No quick recovery is on the horizon for the slumping Japanese book business. That is the consensus of commentator Kazuhiro Kobayashi, writing in Shuppan News (January), and of three experts discussing the matter in Tsukuru (March) -- Yasuo Ueda, Yoshiaki Kiyota and Hiroyuki Shinoda. Unit sales, revenues taken in, sales of books, monthly magazines, weekly magazines, all were down last year for the fifth year in a row of overall decline. In terms of units sold, business has fallen back to the level of 1986 and, in terms of revenues, to 1991.

They agree that one major problem is that desperate publishers are glutting the market with new books, whose number is estimated to have risen almost 2 percent to over 70,000 new titles last year. As a result, books disappear from bookstores to make way for the next ones before they can find an audience -- returns of new titles have reached a rate of 60-70 percent.

There are some signs that publishers are starting to realize that it is no longer enough to simply put together a book and throw it out into the distribution system. For example, the publisher of Mandino's "Twelfth Angel" first did a test run of 200 copies, advertising 100 of them on the Internet, and gathered comments from ordinary readers to use as blurbs on the book when it was finally printed. Also, a paperback title became a best seller when a publisher's representative noticed a handwritten recommendation for it in a bookstore and had this printed up and sent to bookstores throughout Japan.