The publishing industry (both for books and newspapers & magazines) is confronting today a major problem: there simply are not enough readers for the number of books and newspapers published. A recent blog in New York, run by writer M.J. Rose, caught my attention when it spoke about this problem directly with the following story. If we cannot reverse this situation, the world of books and magazines and newspapers -- as we know it -- is doomed....
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ADD YOUR COMMENTS BELOW:
during a lunch with a major publishing exec in NYC ....he said to MJ Rose:
the problem (in the publishing industry today) is WE DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH READERS TODAY, that is why publishing is going ............................................downhill.
QUOTE: "We were standing on the corner outside the restaurant, and before my friend the publishing maven crossed the street to go back to his office, he left me with one final 'bon mot' that I'd like to share with you.
The real issue, the saddest part of the story, the mess that the book industry is in today, is that we do not have enough readers for the number of books we are publishing to all do well.
We do not have enough readers for even one quarter of all the books we are publishing to do well.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And NO, NO, NO, he does not think there are too many books.Quite the opposite.The problem, he says, is we do not have enough readers.
"I think that the larger issue of static/declining readership is the real heart of the matter. It's pathetic that, as an industry, we refuse to really deal with what afflicts us. The obvious way to sell more copies of books is to raise the level of the water. Right now we're battling over a little pond, and instead of noticing that the water is draining and doing something about it, we just keep talking about how each of our little pieces of the pond could be better managed."
NOTICE TO ALL NEWSPAPER COLUMNISTS, REPORTERS, PUNDITS and TALKING HEADS on TV worldwide: this issue needs to be addressed publicly. we are in a world now that for several reasons simply does not have enough readers for the number of books, magazines and newpapers published to do well enough to stay in business. The competition from the Internet, blogs, TV, DVDs, video games and then entire leisure time culture of play has turned READERS into a dying breed, a vanishing breed.
WILL ANYONE...... ADDRESS THIS ISSUE ....BEFORE ..... IT IS TOO LATE?
PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ADD YOUR COMMENTS BELOW:
during a lunch with a major publishing exec in NYC ....he said to MJ Rose:
the problem (in the publishing industry today) is WE DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH READERS TODAY, that is why publishing is going ............................................downhill.
QUOTE: "We were standing on the corner outside the restaurant, and before my friend the publishing maven crossed the street to go back to his office, he left me with one final 'bon mot' that I'd like to share with you.
The real issue, the saddest part of the story, the mess that the book industry is in today, is that we do not have enough readers for the number of books we are publishing to all do well.
We do not have enough readers for even one quarter of all the books we are publishing to do well.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And NO, NO, NO, he does not think there are too many books.Quite the opposite.The problem, he says, is we do not have enough readers.
"I think that the larger issue of static/declining readership is the real heart of the matter. It's pathetic that, as an industry, we refuse to really deal with what afflicts us. The obvious way to sell more copies of books is to raise the level of the water. Right now we're battling over a little pond, and instead of noticing that the water is draining and doing something about it, we just keep talking about how each of our little pieces of the pond could be better managed."
NOTICE TO ALL NEWSPAPER COLUMNISTS, REPORTERS, PUNDITS and TALKING HEADS on TV worldwide: this issue needs to be addressed publicly. we are in a world now that for several reasons simply does not have enough readers for the number of books, magazines and newpapers published to do well enough to stay in business. The competition from the Internet, blogs, TV, DVDs, video games and then entire leisure time culture of play has turned READERS into a dying breed, a vanishing breed.
WILL ANYONE...... ADDRESS THIS ISSUE ....BEFORE ..... IT IS TOO LATE?
posted by DANIELBLOOM at 11:21 PM
9 Comments:
The L.A. Times recently brought two distinct in-house opinions about the future of the medium in which the pieces were printed.
On Saturday, media columnist Tim Rutten argued that plunging circulation figures are "a clear challenge to newspaper promotion and circulation departments and — in more subtle and complex ways — to editors and reporters."
But he lectured (with a sarcastic edge) the right-wingers, academics and online evangelists who smugly predict the impending death of newspapers not to be too giddy:
The notion that the advent of new communication technologies — in this case digitalization and the Web — inevitably spells oblivion for other media has no basis in experience...
