Why Steve Jobs isn't entirely wrong about the woes of books

Book-buyers are a much bigger niche than Mac owners and deserve an e-book-friendly Apple tablet. But Steve Jobs, in justifying the lack of an e-fit tablet, was on to something when he said that people don’t read as much as before.

Consider Ursula K. Le Guin‘s essay in the February Harper’s. The title is Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading, and as you’d expect, she writes that books are “here to stay.” In fact they are—among the well-to-do shoppers who haunt Barnes and Noble or order regularly from Amazon.

But wait! Go beyond Le Guin’s title, past the Harper’s pay wall, and read her to the end. “Since kids coming up through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleasure, the relative number of book readers is unlikely to see any kind of useful increase and may well shrink further,” she says in arguing against commercial publishers’ fixations on bestseller-driven profits. So much for the “alleged decline” if you’re considering the general population.

Flat unit sales growth in recent years, it would seem

Now let’s talk numbers. Caleb Crain, author of the Twilight of the Book article in the New Yorker, took some figures from the Book Industry Study group, plugged in Census statistics, and calculated that U.S. books sales had declined from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. Spending was up, but so were book prices.

Another study Crain mentions isn’t as gloomy, finding a slight increase in new unit sales in recent years, but it still says consumer spending on books hasn’t kept up with the GDP. So there! Given the number of boomers in prime book-buying years, 55-64 if you go by Bureau of Labor numbers, sales should be increasing ahead of the GDP, in my opinion. Are used book sales enough to explain the disappointments here?

“Reading less”

But what about book-reading, as opposed to buying? “…we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago,” Crain writes in the New Yorker, and online he backs up his conclusion. Here’s one little tidbit I found in his summary of a Dutch study: Men used to read more than women, but this has changed. Why?

Meanwhile the school, library and publishing establishments should in fact worry more about the flat unit growth and seek to expand the universe of serious readers. I’ve already made the point that newspapers haven’t been served well by the past notion that they could get away with just catering to the elite; the same applies to the book industry. Via the economies of E, we have more of a chance then ever to inculcate in the young the pleasures of books—I hope society doesn’t squander the opportunity.

Related: Stop the hype! Inflationary reading crisis calls for interest cut, by Peter Kerry Powers, source of the Crain blog link. Chair of the English Department at Messiah College, he passes on old quotes about the literacy panics of the past, but at the same time warns not to deny the problem just because of the hype. I’m pleased to say, not so incidentally, that Prof. Powers will be contributing to the TeleBlog from time to time. He asked if we had a length limit, and I said, “No.” To me, a blog post can be a 6,000-word essay and vice versa. If that makes us different from most other blogs—see his post Blog on, readers, blog on—then so be it. Stay tuned for a longer introduction. Welcome, Pete!

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