One of the direst predictions in Wednesday's Observer piece on thelong, dark winter publishing might face was that, as the major houses start focusing on only the biggest of big books, "only the most established agents" will command enough respect from editors to make the big deals. "It's the people who are on their way up who are going to face challenges," as literary agent Richard Abate put it.

Over at The 26th Story, the official HarperStudio blog, Jeff Moores provided an emphatically polite dissent:

"We don't have the answers," he notes. "Nobody does in publishing... But we're coming together as younger agents who don't have a lot of experience and just looking for the answers between us." Which has a bit more gravitas than the Cityfile summary of the Observer argument: "Everyone's going to freak out, there are going to be random firings, no one will really understand what's going on or how to deal with it, and we'll just continue to throw massive advances at famous/infamous people for their ghostwritten blockbusters and literary culture will continue to shrivel and die, but at least it won't be our fault anymore but the economy's."