The notion that print newspapers won't find ways to adapt, absorb and adjust to the Internet and other new media is as narrow and ahistorical as the insistence by some print media fundamentalists that bloggers aren't journalists and are not entitled to 1st Amendment protections.
Then on Sunday, Michael Kinsley offers a satirical take that makes clear he wouldn't much miss seeing the news in print:
What could be more common-sense — more downright American — than chopping down vast acres of trees, loading them onto trucks, driving the trucks to paper mills where the trees are ground into paste and reconstituted as huge rolls of newsprint, which are put back onto trucks and carted across the country to printing plants where they are turned into newspapers as we know them (with sections folded into one another according to a secret formula designed for maximum mess and frustration and known only to a few artisans) and then piled into a third set of trucks that fan out before dawn across every metropolitan area dropping piles here and there so that a network of newspaper deliverers can go house-to-house hiding newspapers in the bushes or throwing them at the cat, and patriotic citizens can ultimately glance at the front page, take Sports to the john, tear out the crossword puzzle and throw the rest away?...
It is up to us, as members of the last generation that experienced life before computer screens, to make sure that future generations of Americans will know what to do when it says "Continued on Page B37."
He proposes, in fun, "a Strategic Newspaper Reserve to reduce the nation's dangerous dependence on foreign news...One possible location for the reserve might be my mother's apartment, where there are already neat piles of newspapers dating back to Watergate that she is going to get to soon."
Kinsley is more of an online convert than the average Times editor, and the belief around his second-floor domain seems to be that he's just passing through this newspaper phase of his life. At a desert retreat of masthead editors last week to brainstorm the future of the Times, it has been said — but not confirmed by me — that his thinking-outside-the-box memo included a suggestion that the editorial page be scrapped as tired and irrelevant.
Cherie Jung, writing in February 2005, says the same thing here: NOT ENOUGH READERS ANYMORE:
THE MONEY QUOTE IS HERE
"The other side of this problem, I suppose, is there are not enough readers. They’ve all gone away somewhere. Perhaps they’re busy with their computers or life or something more important (to them) than reading books, but the bottom line is the same. Not enough readers. "
Here is her entire oped.
"The End of the World, As We Know It"
Commentary by Cherie Jung
Bearing in mind that I am still suffering mightily from a nasty cold and flu season, that breathing is painful, and that I may be just a tad high on the feeling sorry for myself scale...
I’m suspecting that life as I knew it is over. And let me tell you why.
Nobody cares about books or bookstores anymore. At least not the way they used to.
I remember in the "good old days" my husband and I would make the rounds of our favorite bookstores each week. Not just to buy books, but to meet with the owners, chat, and swap reading suggestions. Don’t get me wrong, we did buy lots of books. Most of our "discretionary" spending went to books and movies, and eating out. Ah, those were the carefree days...
We usually maintained a "favorite" bookstore list of about seven shops, plus other favorites that we had discovered during our travels. Of course, any bookstore was a good enough excuse to stop and browse.
Back then, people seemed to love books. I mean really love them. Need them. And wanted to take them home.
Even though our shelves were always crowded and we had boxes and boxes of books in our huge storage unit, I could never leave a bookstore without making a few purchases. I just needed to take some home with me, as if they were orphaned kittens. To give them a better life on my shelves. Or at least a little more life...
And then I began to notice it. Many of you noticed it too. Much has been written of it in other commentaries. It’s been whispered about for years. We knew it was coming but we tried to fool ourselves into thinking it wouldn’t happen in our lifetime. Now, even our bookstore friends have succumbed.
They’re dead. Dead or as good as.
For many years (over twenty) seven of my friends owned bookstores. And then they began to go out of business. Last year, three more friends, bookstore owners, closed their doors. I have one last friend who is moving her bookstore in the hopes of finding more foot traffic. Near by? All of the used bookstores have closed, except for one. No one even bothers opening new ones anymore. There is a Barnes & Noble which I can get to using public transportation (it’s a four-bus round trip) at one mall or a Waldenbooks (a two-bus trip) at another mall. Remember when we tried to blame them for making the small bookstores go away? Oh, and there are plenty of books online…but I miss the real bookstores. The ones with chairs you can sit in while you browse. (The latest trend in bookstores these days is to remove the chairs so homeless people won’t come in the store and fall asleep in the chairs.)
