Writing's on the wall

How will the book world remember 2013? Let me count the ways. Anyone who even glimpsed a publishing trade paper will know the industry remains obsessed with the impact of technology. How can paperbacks compete against the internet and Amazon? Is the high-street bookshop an endangered species? Are audiobook downloads changing readers into listeners? And what about the rise of e-book self-publishing?

David Shelley, J.K. Rowling's editor for The Casual Vacancy and The Cuckoo's Calling (as Robert Galbraith), sounded an optimistic note. "E-books now make up around 30 per cent of our sales, so they have definitely hit the bookselling trade. In terms of internet self-publishing, this could seem a bad thing, but actually I would argue that it has been good," he says. "Some of the most successful physical books of recent years started off as self-published - most prominently E.L. James. I think self-published e-books are a good way of authors getting their work out there."

Shelley strikes a more cautious tone when asked about the erosion of bookshops and libraries from London to Kowloon. "It's obviously challenging, given competition from e-books and online retailers, but I think most publishers are working closely with bookshops. They are valuable partners, without whom readers may not discover books. I would say the same for libraries, some of whom are under threat at the moment but who are incredibly important."

Amid all this techno-din, you could occasionally hear authors and their books getting words in edgewise. If any major themes dominated the year, they were generation gaps and the sense of a passing of the guard - 2013 was the year of the big literary retirement.

Philip Roth, Jim Crace and Alice Munro all announced the end of their careers - although only Roth, who celebrated his 80th birthday in March, kept to his word. Crace reneged after Harvest, his 10th novel, raced into poll position to win 2013's Man Booker. What Crace's thoughts were after he was beaten to Britain's largest literary prize by Eleanor Catton's 832-page The Luminaries remains unknown for now.

Munro too ate her words about laying down her pen. Unlike Crace, her reason was the biggest literary win of them all: 2013's Nobel Prize. At a time when publishers would rather eat 832 pages of The Luminaries than publish a collection of short stories, Munro's victory was a triumph for an entire mode of writing as well as an individual.

And yet, the old order gave way to the new. In a year that saw the passing of Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Elmore Leonard, Iain Banks and Paul Torday, the literary world crowned a possible replacement in Catton, at 27 years old the youngest winner of the Man Booker ever. Like South African-born Lessing, Catton hailed from the farthest-flung reaches of the Commonwealth - New Zealand - and specialises in a heady brew of ambitious narrative fiction, experimental structure and a vibrant narrative voice.