This time last week I was exploring the ancient village of Carn Euny in the centre of the Penwith Peninsula of Cornwall. The origins of the village can be traced back to the 5th Century BC and the Iron Age; it was occupied for 900 years and abandoned in the 4th Century AD, when the Roman occupation of Britain was in its twilight.

Anyone who’s been to this part of Britain might agree with me that it has a uniquely heavy vibe. For these ancient people this furthest tip of the South-West was the end of the earth. In more recent times it hosted the ‘Great Beast’, occultist Aleister Crowley. Rumours of his misdemeanors amongst its ancient monuments spread widely. STRAW DOGS was filmed in St. Buryan, a mile or two from Carn Euny. You get the picture.

Wandering around the site you can make out the layers of settlement over the hundred of years it was occupied, plain to see even thousands of years later. Here is solid stone, well-preserved, heritage and legacy: monolithic history.

I work as digital editor at Canongate Books. I spend a lot of time thinking about how people might want to read in an increasingly digital world. There’s a lot of noise - a LOT of noise - around the subject. Sometimes I worry that it is all very ephemeral (prime suspect, Twitter: it’s @DigitalDanCanon by the way), transitional, that everything that holds meaning will exist in clouds, on servers, in 1s & 0s that it can all come crashing down very quickly. Philip Pullman pointed out to me and Peter Collingridge of Enhanced Editions fame that all this digital innovation is well and good as long as we have electricity; that you don’t need electricity to read a paper book. So any apocalyptic scenario is not particularly good for digital reading.

I don’t really dwell on the end of the world too much, because like most people I’m often too busy meeting/missing deadlines and fighting fires. But I am slightly concerned about the future of book publishing.

I was taught at school about Charlemagne, the great Carolingian Emperor who installed himself as head of a self-styled new Holy Roman Empire in 800AD. When he died the Empire collapsed in on itself, dissolving in the disputes and bitter recriminations of his heirs.

The great scholar of this period R.W. Southern concluded thus: ‘Expand or Die’.

The greatest risk to any meaningful community, enterprise, or mutually beneficial grouping is when it starts to look too much at itself and becomes too much about itself. For example when most members of a friendship group get incestuous with each other and the whole thing falls apart because these people only spend time with one another: Expand or Die.

So it goes with publishing. If publishers don’t seek to innovate, if they choose to think negatively, if they play to what they know and refuse to embrace a new form of reading that can reach new people in new ways, the industry will (slowly, incrementally) die.

I don’t necessarily mean that failing to embrace the digital aspects of reading that will probably constitute a relatively small portion of a regular publisher’s revenue will lead directly to a company’s demise (though it might), but that the mindset behind it endangers everything.

I don’t expect whoever or whatever is walking across our scorched lands in hundreds of years time to come across calcified Kindles and iPads as some sort of testament of a long gone idea of progress. But I do hope that publishers don’t expend too much energy playing it safe, hunting down minor threats to their businesses and generally stalling. Things are moving too fast and changing too fluidly to be standing looking at each other waiting for someone else to draw their gun first. Expand into these new areas with energy and relish, or die. Because, for us, nothing is set in stone.