Expenditure on reading has again declined. Does this matter?
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that for 2019 the average expenditure per household for all forms of entertainment reading (i.e. not textbooks, but including newspapers and magazines) was $92. Might we think that half of that $92 was spent on books? If so, I’d have thought that was a pretty decent sum all things being considered. There appear to have been 132,242 consumer units (what we’d call households) in America in 2019, so half of $92 multiplied by households would come to over $6 million.* Don’t know about you, but I’ll settle for that.
Many see the news as a cause for concern and believe that the publishing industry should do something about it. In a piece by David Rothman at TeleRead Thad McIlroy scolds, “The book publishing industry largely sells to the same well-heeled audience, year after year. The audience increases slightly as additional literate graduates enter the reading world — then declines with the deaths of the heavy-reading seniors.” Yes, yes, traditional book publishing is a mature industry. Might be nice if we could look for mass increases in our customer base, but there are certain barriers to entry — you have to want to read a book, and be able to do so ( — which doesn’t just mean being capable of reading. You’ve got to have a bit of peace and quiet and quite a fair serving of spare time, as well as the wish and ability to concentrate on the task at hand. Plus of course it calls for a bit of surplus income. Would that all these things were more widely distributed in our population.) The overall market for books isn’t infinitely expandable — in fact I suspect we’ve gone about as far as we can go. As (and if) education rates increase, new recruits will be constantly available, but don’t look for leaps and bounds. Obviously we always have to be ready for “the deaths of the heavy-reading seniors”.
What isn’t at all clear is whether the $92 cited by the Bureau of Labor Statistics includes sales of self-published and indie-published books — I bet it doesn’t, as I don’t think there’s any real way to discover these numbers. Also the figures have, obviously, got to leave out of account reading of library books, borrowed books, found books, second-hand books, books you’ve owned for years and so on. They are reporting expenditures after all.
It’s always fun to have a go at publishing. It’s something you care about and it looks so inviting. But what is your target? What is publishing? When you address it there’s nobody there to hear. Publishing is made up of lots of individual companies, and each of these companies is made up of lots of different individual people. There’s no collective entity which can agree or disagree with your wish that publishing should do more market outreach, and thus no entity that can do anything about it. Does Mr McIlroy really think that Random House, The University of Chicago Press, The New Press, The American Chemical Society ,and so on should be spending money on outreach to non-readers? Why would they not focus their marketing expenditures on people who they think might e likely to buy their product. Industry associations do do a little outreach: Get Caught Reading still exists, though such initiatives really just end up preaching to the choir.
We’ll have to wait a year or so to get the 2020 numbers, but we all anticipate, don’t we, that expenditure on entertainment reading will have increased during our year of coronavirus?
___________________
* Oops. As all too frequently my grasp of large numbers manifests itself as a problem. As David Rothman gently points out in a comment “You need to add some zeros to when you talk about “132,242 consumer units” in the US. The correct number would be 132,242,000. Times $46, that would be $6.07 billion.” A somewhat bigger number! I once had a boss who used to tell me ” Don’t tell me it’s a large number of dollars — give me the number”.
Making Book 
My thanks, Richard, for your comments on my TeleRead post and Thad McIlroy’s opinions there (yes, I essentially agree with him).
You and I are not in alignment so far, but perhaps I can win you over. Consider:
1. A drop in US rec-reading-related household expenditures from $108 in 2016 to $92 in 2019 is nothing to be casually brushed aside. Of course, the expenditures for 2020 will be bigger due to the virus. But we can’t depend on that for the long term.
2. We’re talking about a crumb of total entertainment-related expenditures of several thousand a year. Virus-caused isolation has also boosted sales of big-screen TVs, by the way.
3. Yes, reading takes time, but if you look at other BLS stats, you’ll see there’s major room for growth of that as well. “Individuals age 75 and over averaged 44 minutes of reading per day, whereas individuals ages 15 to 44 read on average for 10 minutes or less per day,” according to 2019 numbers mentioned in 2020. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/atus.pdf
4. The reading expenditures would encompass those on books from publishers of all sizes, including those too small to be part of industry statistics. Remember, BLS in this case collected the data at the consumer end.
5. We’d agree that individual publishers can do only so much to encourage reading—and that’s among the many reasons why I myself am calling for the creation of a national library endowment, from which money could promote not only libraries and reading but even individual titles (just to name one of a bunch of activities the endowment could help pay for).
Publishers in effect would be piggybacking on library-related promotion, which would happen within social media and legacy media as well as by traditional outreach. See libraryendowment.org (my project, not Thad’s).
Buying links in library catalogs could exist to encourage readers to seek out titles from bookstores of all kinds, including brick-and-mortar ones near readers. This would be a win-win for everyone. Publishers would see an increase in promotion-related resources at no cost of them. Money for the endowment could come from interested members of the super rich, so as not to get in the way of local “friends of the library” efforts.
Needless to say, many of the same concepts here could work in the UK, not just the US.
6. You need to add some zeros to when you talk about “132,242 consumer units” in the US. The correct number would be 132,242,000. Times $46, that would be $6.07 billion. Plenty money? Of course. But I’ve already explained how it could be much larger. Let’s not be happy with the status quo. Publishers and writers alike—and many others in the book industry—could use the money! Of course, we want people to be reading more. But let’s also care about industry earnings and revenue. Expanding the universe of readers is one way for this to happen without jacking up per-unit book prices.
