The koala bear lives on eucalyptus leaves. The goat will eat almost anything. As readers, we might aspire to the ascetic diet of the koala, shunning trash in favour of poetry or the classics. In practice, increasingly, we behave like goats.
As omnivores, we'll go to every kind of literary festival, from Bath to Buxton. We'll listen to crime writers, pop stars, atheists, pundits and comedians and probably buy their books too. The venues in which these encounters occur will vary from stately homes to church halls, from pubs to yurts.
At festivals, the British reading public today acquires books across an extraordinary range of talent from Jacqueline Wilson, Beryl Bainbridge, Edward St Aubyn, Margaret Drabble, and JM Coetzee, to Howard Jacobson, Aminatta Forna and Stephen Fry.
Long gone are the days when the Common Reader of Virginia Woolf's snooty label behaved like the koala and stuck to a diet of literary eucalyptus supplied by the literary-critical establishment.
Today, not only do the goatish omnivores favour a varied domestic diet, they also want foreign food, too. The shelves of Mr and Mrs Average Reader will include names such as Dubravka Ugresic, Amitav Ghosh, Christopher Tsiolkas, Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander and Roberto Bolaño.
These shelves will exhibit a farrago of biography, novels, history and memoir, traditional genres in a state of flux as they strive to adapt to the changing tastes of readers. Occasionally, perhaps prompted by a prize, there'll be a volume of poetry, for instance, Christopher Reid's A Scattering, last year's Costa winner.
How did we morph from koalas into goats? What has turned us into omnivores? The short answer must be: global technology. When you can get any book you want at the click of a mouse, what's to stop you surfing the shelves of the world's virtual library and ordering a copy on Amazon or downloading an ebook in the time it takes to write this sentence?
The contemporary reader has become an omnivore because the literary jungle is free, and available. No longer are we constrained by the conservative tastes of the local bookseller. Indeed, a bookseller such as James Daunt – soon to be the managing director of Waterstone's – will actively sponsor literary experimentation among his clientele, as good booksellers have always done.
The IT revolution has done something else to the parameters of British literary preference. Where once the book world was a closed shop patrolled by arbiters of taste such as Harold Nicolson and Philip Toynbee (the Observer) or Raymond Mortimer (the Sunday Times), now the shutters have come off all the doors and windows. At scores of literary festivals, and in countless informal venues, readers can encounter almost any writer they choose. They can listen and discriminate for themselves, released from the tyranny of the professionals. Literary power has shifted to the people and, every bit as important, English culture is being set free.
Release readers from the restrictions of fashion and snobbery and what do you find? Koalas becoming goats. A generation of omnivores for whom that old eucalyptus diet is not enough. This is not just confined to books. The idea of an "open" culture, partly sponsored by an "open" web, gives equal weight to many competing genres: manga novels, films, TV documentaries, magazine journalism, short stories, audiobooks, poetry apps, blogs, even YouTube video clips. Your contemporary goat will omnivorously devour all of these, possibly while watching Twenty20 cricket and listening to the latest i-Tunes download. In the mind of the omnivore, the book is no longer an exclusive phenomenon.
Not much of this is really new, though it can feel that way, especially if you're over 40. The first Elizabethans were also enthusiastic omnivores, drawing on an incredible range of sources, high and lowbrow, to find self-expression in many styles that are now lost or forgotten. Shakespeare, who wrote of his character Holofernes that he was "eating paper and drinking ink", is an exemplary omnivore. Today, the man from Stratford would be in his element, running Globe Films, a small production company, and living in some style with a dark lady in the Hollywood Hills.
Has Keri got a bone to pick with VS Naipaul!
VS Naipaul's remarks about Jane Austen and other female writers have finally stirred a fellow Booker prize winner – who has been silent for decades – into action. Keri The Bone People Hulme, who lives on the South Island of New Zealand amid sheep and fisher folk, has told her New Zealand audience: "VS Naipaul is a misogynist prick whose works are dying. He accurately foresaw their relevance three decades ago: 'They will not survive me.' As he ages, his nasty behaviour - and judgments - become ever more wince-making. Many thousand women writers both outrank and will out-survive this slug." The language of literary criticism clearly has a different register in the Antipodes, but Hulme's indignation was shared by many of the guests, some in ebullient spirits, at a gathering prior to the Orange prize.
Téa's Tiger feat walks away with the prize
And so to London's Festival Hall for the 16th year of the Orange prize, Britain's popular and reader-friendly prize for fiction. Orange's global reach now rivals Booker and the international shortlist, from Aminatta Forna to Nicole Krauss, reflected that. True to form, the favourite, Emma Donoghue's Room, was pipped at the post. The Tiger's Wife by Serbian-American Téa Obreht is a powerful account of the Balkan war, a novel acclaimed by prize chair Bettany Hughes as the work of "a truly exciting new talent". Among the onlookers, Tim Waterstone was talking up the appointment of James Daunt to the ailing book chain and Obreht's publisher, Weidenfeld, celebrated its good fortune. Obreht is the youngest-ever winner of this important trophy. For her, in a changing marketplace, the future's bright.