Elizabeth Bear linked to this article in her blog today about how the top authors feel pressure from their publishers to produce a book a year. I don’t have any issue with the main thrust of the article, but what interests me is the first sentence.
In an age when reading for pleasure is declining, book publishers increasingly are counting on their biggest moneymaking writers to crank out books at a rate of at least one a year, right on schedule, and sometimes faster than that. [emphasis mine]
You hear this a lot — and it is almost never backed up with evidence. In an age of video games, television, dvds, and the internet, books are dying out. And yet we also live in an age when those same books are advertised heavily on that same television and intertubes. We live in a post-Harry Potter era, where millions of children were introduced to the joy of reading through the adventures of the Hogwarts kids. The debate over bookwarez is heating up, suggesting many are just as interested in pirating the latest bestseller or computer manual as they are the latest album or first person shooter.
Steve tells me that about ten years ago, when the media were still blithely spouting this same bit of “common knowledge” — that the book is dying — Tom Doherty was a guest at Fourth Street Fantasy Convention, he shared his own research which suggested that book reading was increasing slightly over time.
Does anyone have any recent evidence, statistical or anecdotal, to suggest whether book reading is waxing or waning?
32 responses so far ↓
1 David B // Jun 10, 2008 at 5:49 pm
I think the issue isn’t that people aren’t reading, but that the book industry is starting to go the way of the record industry. Audio and electronic books aren’t really threatening the modern industry, but in an age where you’re paying $8 for a paperback book, and wondering where all the profit is going, there’s bound to be some backlash.
For years the Mom and Pop bookstore was able to survive, selling at retail. Then the chains came along, the better to deal with a more fast-paced society and were able to do so, and hurt the M&Ps. Then Amazon came along and hurt the chains, and displayed the power of the internet in general. Reading isn’t hurting so much as publishing and the industry is hurting.
Turning authors into rock stars is part of the problem; especially when the quality comparison between the two industries is fairly similar.
I ramble, but I think I made a point in there somewhere.
2 nothings // Jun 10, 2008 at 6:00 pm
Not based on any facts, but the two theories could be compatible: it could be that reading is decreasing per capita while total reading is increasing slightly due to population growth.
3 Bawrence // Jun 10, 2008 at 6:02 pm
The amount of reading I do has remained fairly constant over the decades, only the subject matter has varied somewhat.
4 Stephen // Jun 10, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Reading has seen a giant boom. Blogs, comments, and other similar formats have seen most of the benefit. I’ve seen many mocking asides and commentaries on the value of the material there, but you can get the same result from a bookstore if you look at the new releases section. Here’s why it relates to actual books: Guy called David Sirlin’s been writing articles on the theory of competitive strategy in video games for awhile. He tossed it together, made some edits and wrote some more material, and called it a book. Now he’s selling it in physical form on lulu and amazon; it’s also available on his website for free. I found almost as much value in the articles as in the book, and I think the vast majority of non-fiction is only book-size because That’s How You Write Books. I’m not so sure about fiction, though.
5 Paul Caughell // Jun 10, 2008 at 6:20 pm
I think the decrease they’re seeing might be more caused by the prices of books than a decline in the desire to read them. My wife and I have divergent tastes and could easily read 5 or more books a week between us, but at $7 to $10 a book, that’s pretty much out of the question. The thing that saddens me is even more is the price of E-books. In many cases, they’re the same as a hardcover copy. If more publishers priced their ebooks realistically, or released free ebooks like Baen and Tor, I think they’d see a huge upswing in sales.
6 amysue // Jun 10, 2008 at 7:29 pm
Well, our family is weird. We read alot. All of us, at the dinner table, in bed, at the beach and every day. Our ages are 51,46,13,and 9.
I buy much of what we read and download some to the Kindle. I also use the library.
I just started Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid which is about the science behind reading and the brain. Perhaps that might shed some light or not.
All I know is we tend to not socialize with non readers so most of our cohort read a lot as well. And yet, many neighbors in our somewhat affluent superb have no books or magazines in their homes and brag about “not having time to read for pleasure”. I don’t know what to make of it. I’ve already read a book of essays and two novels this week and am almost caught up to June with my New Yorkers. On the other hand, the lawn needs to be mowed…
7 Tammy Lee // Jun 10, 2008 at 8:16 pm
I used to go to the library or buy a couple of books a year from a bookstore.