Oh, I know that times are tough and that bookstores -- especially small independent bookstores -- are closing every day and there’s really nothing we can do about it other than to mourn their loss, but darn it, I do mourn their loss. I even miss the ones that I didn’t even know existed because now I have no chance to wander by some day and pop inside to pass a few hours browsing and to perhaps find a few more books to bring home.
But more than that, I miss the light in my friends’ eyes when they chatted away about the latest book they were reading, or dashed to a shelf to retrieve a book they were sure I would like to read. I miss watching them lovingly shelf the new arrivals along side the other titles waiting quietly on the shelf for someone to pick them up, peek inside, read the back cover and maybe, just maybe take them to the front counter and then home to a nice bookshelf or pile of "to read" books near a comfy chair.
The other side of this problem, I suppose, is there are not enough readers. They’ve all gone away somewhere. Perhaps they’re busy with their computers or life or something more important (to them) than reading books, but the bottom line is the same. Not enough readers.
As I write this, I just realized. I don’t know anyone who reads for pure pleasure anymore. Wait, I know two people. Both are certifiably crazy. Other than that, I know writers who read, and book reviewers who read, but people who just pick up a book and read? Nope. None.
Sigh. It’s a sad day in "Bookville," my friends...
Taije Silverman asks Umberto Eco about readers and reading:
MONEY QUOTE HERE:
You know, there are always journalists asking, what do you think of the death of the book, of the fact that people do not read any longer? But in the cities, bookstores are flourishing. New bookstores, six floors tall, like the Fnac in Paris, or the Feltrinelli bookstores in Italy. And they’re full of young people! I ask myself, where do these people come from? And maybe they don’t buy a book every day but . . .I repeat, among six billion inhabitants of the earth, there are not enough readers.
But I am a little more optimistic about it.
Q and A follows: google for citation
TAIJE SILVERMAN: Do you think that with the huge quantity of information that the Internet has made so readily available, we’re going to see a new breed of literature coming into being?
TAIJE SILVERMAN: You’ve spoken about a new public that wants to read a higher calibre of literature. How would you define that public, and what do you think brought it about?
UMBERTO ECO: I made a discovery twenty years ago, when I published THE NAME OF THE ROSE. And I always heard the same silly question: ‘Why, when your books are so full of quotations, historical references, and philosophical problems, do you have so many readers? ` And I answer, `I think probably you’re still thinking that readers are stupid.’ Only publishers believe readers want to read trash. The world is full of people who read just to be challenged. To be engaged in an intellectual affair.
I’ll give you an example. When my American publisher first read THE NAME OF THE ROSE, she told me `Oh, I love your book’—she was Serbian-American, but also read and spoke Italian and German...a really great person—’and I want to publish it. But in America, you know, with a book set in the Middle Ages and filled with Latin quotations, we’ll be lucky if we sell 3,000 copies. So if you accept an advance for 3,000 copies`—and that was nothing—`then I will do it.’ And I said, ‘Okay, do it!’ And it was a smash in America. I received a lot of letters—not from people of New York and San Francisco, which are cultivated cities—but from the Midwest, from Texas. Letters from people who were really challenged by this. They didn’t understand everything, but they understood a lot, and they wanted to have a discussion about it.
Obviously we all need very easy reading, like crime novels, in order to sleep in the evening, or to pass an hour on the train. But this is not the norm. And the same person who might want a crime novel to relax a little will, in another moment, want a book that posits problems and questions. There are more of these people than publishers believe. More and more often I find people asking me for a signature. And these people are the gasoline attendant, or the man on the train, or the policeman at the airport. Thirty years ago we believed that these kind of people were not reading books. But something has changed. They read. Obviously, among six billion people living at this moment on the planet, the community of readers is still very small. But it’s bigger than it was fifty years ago. But I shouldn’t make such a statement in this country, because here people used to read a lot more than people in Italy or in other countries did.
