Science will forever lag behind the arts. What I, as an artiste, already know, those wonks in their lab coats can only guess.
For instance, a survey recently conducted by BizRate Research for Shopzilla, the comparison shopping site, has a lot to say about the book-buying public. But are its findings, detailed below, news?
After restaurants, bookstores are the second most popular place to meet a blind date. When I walk into my local Borders on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, I think I'm in a restaurant. All the main floor action is over on the left, where the cafe is dispensing cinnamon buns and ginseng tea, while the number of bookshelves on my right has been steadily dwindling. Most of the actual books have now been moved upstairs, where they're less likely to dampen the mellow vibe created by the blind daters and the poseurs tapping away on their laptops. Bookstores are clean, well-lit places, and given the distinct possibility that your date will not live up to his online profile ("Why was Queequeg never referenced?" you may wonder), the bookstore is a haven, with many possible avenues of escape. (Run straight down the aisle of The Da Vinci Code, turn right at the stack of paperback copies of The Da Vinci Code, then duck behind the cardboard display of Dan Brown and you're home free!)
The most popular venue for reading is not the restaurant or the bookstore, but the home. Even the schnorrers who try to read everything for free in the bookstore occasionally feel compelled to buy a book that's too long to finish during store hours—though God forbid they buy the copy whose spine they've just broken and whose pages they've sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.
The second most popular venue for reading is on vacation. That's why, like many authors, my greatest goal is to get my book into airport bookstores and hotel gift shops. My last novel apparently did appear, along with ones by James Patterson, Danielle Steel and John Grisham, in a display marked "National Bestsellers" at Chicago's O'Hare Airport. I know this because a friend, traveling through, took a picture of himself standing by the rack, which he captioned, "What's wrong with this picture?"
The third most popular venue for reading is on a plane. This one did surprise me. On every flight I've taken recently, I've been surrounded not by books but by screens—on laptops, cellphones and other portable devices whose names I do not know. Flying back to L.A, I had a kid, about six years old, and his nanny, in the two seats next to me. For four hours, this kid sat riveted to a screen where, whenever I dared to look, I saw somebody's head exploding like a ripe tomato. The nanny was absorbed in a page of Us Weekly that carried, by my guess, half a dozen pictures of Brad and Angelina, and about 12 words of text. Perhaps the Da Vinci code was embedded there.
The most popular reason to read is escape, followed by self-improvement. But what brings up the rear is interesting: 3% of survey respondents read to make themselves look more intelligent. Frankly, I think that number is way too low—just look at the sales figures for Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and then ask yourself how many of these people really, honestly, use the theory of relativity in their daily lives. I used to haunt the Frick Library every weekend, with a prominently displayed copy of Women in Love under my arm, hoping I'd be mistaken for a sensitive man, but I'll tell you how well that worked out: the museum guard finally said, "You ever gonna finish that thing?"—and he never even asked me out for coffee.
78% of the survey's respondents say they regularly shop at online bookstores. Of course, given that this was a point-of-sale survey conducted with 840 online book buyers, even that number may seem a bit... underwhelming?
Science marches on, but always in the van, never in the vanguard.
