'd think that this important subject would have created a vast body of literature, but you'd be wrong. Novels about s are very rare and this might be because the ideal of "the communal" is at loggerheads with the bias towards "the individual" in the novel. But there are some gems, which are important documents of a noble, failed, social experiment."