Now, I am almost embarrassed to admit how much money I spend every year thanks to Amazon.com. Book recommendations immediately go on either my amazon.com or .ca wish list and as soon as I have enough for free shipping I place an order.
I find it hard to believe sales are down when services such as Amazon are available.
8 Schadenfreude // Jun 10, 2008 at 8:20 pm
I read like crazy, and I still read books, since trying to read e-books usually makes my eyes feel like I shoved two spiky ball bearings into their sockets. As long as I have to commute to work, there will be time to read.
9 Claire // Jun 10, 2008 at 8:53 pm
The Library of Congress hosted an interesting talk on the state of the book industry last summer that was chock full of numbers. I took about ten pages of notes. . .and, naturally, cannot find the notebook. The press release for the talk is still available at http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2007/07-140.html, though, and the numbers may be available on the pages of the event’s co-sponsor or one of the speakers.
The really short summary, IIRC, is that many categories of book reading are down, but a few, most notably religious books, are doing quite well. (The numbers given were for the US only.)
10 Benn // Jun 10, 2008 at 9:33 pm
The ebook gig (and, by extension, the bookwarez scene) is an interesting situation. I am an /avid/ (as in, usually around 3-5 books a week) ebook reader. At that rate, it’s financially impossible to buy the books fast enough, and while the library is one of my favorite places, weight concerns prevent me from really leveraging that resource.
So what can I do?
Ebooks, in all their forms and legality, provide the bulk. The books that I read more then once (like, for example, works covering a particular assassin), I buy. And I don’t buy the ebook version, either; if I’m going to spend the $8, I damn well want something to show for it, something I can lend to my friends, and at the end of the day something I can donate to the library, sell back to a 2nd hand book store, or slip into someones bag unaware.
I know this is a little divergent from the topic at hand. It’s a question that can only be answered by some cold hard — correctly chosen — numbers, and, frankly, I’m not even interested. I much prefer the slight atmosphere of panic (who’d notice, in the general stew we call culture?) keeping parents thinking about getting their kids a’reading, then to turn around one day and go, “Oh, hey, anyone seen a book in the last 5 years?”
The downside, of course, is that the pressure it places on the authors to publish-publish-publish. Exploring alternate avenues, or finding enlightened publishers, and watching the record industry’s footsteps, seems to be the best option going. It’s not going to be an easy path towards solvency as an industry, but at least you won’t be wielding the machete.
11 Bastlynn // Jun 10, 2008 at 9:45 pm
Well last year there was a poll on readership ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/21/AR2007082101045.html?hpid=sec-education ) balefully titled “One in Four don’t read!” … as if this is somehow bad news.
I don’t know how their grasp on fractions is, but as far as I know that means “Three out of Four Read, and by all reports do plenty of it!” … but then that would be positive news. ;)
12 lightningrose // Jun 10, 2008 at 10:17 pm
From the activity of bookmooch & other booksharing sites, I’d say there is still plenty of book reading going on, if less book buying. also, I’m sure libraries have good records as to their activity — if there are any librarians reading this, how would one look at US (and even international) library activity?
13 skzb // Jun 11, 2008 at 1:49 am
David B @ 1: “Turning authors into rock stars is part of the problem”
But…I AM a rock star!
14 Ian // Jun 11, 2008 at 2:16 am
The price of books has reduced my experimental reading by quite a lot. I used to by almost any new SF book that looked vaguely interesting on the off-chance that it might be. Usually I was disappointed, but I found a lot of treasures that way (including skzb for that matter, way back when). But as the price of books rose I had to reduce my purchasing habits to those authors I knew or who were recommended to me (there is almost no second-hand market where I am any more, either).
Now, the only new authors I can afford to read are those that participate in the Baen Webscription scheme. And if I like the book by the unknown author there, I probably buy the hardcover (or at least the softcover) for my collection too. Now if other publishers reduced their e-book prices to similiar levels (and increased the return to the authors too), I’d be purchasing a lot more of their product (especially that of unknowns – I miss the joy of discovering a new author and raving about him/her/it).