You know, there are always journalists asking, what do you think of the death of the book, of the fact that people do not read any longer? But in the cities, bookstores are flourishing. New bookstores, six floors tall, like the Fnac in Paris, or the Feltrinelli bookstores in Italy. And they’re full of young people! I ask myself, where do these people come from? And maybe they don’t buy a book every day but . . .I repeat, among six billion inhabitants of the earth, there are not enough readers. But I am a little more optimistic about it.
TAIJE SILVERMAN: Do you think that with the huge quantity of information that the Internet has made so readily available, we’re going to see a new breed of literature coming into being?
UMBERTO ECO: There are two phenomena. One is the samizdat era. The Internet allows people to put their text on-line without passing through publishers. Which is why we have the crisis of the so-called vanity press ... those publishers who make you pay in order to publish your book. This is a good, democratic event. A young person who wants to make his or her texts known will put them on the Internet. And something can come of it. I know a young friend of mine who put their novel on the Internet, and then a publisher asked to publish it as a book. But this can also create confusion. Because for a young surfer, there are no criteria to decide if that publication is good or bad. In a way, the publishing houses represent a criterion. You think—at least, if the publisher’s not crazy—that there is a selection process involved. I remember reading a cultural magazine in Italy when I was young. The magazine published poems sent by its readers, and those poems were commented on in the magazine. The critics would say, ‘That’s good,’ or, ‘I don’t like it.’ For me, this school of criticism is very important. To learn how to judge a poet. To make up my taste. To say, ‘This is a good verse, this looks very outdated,’ or ‘This is an imitation of a lot of previous poetry.’
With the Internet, the risk is that a young surfer doesn’t know whether what he or she receives is worth something or not. It can create a certain anarchy. But I don’t see this as a tragic problem. There is the possibility of making one’s own work known. My students have a site on which they publish their own papers.
Then there is another phenomenon. It’s the idea that now, with the Internet, there can be a kind of free literature without author, which one person starts and the other continues and it goes on. This is good creative play, but it’s no more than play. I think we need a finished, authored book to confront ourselves with. This authorless Internet literature could be equivalent to a jazz jam session that every night will become a little different…and why not? Provided you don’t say, ‘as so-and-so says…’ But I don’t think the new Internet literature will destroy authorship. It’s the same as saying, ‘If you put your children in a sort of sanatorium, it will destroy fatherhood or motherhood.’ No. We will always need a father or a mother.
TAIJE SILVERMAN: You’re likely in a single paragraph to describe Superman, Santería, California’s wax museums, Communism, and the Middle Ages, and make them all seem effortlessly connected. How do you keep so much information in your head at once? Is your tendency to cross-reference so wildly an intuitive one, or is it more that you are just having fun?
UMBERTO ECO: Well, I know a lot of people who keep more information in their head than me. And live happily forever!
I think the moving element is a curiosity. If you are curious, you absorb what you see and you keep it in your memory. And in learning it, you feel pleasure. Even though it can be tiring. This problem, I know, belongs to the privileged person like me. Many of my fellow human beings work, and then when they are free they cultivate a hobby. For people like me, the job is the hobby. They’re the same thing. So you can work even during the night, and still have fun. I know this is a privilege. A lot of people cannot do it. They are obliged to work, perhaps at an office, making calculations. And then they might read a book.
The other side of the story is that if your job is the same as your hobby, you can, unfortunately, never have the pleasure of sitting down and reading a book. Because even when you read a book, you’re speculating about it as if it were your job. So you lose some of the pleasure which other people might get. But in general, I think, yes: the fact of identifying two sides of your activity is a real fortune.
TAIJE SILVERMAN: Are you constantly making connections between everything?
UMBERTO ECO: [Laughs] No! I spend my time stopping myself from making connections. Trying not to exaggerate.
Taije Silverman is a poet and journalist formerly with the Prague Tribune. She has been published in 64, a magazine published in Virginia, and Ploughshares. She spoke to Umberto Eco in the Prague Castle last Autumn.
Q: Presently, what is the local poetry scene like? What will it be like in the future? Why?
A.
