I have to take issue with the underlying complaint in this interview on the lines of "bookshops are stocking more and more copies of fewer and fewer books, so our culture is less diverse than it used to be 25 years ago."
First, are your assumptions true? I remember in my consultancy days having a stat which showed the number of novels published in the UK had doubled between 1980 and the year 2000. Maybe that's in decline again. But, if not, then the diversity is still there. But let's assume it's true.
Second, should we expect the published paperback novel to be something of which there are thousands of different examples, when the internet is sprawling vast amounts of literature that bypasses the need to get published in the traditional form? If old fashioned, published novels are in decline, than that, to me, is a natural corollary of the vast spew of words filling blogs all over the place and allowing publication of more words than ever before. The business model would not cope, not should it.
But third, I think you're mistaken in exactly what people read for. Yes, they want to read the book, but they also want to be in the discussion about it. The Da Vinci Code phenomenon for example was only partly about the text of The Da Vinci Code, and the excitement individual readers got from it. More key was that people wanted to be involved in the debate around Mary Magdalene, Opus Dei etc.etc.
And for those community-welding debates to happen, there needs to be unifying, mass market material, which a lot of people get hold of.
In publishing, one could also think of, to greater or lesser degrees, The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night-time, Labyrinth, Harry Potter, Schott's Miscellany...
People don't just want an individual engagement with a text. They want to be part of a community which has all engaged with the same text. These extra conversations are fun.
This will always work against diversity, as you seem to see it.
Increasingly, published paperback novels (and TV series and cinema bound movies...) will need to be open to being in the former category, part of a wider community: the meta-phenomenon around the work of art is as important as the art itself. And for someone who works this brilliantly, see Anthony Gormley's stuff. He's probably more interested in the 'surround' of his art than his actual art pieces.
As for people's quirky tastes for diversity: that odd penchant for poetry by wine critics, or Peter Gabriel's Afro-Cuban pop or whatever, then the internet will soak it up.
This isn't a conspiracy by the media to deaden diversity. It's just a reflection of what people want and how the media can best bring it about.

Patrick replies:

Rob

Always lovely to hear from you ... not least because I know you're up for an argument that will keep me away from proper work!

I agree with much of what you say, but would like to make a few points of my own. Before I do so, however, can I make a couple of observations about the interview itself? First, it is a much abridged version of what was a longer conversation and I think some of the nuance of what I actually said was lost. Second, I was responding to questions off the top of my head and so didn't always achieve the precision of meaning i might have liked. So, thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify myself!

I can quite see that I come across as suggesting our literary (even artistic) culture was once diverse and now is not. So it's worth saying up front that I don't believe this to be true. You're right - more books are published than ever before and they are more accessible to more people. In any case, I'm not sure I would trumpet 20, 30 or 40 years ago as times of great artistic diversity.

However, the point which I really intended (but failed) to make was actually something like this ...  Like never before, our contemporary culture prides itself on its diversity. In fact, 'diversity' has become one of the labels by which we define ourselves. We are a racially, ethnically, religously, culturally diverse people, aren't we? Sure, we find it hard to identify core values, but that's the price we pay for being so liberal and tolerant. This is what we tell ourselves.

Now, a key part of this narrative is diversity of expression - as a diverse people, we tell diverse stories. But is that really true? And, if it is true, does it matter one jot if those stories are all lost in the vast expanse of an Amazon warehouse or a high street Waterstones that pushes only a very limited selection of titles?

It is most profitable for a bookshop to sell the most number of copies of the fewest number of titles: the McDonalds model - obvious. However, in a society that values diversity so highly, a bookshop must appear to cater broadly. Bookshops must appear to have lots of books, therefore, to allow the reading public to read the same books while pretending they have a great breadth of interest! This is not a criticism of book shops, but culture ...

Let me put it like this: I don't believe we're any more or less creatively diverse than we ever were. However, the BELIEF in our great diversity has become politically and socially important. And it is illusory.

I absolutely agree with what you give as the reason people read - to be part of a discussion. But what is the nature of those discussions and what are they aiming to achieve? The most plausible answer is 'not very much'. More than anything else, those discussions are used to suggest membership of a shared culture with shared values. However, in this society, one of said values is the diversity of the discussion and it doesn't actually exist!

May I close with one final thought?

Whenever I have visited a country with a media more or less under government control, I've generally found the degree of political engagement among the general population to be high. I imagine that this is because people know the government control the media, distrust what they read and hear and, therefore, attempt to look elsewhere for information. In this country, however, we have a free press, don't we? I mean, we talk about it enough. In fact, the '4th estate' is one of our great values. And yet, for my part, I find the breadth of opinion expressed in the British media no wider than that within the pages of, say, the Zimbabwe Herald. Why is that?

What if, Rob ... what if ...

What if you can fool all the people all the time after all? What if all it took was the gradual social rejection of absolute moral value and its replacement with something abstract and amoral like, for example, profit? What if the means by which all the people are fooled all the time is that they are fooling themselves? What if this is -depending on your chosen reference point - the nature of the matrix or painted veil or false consciousness or devil's work?

Ha ha ... let me stop before I launch myself headlong into nutsville. I do look forward to a suitably scathing retort!

xx