The Publishing World Post #3: "Readers, Where Art Thou?"

In August, the Boston Globe published “Poll: 1 in 4 adults read no books last year; biggest readers were women, older people,” and once the article had circulated through Bedford/St. Martin's for the better part of a morning, it started a flurry of e-mails around the office. At first, we all just grumbled to ourselves about the true state of the Union, but after discovering that the poll only consisted of 1,003 adults who had answered questions in telephone interviews, I was inspired to prod the conversation beyond criticizing the three of four adults we didn’t identify with. After all, how likely are avid readers to actually participate in telephone surveys? Obviously, our many speculations didn’t add up to much since we didn’t have facts about the psychology of telemarketing, but since then, I’ve been meaning to research the issue of American literacy and tendency to read more thoroughly. When I started reading Greco’s facts about publishing profits and industry trends, it got me thinking again. Smaller reading audiences seem like they’d be cutting larger “in-roads” into publishing profits than electronic publishing. A New York Times article summarizing local National Endowment of the Arts’s Big Read programs put me in the mood for addressing it this week. Knowing that the NEA is taking such a huge step towards promoting literacy—not just American literature, but now global/multinational literature as well—I had more proof that reading is declining in the U.S. The National Institute for Literacy has a long list of Reading Facts that discuss both literacy in American children, adolescents, and adults, but the likelihood of today’s younger generations becoming readers in adulthood. Some facts were very disheartening: for example, “only about 1 in 17 seventeen year olds can read and gain information from specialized text, for example the science section in the local news paper,” and evidence of stagnation since 1980 of long-term reading assessment scores in students across three age groups (9, 13, and 17). American students are only performing marginally well when compared to other nations, sometimes outpacing a category or two, sometimes falling well below expectations in others. And the effects of reading for fun, variety of reading material, and family interaction on reading levels were staggering: “Students who read for fun every day scored the highest,” “Students who had 4 types of reading material at home performed the highest,” and “Students who discussed their studies at home, however frequently, had higher average reading scores than students who reported never discussing their studies at home.” Reading proficiency was also connected positively to parents’ level of education. So if 29% of adults are struggling with reading or cannot read at all, then their children are much more likely to struggle. And if children are struggling with reading, they won’t purchase books for fun. Nor are they likely to invest in higher education which is most often reading intensive. Nor will they purchase technical books to improve their jobs and life. When they have children, this cycle will be perpetuated. On the other hand, there still is an established readership in the US. There are still a majority of people who are literate, who purchase books, who read for fun, who pass these traits to their children. Could the advent of the blog be threatening book readership and periodical sales? I don’t believe it has quite yet. And industry statistics provided by the Association of American Publishers for 2005 and 2006 maintain that the book industry is still hovering around $25 billion (down this in 2006, but it was up in 2005). In both years, Higher Educations sales grew, as did adult and juvenile trade book sales. E-book sales were up a full 24.1% in 2006, too. So someone is buying books: books for college, to read for fun, to read on the go, to read because they’re interested in a reasonably priced easy to move with set of physical or electronic pages or in bettering their lives somehow. And though the Boston Globe article claimed that religious books and romances were in the top runners for their polled readers, both sales of both religious and mass-market books (as a whole) were down in 2006. So where does that leave my search? Not very far from where I started. I’m not so worried about the state of American readership, and a $1 billion dollar loss in the industry isn’t too bad when there are 24.1 more to support it, but I can’t help being relieved at the NEA’s efforts to continue bolstering what we all know is an American trend not to read. It does not yet seem to be epidemic, but then again, I’m sure the plague didn’t for a few months either…