I think we need more readers of poetry, or else the scene will not be suitably credible. There is not enough of a culture for poetry-criticism, such that poets end up reviewing one another in a somewhat incestuous way in the local papers. The works themselves are more than credible though, as well as worth any kind of in-depth study at the academic level. There is a wide range of styles, although, since the poetry of the 1970s. Public poetry tended to steal the limelight, as they dealt with nation-building themes concurrent with the nationalistic anxieties of a nation during that period. Since then, public or socio-political poems were the trend, and personal poetry was inevitably sidelined. One can see in the way Roger Jenkins' The Belly Of The Carp won a commendation prize over other more introspective poets like Paul Tan and Yong Shu Hoong at one time, while the poetry scene was slowly developing as a credible force in Singapore. A famous personal-poet like Lee Tzu Pheng, I still tends to be known predominantly for her social poems, despite her well-known introverted tone and contemplative, self-reflexive poetic stance. Experiments in poetic forms by the likes of Arthur Yap mark also a great evolution in the progress of poetry-development in Singapore, pointing to the rich and multifarious nature of the poetry scene here. Still, there are not enough readers commensurate to such a literary wealth. If the education does not improve, if people still care only about getting money and living comfortably, then die lor, the scene will breathe on painfully without much consequence or impact. But I do see changes will occur in the future, a more accepting audience for the arts, which bodes well for poetry, of course. Why? Because people will get bored just being capitalistic all the time. They will find more ways to tell themselves they are cultured, well-informed culturely, deeper, blah blah.
May 18, 2005
Letter to www.MobyLives.com
It's the readers, stupid . . .
Dear Editor,
In regard to your news item "THEY'RE PUBLISHING TOO MANY DAMN BOOKS" that quotes a Book Industry Study Group report as stating: "The publishing industry continues to put out more books than the public is prepared to buy," there is even more startling (and for the most part unspoken) news to chew on.
According to a major player in the publishing field in New York, who has worked in the industry for many years (and who I cannot name at the moment): "The sad fact is that we do not have enough readers for the number of books we are publishing to all do well. We do not have enough readers for even one quarter of all the books we are publishing to do well."
As a friend of mine, a writer, said the other day on her blog: "I think that the larger issue of static/declining readership is the real heart of the matter. It's pathetic that, as an industry, we refuse to really deal with what afflicts us. The obvious way to sell more copies of books is to raise the level of the water. Right now we're battling over a little pond, and instead of noticing that the water is draining and doing something about it, we just keep talking about how each of our little pieces of the pond could be better managed."
The water is draining out of the book pond. What are we going to do? I have created a website to gather global comments on this important issue here: http://NotEnoughReaders.blogspot.com
Too often we look for quick fixes. Even here, with the question of how do we go about building back the readership base, we are esentially looking for someone to come to us with a Holy Grail and everything will be good again.
I say it time and time again. The answers to so many of our problems, and especially one like this, is education.
How can we expect to draw more readers if we don't really teach them HOW to read?
More and more, our schools continue to look at which programs they can cut because state and federal budgets for education keep getting cut. Already, my elementary school aged children have no art classes in their school. Their whole concept of art is to color in some xeroxed picture that their teacher has scrounged from the internet. We do have music classes still, but we're one of the few schools in the area who does.
You may ask what teaching elementary children has to do with building an adult readership, but when our elementary schools can't properly instruct our children, the problem snowballs. Ask any college-level English teacher about their basic composition classes. Our universities are teaching kids what they SHOULD have learned in sixth grade. And if that's the case, how can we ever expect these people to become the sort who would pick up a book for pleasure?
Yes, it's okay to be looking for the quick fixes, but let's not forget that if we can catch a problem early (childhood education) we could well avoid the problems we see today.
If in fact the publishing world is publishing books for which only 25% can hope to find readers, and 75% are just wasted trees, then why is not the mainstream media reporting this?
So, what I want to know is what is happening to all those unbought unread books? Can we use them as building materials? Insulation?
Has anybody out there ever read Aunt Chip and the Triple Creek Dam Affair? That's what happens when there are too many books and not enough readers. But books and readers triumph in the end.
Tremendous work ! Your web blog has supplied me the majority of the know-how I wished .
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