For nearly as long as the modern book has been around, pessimists have been predicting its demise. And yet, through the decades, the pessimists have been proven wrong. Old book formats wane but new ones rise up; popular genres fade but others take their place. The hardcover makes way for the mass market paperback, and then for the trade paperback. Academic tomes share space with pop psychology tracts. Biographies of people share shelf space with secret histories of objects. Novels persist. Children grow up on TV but remember their first books. The latter part of the 20th century saw a nearly unfathomable range of titles from more publishers than ever before. And while publishers of significance have seen their numbers thin, they are, in many cases, making more money than ever before. All is well.
Or would seem to be.
A look at several indicators from the last six years offer some basis for pessimism about the book's long-term prospects. While the publishing industry, broadly speaking, seems comparatively healthy, several numbers provide darker omens. During the period between 1996 and 2001, consumer spending on books rose 16%, but unit sales dropped 6%. In other words, while readers laid out more money for books, they actually bought fewer of them. Nor does it appear that Americans are spending more time with the books they have; in fact, according to Veronis Suhler Stevenson's most recent Communications Industry Forecast, the time Americans spent reading a book fell from 123 hours per year in 1996 to 109 hours in 2001. Even other print media fared better.
More competition from other forms of entertainment, shorter attention spans and inadequate efforts to promote the pleasures of reading have spelled a dire reality—books matter less to more people every year. The number of households buying at least one book per year has dropped steadily over the last five years, falling from 60% to 56.5% in 2001, according to a study conducted by the research firm Ipsos-NPD. If these trends continue, soon the number of households that buy at least one book over the course of an entire year will be in the minority.
Demographic data does not paint a rosy long-term picture, either. The mean age of the most prolific bookbuyers continues to rise. Ipsos-NPD reports that in 1997, Americans between the ages of 25 and 39 accounted for 26.5% of books bought, while in 2001 they accounted for only 20.8%. Meanwhile, people over the age of 55 were responsible for only 33.7% percent of books bought in 1997, but 44.1% in 2001. (Both differences are disproportionate to the changes these groups had as a percentage of the population.) While in the short term this may mean a spike in sales from retiring baby boomers, in the longer term, it means the rolls of bookbuyers are not being replenished.
The news from the retail front is hardly more encouraging. In 1996, Barnes & Noble, Borders Group, Books-A-Million, Crown Books, Lauriat's and independents operated 6,269 outlets; in 2001, with the bankruptcies of Crown's and Lauriat's, the downsizing of the Walden and Dalton franchises and the closing of nearly 1,500 indies, the number had declined a shocking 40%, to 4,474. The decline in bricks-and-mortar stores has blunted the positive effects of the rise of online bookselling.
The consequences of such shifts are incremental and often undiscernible. Over time, though, the slow drip can lead to a big puddle. If things don't improve, we could soon be witness to an entire generation for whom reading is as unlikely a form of entertainment as, say, vaudeville. In a nightmare scenario, the shrinking number of readers could lead to the shriveling of publishers, the dissolution of imprints and a narrowing in the number of new books available every year. Twenty years from now, the era of Oprah's Book Club could look like the golden age of reading.
If these trends were visible only over one or two years, they wouldn't be so troubling. They could be written off as aberrations, or as the temporary effects of a weak economy. But what makes these numbers alarming is that they have steadily gotten worse through both boom and bust.
All is not lost, however. Many publishers plow on, oblivious to the problem or hoping that it will simply go away. But others have not been so passive. Throughout the publishing industry, little communities of effort have sprung up to tackle the problem and hunt for new readers.
We set out on our own quest to track down these programs. What we came upon was a disparate and surprising amount of innovation. Andrews McMeel released Stay Tuned, a book commemorating historic TV broadcasts, from Elvis appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show to the U.S. Olympic hockey team's victory in 1980. The subject matter is already geared to more visually-oriented types, and the publisher upped the ante by packaging it with a DVD and two CDs. At Ballantine's Del Rey imprint, executive editor Steve Saffel develops novels based on Xbox video games and Mage Knight action figures. And a number of publishers are taking advantage of the TV- and movie-driven obsession for Japanese animation by beefing up their manga programs, hoping to reach fans who don't normally buy books.
Literacy, of course, is a critical and, in many ways, the first step in the hunt for new readers. Despite strides over the last 20 years, literacy levels remain a huge concern; according to a National Adult Literacy Survey conducted in 1992, more than 20% of adults read at or below the fifth-grade level. No less an icon than Dolly Parton is involved. In 1996, Parton founded the Imagination Library, a reading program for children. Children who register for the program receive a book a month from birth until they reach the age of five. The group teams up with local agencies to contact hospitals and literally recruit readers from the moment they are born.
Children's publishing also has stories of companies looking for ways to reach new readers. Simon & Schuster worked with General Mills to distribute mini-editions of books via several million boxes of Cheerios. HarperCollins created a cross-promotion with Nestle Toll House Cookies to extend the readership for its Mouse to School books in a consumer writing contest.
The Publishers Marketing Association, the umbrella group for niche houses, is planning a program to distribute books to prisoners, while a program called the Armed Services Edition ships books to servicepeople. And on the retail side, ticket sales to community theaters and a "Brew and Books" program in a bar try to hook in readers who might not ordinarily come into a bookstore.
Many of the programs have a strain of social consciousness; others are simply the result of creative marketing. While not all are equally effective, all strive to do the same thing: reach and cultivate new readers. In a time of pessimism, all offer reason for optimism.