The problem is that this model (as well as experiments like print-on-demand backlist) seriously affects the retail book market and so there is a lot of backlash. I’d say the prophecies of doom are from this part of the market, as people use the options of the internet to consolidate their purchasing habits into a few cheaper alternatives.
15 Jason // Jun 11, 2008 at 6:05 am
But…I AM a rock star!
Well, that explains why every time I hit the climax of a Vlad novel I find my hand in the air holding a lighter and waving it back and forth.
It’s weird. I don’t smoke, and don’t own a lighter, but there it is. Every time.
16 Nolly // Jun 11, 2008 at 9:33 am
Benn@9: Seems to me there’s an awful lot of free ebooks out there without pirating them. I know I’ve got more than I have time to read right now, between Wowio of the recent Tor giveaways. Not to mention Project Gutenberg, Creative Commons releases, etc. Not the newest bestsellers, for the most part, but plenty of classics.
17 Nolly // Jun 11, 2008 at 9:34 am
(grr, despite previewing, I only see typos AFTER I hit post. “Wowio of the recent Tor giveaways” should be “Wowio and the recent Tor giveaways”.)
18 jenn1966 // Jun 11, 2008 at 11:33 am
As a college reading teacher, this very topic is of immense interest to me. I have been in this gig for almost 10 years, and there seems to be no shortage of students coming in to my community college requiring one or two courses in developmental (used to be “remedial”) reading. Informal polling of these students about book reading seems to conform to the estimates put forward by the doom-sayers. However, and this is much in line with what Stephen was addressing above, my students will cop to reading 7-10 different blogs and other materials online.
As far as this goes, it’s great. But…
The students I see in my classes are fine if what they are asked to read is one page or less. Anything that requires sustained attention (like a college textbook chapter, for instance) quickly overwhelms them. It is nearly impossible for them to sustain any kind of discourse for more than a few minutes at a time. They can usually manage textbooks in the social sciences and education, because those authors and publishers know something about the research behind how much information an unmotivated reader is able to digest. Hard science, math and (don’t even go there) philosophy textbooks make my students feel like they are drowning.
Even the students who test in as reading at college level struggle in my course, “Critical Reading and Thinking for College.” This past semester, I had my students read an essay by Stephen King on media analysis. Now, I am not a huge fan of King’s choice of topical material, but the man can write. I had 7 or 8 students out of a class of 25 tell me that the essay was just too long and complicated for them to finish. They couldn’t understand the point he was trying to make and they found his personal “stories” distracting and confusing.
What do I make of this? Yes, students are still reading, but the way they are reading has changed significantly. The book “Everything Bad Is Good for You” wants to make the case that video gaming, text messaging and all the other ways that we process information in a great big hurry is contributing to an increased ability to handle large amounts of data more rapidly and deftly. I think nothing could be further from the truth.
19 Mia // Jun 11, 2008 at 11:37 am
Recently my 12 yr old son told me that he really likes reading and that his video games now bore him. I was THRILLED to hear this since I’ve been trying to get him to read more for years. However, I have noticed that the books I see him read are library books. Any new books that he owns are ones that have been purchased by me, his dad or his grandparents.
For my personal reading I am finding that the $8-$15 price tag for a paperback book is a bit much. (And what is with publishers going with the “trade size” paperbacks?!?! I don;t know about anyone else, but it makes it difficult for me to take them with me.) So most of the time I buy used if I can find it or get it from the library. Only in a pinch or in the case of a new release will I buy new. My next investment will be a Kindle…
So if these studies are basing their information off of “new book sales direct from the publishers” then they are probably seeing a decline.
20 kit // Jun 11, 2008 at 11:57 am
Ian@13 & Nolly@15: My favorite sources for free fiction are Futurismic’s Friday free fiction and the repository at Free Speculative Fiction Online.
21 cynthia // Jun 11, 2008 at 12:27 pm
Jenn1966: As long ago as 1990, Jane M. Healy, PhD. wrote a book called “Endangered Minds: Why Children Don’t Think and What We Can Do About It.” It deals with TV, advertising, video games and computers and their effect on the growing brains of our children. Although a lot more is known about the brain at this point, she explains a lot of what you’ve been seeing.
In addition, a lot of kids who had problems in school (like my two) read books rarely but do continue to read via computer. I think this has more to do with the emotional response to years of failure and “try harder” rather than any lack of interest in learning.
