Clem and Tom both seem worried about the future of the book. But a blog is nothing without debate, and I'm not so sure. True, the Kindle and the new generation of e-books are potentially a threat, and one we should take seriously. And, also true, the music industry was effectively killed by the web, and the newspaper industry looks like being next, so we shouldn't be complacent.

Still, there are some important differences.

In both music and newspapers, the technology dictated the form. The 40-minute LP happened to be the length because that's what you could fit onto 12-inches of vinyl. The once a day mix of news, business, sport, crosswords and features that we call a newspaper came about because that was worked when printing presses and trains were the only way of distributing information. In both cases, the product itself was, to a large extent, created by the technology.

And so, when the technology changed, there wasn't much point to the product any more.

I don't that's true of the book. Okay, it's printed and bound, but it's just a narrated story and there have never been any technological rules about length (a novel, by the way, is a similar length to a dream) or format.

My point is that while digital music and digital news are in many ways superior products that isn't true of books.

A digital book might be cheaper, if the publishers choose to make it so, or free if there is file-sharing, but it isn't better.. And that's a crucial distinction.

To me the big challenge to writers and novelists isn't the e-book. It's the compter game. This is a completely new narrative form, and one that can be far more immmersive for the reader/player. But that isn't a threat. It's an opportunity.

We've just returned from The Curzon Group airport tour, which started at Manchester and continued with a 5.30am start at East Midlands. I've done a piece about it for The Bookseller, so I won't say too much about it here, but it was great fun, we sold a lot of books, and made some good contacts.

You can read more about how we got on at the airports in this blog post I've done for The Bookseller.

I was having lunch with my publisher, Martin Fletcher of Headline, last week. I was congratulating him on the cover of 'Fire Force', the sequel to 'Death Force', which will be out next year. It establishes a common identity with the first book, whilst being a great cover in itself. "The same, but different," I observed.

It struck me that "the same but different" was a good way of describing how to approach writing a series of books. Increasingly, publishers want series because the characters can be established over time and the writer can build up an audience. But, of course, it poses challenges to the writer. You need to think about your characters and how they care going to develop over four or five books: in my case ten characters which is especially difficult. And then you need to keep the basic structure of the books similar, while also having sufficient variation to make them fresh and exciting.

There's nothing wrong with "the same but different". Mozart wrote 41 symphonies to which that description could be applied, but that doesn't mean that most of them aren't masterpieces. Of course you can take it too far (Take Van Morrison, for example. A genius, as well, but many of his albums could be described as 'the same but, er, the same). The trick is to get the balance right.

I've just started work on 'Shadow Force', the third in the series. As you can see from the title, I'm keeping one word the same…while the other one is different.

There's some discussion out there about recession fiction, According to this piece in The Independent, publishers are demanding changes from their chick-lit authors to fit more straighten times. Meanwhile, the Daily Mail chips in with a peice about 'recession-lit'

Out go the sex-and-shopping bonkbusters, it seems. In come frugal tales of coping with the recession.

I wonder if the same trend applies to thrillers. Less obviously, in the sense that popular women's fiction is very materialistic. Thrillers don't have so much shopping in them anyway.

But in another sense, all popular fiction has to capture the mood. I suspect people are going to want more escapism, and more heroes who have fallen on hard times and want to make some quick money. I try to touch on some of those themes in my mercenary stories.

But I suspect it is a rich vein for thriller writers to mine. More financial thrillers, perhaps? More heist thrillers? And more mega-rich villains.

First, a confession. I really liked The Da Vinci Code. Admittedly, that was in part because I've always enjoyed the rich vein of nutty conspiracy theories that it drew upon, but I also though it was a brilliantly conceived and executed thriller. It took two of the strongest traditions of the genre - Sherlock Holmes style sleuthing, and cold-war conspiracies - and brilliantly updated them. It completely deserved all its success.

There's only one problem with it - and one that is particularly pressing as the tsunami of hype and hoopla over Dan Brown's follow-up, 'The Lost Symbol', threatens to wash away the rest of the publishing industry. Like many really successful books, while good in itself, its consequences haven't always been quite so happy.

Publishers, inevitably,  have been trying to cash in on the book's popularity.

In the wake of The Da Vinci Code, the Vatican seems to have taken over from the KGB as the stock villain for thriller writers. Where once, every thriller had to have a tense scene with a rogue double-agent at Checkpoint Charlie, now it is just as mandatory to have a few missing pages from the Old Testament to chase, some wacky inscriptions from a church spire to decipher, and a few rogue monks quietly assassinating people.

It works for Dan Brown. But when most other writers try it, it looks a bit silly.

Worse, the publishers are now terrified that the Dan Brown juggernaut means they have to clear all other books from their schedules. But that is probably a mistake as well. After all, lots of people will be going into bookshops in the next couple of weeks to buy 'The Lost Symbol'. They may well buy something else as well while they are there. So this month is probably a good one to sell a book that isn't by dan Brown.

Which is why my fellow Curzon Group writer Richard Jay Parker and I put a short video up on You Tube about the Dan Brown craze. We wish the Dan-ster the best of luck with the new book - there are certainly a lot of expectations to live up to. But publishers and booksellers should remember there are a lot of other good books out there. And the last thing his fans are looking for are pale imitations and rip-offs.