Thanks,
David
David H. Rothman
Editor-Publisher, TeleRead.org
703-370-6540
Thank you for this super-detailed response. I’ll need time to digest it!
I am always lousy with big numbers, but am embarrassed by my Sheldon-Cooper-like dropping of zeros in the household number! $6 billion is a lot more impressive than the $6 million — which I did keep wondering about — not enough obviously. (I’ll add a note to the original post correcting this. OK?)
The idea of buy-buttons in library catalogs looks brilliant. Librarians might want to resist, but ultimately there doesn’t seem to be any harm to them in such an idea. (Some people might think it better to buy the book, than to go on the wait-list, and that would just relieve pressure on the library.) And the proposal of a library endowment which would enable the promotion of reading is a welcome one. It sounds like you are doing valuable work to promote the book business — thank you.
Perhaps my position isn’t too far from yours. I certainly would prefer people to spend more time reading. I just think that publishers are not the ones to push that. Publishers deal with the book environment in a rather detailed way, book by book, and even more, individual book sale by individual book sale. I don’t think that we as a society should not try to expand the reading universe, just (as I think you agree) that it’s not publishers’ job to do that, however much it might benefit them. Publishers are (relatively) immersed in detail — their response to a shrinking market would be to lay off a few people and publish fewer titles, and to an expanding market, to hire more staff and grow lists. If reading becomes more popular, that would meet the same response, and on we’d go. (While profitability fluctuates, I suspect it is relatively independent of size: while we don’t have easy access to the numbers, any most-profitable-publishers list wouldn’t be ranked in size order I’m sure.) Expanding demand for reading is not quite the same as trying to expand the market for yoghurt. Almost everyone can become a yoghurt eater (leave aside the lactose intolerant as well as the illiterate). Books present a less universally adoptable product. An increase in demand would not automatically lead to an increase in the supply of (good) books.
Thanks for your open mind, Richard. While publishers should support literacy efforts and otherwise promote reading, you’re absolutely right — that’s FAR more the responsibility of libraries, schools, and others. Publishers need to focus most of all on promotion of individual titles and authors. I’m confident Thad would feel the same way.
A major glory of the proposed endowment is that just by doing its job for society as a whole, the organization would help publishers popularize certain of their offerings at no cost to them. Once again—the endowment among other activities could not only promote reading and libraries in general, but also individual titles that impressed librarians. A win for all! No miracles expected, but even a small increase in that $6 billion would be a lot of money.
One additional detail. The definition of “good book” is rather subjective. The larger the audience for books in general, the greater the sales potential for specialized titles as well as bestsellers. As it happens, I love yogurt. But I’m very partial to the low-cal, high-protein Greek variety.
How far advanced is work on the proposed endowment? Obviously getting the money would be vital. Mellon? Bezos?
While the definition of “good book” has indeed got to be subjective I do think we can use it as a shorthand and agree on it as a general target. While reading anything is a “good thing” reading a “good” book is a better one. Where the definitional lines are drawn may differ for each of us, but we can all probably agree that “Light in August” is a good book, while “Your Big Book of Dogs” is in a meaningful sense less “good” as also might be whole scads of genre fiction. While we live in a world which is hesitant about value judgements (nobody should be dissed), I do think we can make careful value judgements nonetheless.
Excellent questions, Richard. A detailed vision Is there — the money isn’t yet
Some veteran librarians and I have been refining the endowment idea for years. One is the executive director of a Colorado library consortium serving hundreds of schools and libraries. Another used to be a senior executive of the company then owning Library Journal. For details, see LibraryEndowment.org and:
Click to access niso10corileechristouanddavidrothmanfinal-november25-2018update.pdf
Rather than starting the endowment ourselves, we would like people with far more resources to do it while consulting with other major stakeholders ranging from librarians and educators to writers and publishers. Groups like the Book Industry Study Group, ALA, NISO, and the Panorama Project could be involved. Again, we don’t see this as a task for individual publishers. We’re talking about a joint effort. Billionaire donors, not publishers, would be paying for the endowment. A first step would be a series of conferences of knowledgeable people in appropriate areas. If a separate UK equivalent also started up, that would be wonderful. I needn’t remind you of the severity of the library crisis in the UK.
Here in the US, the Christian Science Monitor several years ago asked the Gates Foundation how it felt about our idea of a multi-donor national library endowment. The foundation at the time was neutral. Perhaps with the virus spotlighting inequalities In areas ranging from content to technology, the endowment will be an easier sell. Also, people are more aware of geo-related economic differences.
No response from Jeff Bezos or MacKinzie Scott. We did mention Ms. Scott, a literary novelist, in a commentary that appeared in Publishers Weekly:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/soapbox/article/80394-a-suggestion-for-mackenzie-bezos-fund-libraries.html
While room exists for a variety of books, I agree they are not all the same. Well-prepared librarians and other experts should have a major role to play in identifying the best. Methinks publishers like OUP would fare well under such arrangements.
Further questions, suggestions, and other feedback welcome.
Thanks for the info. I’ll check out the links and maybe write about the endowment. I imagine our government has got more than enough demands for help just now — but that’s who it ultimately should be funded by. Maybe it’ll have to wait till the next period of prosperity. Maybe just a couple of years?
I’m all for a mix of public and private funding (I’ll mercifully not go into all the details here). I don’t know about the UK, but in the US, the money on the private side is definitely there. Certainly, the endowment could start at a certain level and grow as more resources of all kinds became available. I appreciate your continuing interest.