I agree totally about the high price of books. A cousin of SKZB and mine just sold her mom and
pop book store, which was wonderful, because of the massive amounts of work that went into making not-enough money.
I tend to binge book-buy, using the library or borrowing for stretches of time and then wandering into Amazon or a real store and spending wantonly. Last trip, to seek out “Little Brother” resulted in a $60 binge. Gleep! I really only meant to look at it, and then order a cheaper copy from Amazon,but I couldn’t wait!
This is why 4th street just had to be revived!
22 L. Himelhoch // Jun 11, 2008 at 12:59 pm
With over 123,000 libraries in the US I find it unlikely that reading is decreasing. At the very least, they are full of people reading articles on
the internet from the moment they open to the moment they close every single day.
http://www.ala.org/ala/alalibrary/libraryfactsheet/alalibraryfactsheet1.cfm
23 Tegan // Jun 11, 2008 at 2:50 pm
Whenever we see these fears I like to look back at history. In 1947, fewer than 35% of American adults over 35 were high school graduates. In 1900, 10.7 percent of American adults were completely illiterate (who knows how many more couldn’t read well enough to read a book?). The idea of reading as mass entertainment is relatively recent. I think there’s likely to be more reading than ever, but costs are going up and publishers would like to have more guaranteed blockbusters. And at least for me, I do read fewer books than I used to because I spend more time reading online. But I buy my books used, so I’m not a customer of publishers anyway.
24 Mog // Jun 11, 2008 at 3:41 pm
A recent study here in Israel showed that the number of writers in relation to the size of the population has increased significantly. I trust that the book publishers have some interest in making money and therefore won’t publish so many books by unknown authors, unless they believe that someone is going to read it.
Of course my trust in them may be misplaced and next national book week the press is going to announce that many book publications are now out of business but I think think it’s a safe bet to say that they know what they’re doing.
25 RicketyCat // Jun 11, 2008 at 3:52 pm
[unevaluated data] Check out the Social Library at Librarything.com (nope, no easy “click this” for you – you wanna know, then work for it). It is an unevaluated (by anyone not in the employ of the site) data-store of personal libraries from all over the world. Among the 20 most user-entered (if not actually owned) are all seven of the Harry Potter books. (I’m a culprit on that score, but I blame my wife.)
[anecdotal] Most of my library has been entered at the previously mentioned site. I haven’t gotten to my son’s shelves yet. You can check it out by looking up my user name (same as here). I’ve been after my son to read for close to 4 years now (him being 10) and only recently he came to me and stated, “I just realized that there’s more information in the book than there is in the movie.” It was all I could do to stop from saying, “Duh!” Well, it wasn’t that hard to stop myself. I am his dad.
[anecdotal] Related to above: I heard that some Scandinavian country tried an experiment in which they had some success improving male reading habits by not bothering to try to teach them how until they were eight. Seems about right to me. My son didn’t pick one up on his own until about then even though both parents read to him on a regular basis. I’m fairly certain he knew how, but was simply not interested.
[conjectural] It is interesting to see that people believe reading habits are waning when in fact they are not. Blogs, street signs, and even text-messaging have supplanted some of the the time people have set aside for reading. For a few individuals this constitutes all the time they set aside for reading.
What is it they are reading? Is it the original language of their birth. I would say that not all blogs are written in the same language or are, at best, some mutated dialect form of it. The parental lament, “They just don’t speak my language,” is slowly becoming true. Children don’t want to read the way they are taught to speak (if they are taught to speak properly), but would rather ingest the small, factual, or completely fabricated bits of information floating around in the various media. It is almost analogous to my not wanting to read Proust. I understand him, and that killer (as in two dead – author and translator) text, I just don’t wanna read it.
[scary thought] When the oil runs out, the children of today will be in charge. Will they have forgotten how to make books? Will they have forgotten how to research without Google and Wikipaedia (I refuse to spell it their way)?
26 Tegan // Jun 11, 2008 at 5:00 pm
As another counter to the idea that reading is decreasing, I point to the increasing length and popularity of childrens’ and young adult novels. Aside from just Harry Potter, young adult books are big business (see this article). More and more YA books are making it onto the bestseller lists. Kids have more time for reading than most adults, and easy access to libraries through their schools.
