For literature, this has been a year of endings. As well as the usual roll call of obituaries, which this year featured such heavyweight losses as Kurt Vonnegut back in April, Grace Paley in August and the pugilistic Pulitzer prize winner Norman Mailer in November, 2007 has also seen the departure of some of our most cherished literary characters.
The death at just 60 of Michael Dibdin in the spring condemned his most famous creation, the melancholy Venetian detective Aurelio Zen, to untimely oblivion: Dibdin's final Zen novel, fittingly entitled End Games, was published posthumously. Crime fiction sustained a further blow in September when Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus, the 20th century's introvert-detective nonpareil, finally stepped into retirement at the conclusion of the 17th novel in the series, Exit Music. An exit of sorts, too, for Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman, best-known, perhaps, of all the author's doppelgangers; in his ninth outing, Exit Ghost, a dilapidated Zuckerman limps off the final pages impotent, incontinent and unlikely to return. And all this before we turn to the literary leave-taking of the decade, which also fell in 2007: the final adventure of JK Rowling's boy wizard who, as everyone above the age of six must surely know, came to the end of a remarkable school career in the series' conclusion, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, released this July.
A litany of farewells, then. But in years to come, it seems likely that none will have the long-term significance of the announcement last month by Pan MacMillan imprint Picador that from spring next year it plans to bid adieu to the formerly set-in-stone system of publishing fiction in hardback a year or so in advance of the paperback release. Instead, in order to free itself from what it sees as a "moribund market", it will launch almost every new novel from its literary fiction list (home to such noteworthy names as Julian Barnes, Graham Swift and Don DeLillo) straight into £7.99 paperback. Although the publisher plans to continue to produce limited edition hardbacks, aimed at collectors and priced somewhere around the £20 mark, only those authors who've proven their ability to turn a profit in the more prestigious but pricier format will be afforded a general hardback release - and it seems likely that, should their strategy boost sales, even this sop to authors' delicate egos will ultimately be phased out.
Will other publishers follow suit? Does Picador's announcement sound the death knell for the hardback? Is this, as Picador publisher Andrew Kidd claims, an anti-elitist move that takes into account consumer requirements - or, as the Bookseller's Nicholas Clee suggests, a policy that appears democratic at first glance, but will in the long run engender "conservative commissioning" and narrow the playing field for hopeful first-time authors? Time will tell, but for now, Picador's move has plunged the publishing industry into a froth of introspection. It's the biggest change to happen to the industry in recent years, and may well prove to be the farewell for which 2007 is remembered, Harry Potter or no Harry Potter.
Read more in our series about how the world changed in 2007 here