27 Benn // Jun 11, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Nolly @15: Thanks for the references, I’ll check those out. The Tor (and Baen) collections have been brilliant.
If I was a superman, one of the many products I would have produced would have been an ebook subscription site for out-of-copy short stories (my preferred medium). Especially some of those short stories written only for conventions that never made it into mainstream collections. I have all the technical skills, I’ve just never gotten around to going door-to-door with the publishers to arrange agreements.
28 Marco // Jun 12, 2008 at 12:33 pm
I know this is off-topic slightly, but I am dying to know: What is on the Steven Brust Required Reading List? I’m trying to expand my scope, and I’ve never seen anyone such diversified taste.
29 Mayik // Jun 12, 2008 at 1:35 pm
I think the decline the book industry is seeing is related to the increase in pricing of books. Here in the Philippines the average price for a new paperback is around 330 Pesos, which means that most people can’t afford to buy new. But if you look at the second hand bookstores here, you’d find literally find thousands of them scattered all over, doing nothing but selling used books and beating the crap out of the book chains.
A guy I know who works for one of these second hand bookstore (Booksale), said that they have buyers in the U.S., who do nothing but buy and import books all year round (which is how I ended up reading about a certain assassin… LOL!). I think that’s the reason why the book industry think reading is declining, they’re looking at the wrong place, they should be checking out how well the used bookstores are doing.
30 Miramon // Jun 12, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Well, I read less these days, anyhow.
There was a time when I averaged a book a day. That was as a teenager. After a while that dropped down to something like 0.5 books/day, then while I was pretending my eyesight wasn’t deteriorating, down to more like 0.25. Since I gave in and bought some supermarket reading glasses, it’s back up to 0.5 again.
Something of the gap was taken up by video games and DVDs (I haven’t watched broadcast or cable TV in years), but mainly it’s that I used to inhale books quickly, and now I appreciate the language much more than before, and that slows down the reading process.
On a completely unrelated topic, since it comes to mind for some reason, I just read Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard (recently reprinted by Penguin). For those starved for any more Paarfi or quality Dumas, this is an amusing little repast. The period is Napoleonic, not Musketeer, but the sensibility is similar, if more comic.
Anyhow, returning to topic, one presumes that eventually the publishing industry will go the way of the recording industry in terms of irreversibly downward-trending revenues for major publishers due to ripped electronic distribution. After all, it’s even easier to rip text than it is to rip music; you don’t even have to worry about watermarks, and photography (with optional OCR) will easily get around hardware-based DRM controls.
But that day hasn’t come yet, since the Kindle and other electronic formats are still considerably inferior in quality of reading experience to any kind of book. Eventually, however, the big German publishers will just have to bite the bullet and fold down operations to a much lower level, and writers will have to come up with more direct forms of remuneration for their work, along with secondary income sources surrounding cheaper electronically published works. I don’t think this will be a very positive change for most professional writers, despite the extortionate terms squeezed out by most current publishers, but I think it will still be possible to make a living through writing.
31 Jim Henry // Jun 12, 2008 at 2:02 pm
RicketyCat @23:
John Holt used to argue that the reason many people don’t read much (and can’t read complex material very well) is because they were pressured into learning to read before they were ready, in kindergarten or first grade. He had a lot of anecdotal evidence of home-schooled (”unschooled” I think was his preferred term) children whose parents read to them but didn’t push them to learn to read until they wanted to, who became avid readers at ages 7, 8, 9, maybe even older.
But this problem of pushing some subset of kindergarteners and first-graders to read before they’re ready has been around for a long time and I doubt it’s gotten markedly worse, at least in the U.S., since Holt wrote. So I doubt it’s a major component of the recent decline in reading, if there is in fact a recent decline in reading.
32 Miramon // Jun 12, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Jim Henry@29.
I’m told I learned to read when I was 2, (apparently) shortly after I learned to talk. I think my parents used some flash cards for letter recognition to learn the alphabet, and readings of Dr. Seuss also helped, but no one really pushed me into learning to read.
However, I think that bad teaching practices in early years (combined with parental apathy) are more responsible for letting children miss out on the pleasures and scholastic achievements associated with reading than any early “forcing”, but that’s admittedly not supported by any scholarly evidence.
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