The Flip Side

By Andrew Grabois - Dec 10 , 2007

In last week’s article, I compared the findings of two major studies – one national, the other international – that seemed to confirm that reading in the U.S. and other Western countries is in a dismal state.

Time spent reading has declined precipitously, test scores have gone down, and many companies are reporting that writing proficiency is so bad that it is beginning to affect the bottom line. Similar trends have been identified in the U.K. and other Western countries.

One thing has always amazed me about these reports, surveys, and op-ed pieces — they ignore the book business.

It stands to reason that if we are raising a generation of non-readers, and the current universe of readers is shrinking and becoming ever more addled and distracted by electronic entertainments that intrude on what was the most engaging of experiences, the book industry would finally crash and burn after an interminable tailspin. As you and I know, the book industry hasn’t crashed and burned, but that seems to have escaped the notice of industry observers and insiders who insist on describing book publishing as a hit-driven basket case lurching from one crisis to another.

In his wonderful review of Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America (University of Missouri Press) that appeared in The New Republic, James Walcott describes a ritual self-flagellation in book publishing as shocking to the uninitiated as the practice in the Middle East:

The perceived perennial decline in book reviewing mirrors the perennial decline in book publishing. Like the Broadway theater, the publishing world is always tottering on its last legs, a wheezing shadow of its former glory waiting for the final curtain to drop, only to be jolted back into spastic life by an unexpected franchise boon (John Grisham, the Harry Potter series) and granted enough of a reprieve to keep the pity party going until the next financial slump. Much of this fatalism is standard issue, an occupational tic. It is easy to give in to despair, which is why so many give it a spin.

Book publishing may be a low-growth business, but that is not a death sentence. If you step back and look at book publishing in the aggregate, you will find that it is doing quite well compared to other entertainment media and industries.

According to figures from the Television Bureau of Advertising, TV leads the entertainment pack with $48.35 billion in sales in 2006. But guess who comes in second? Using 2006 sales figures released by the Book Industry Group, we find that the sick man of entertainment industries generated almost $36 billion. The graph below compares book publishing net sales in 2006 with those of recorded music, movies, DVD and VHS, video games and radio. The total for recorded music includes sales of digital tracts and concert ticket revenues:

Sources:
Books: Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
DVDs: Entertainment Merchant Association (EMA)
Radio: Radio Advertising Bureau (RAB)
Music: Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) ; Pollstar Magazine
Video Games: Entertainment Merchant Association (EMA)
Movie Box Office: Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

The story’s the same when you look at unit sales. More books were sold last year than all the music CD’s, music digital downloads, and movie tickets combined. It was also nearly triple the number of DVDs and more than twelve times the number of video games sold. The graph below compares 2006 unit sales:

Sources:
Books: Book Industry Study Group (BISG)
DVDs: Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
Music: Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
Video Games: Entertainment Software Association (ESA)
Movie Box Office: Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)

As for new releases, a graph wouldn’t do the comparison justice. Whether you use Bowker’s old number of almost 200,000 or its new one of just under 300,000, no other entertainment industry produces so many new products each year. There were only 600 new movies released in 2006, 13,000 new DVD’s, and probably no more than 20,000 new music CDs (the Recording Industry Association of America stopped providing figures on new releases in 1999, when the total began to plunge).

The comparative media figures published by the folks at Veronis Suhler Stevenson every year are often quoted to show the declining share of our day and dollar devoted to books. But if you actually look at the figures you see a different story. While TV accounted for 38% of our entertainment spending in 2006 (far and away the most for any entertainment choice), consumer book purchases accounted for 23% of the rest. The average person spent $97.04 on books last year. This was second only to home videos (DVD/VHS), which accounted for 29% of non-TV spending, or $114.24. The graph below compares consumer spending per person in 2006 by entertainment choice:

Source: Veronis Suhler Stevenson

Books more than hold their own even if you look at media consumption by hours spent per year per person. While time spent reading books pales in comparison with that of TV, and may be left in the dust as people spend more time surfing the Internet, it has not lost much ground. Time spent reading books declined less than 1% in 2006, and less than 2% since 2002.

If you accept the estimates and projections from the Book Industry Study Group, then you must accept that book publishing is an entertainment force to be reckoned with – despite the best efforts of those who work in the industry to whine, complain, and say the sky is falling. During the very same Internet era that the NEA and others say that voluntary reading and test scores have dropped off the table, we have witnessed the greatest explosion in book publishing since Guttenberg — built on personal computing, supply chain efficiencies, heavy discounting, the data basing and aggregation of catalogs, and the commoditization of books that makes them saleable almost anywhere.

Unless and until we can reconcile book publishing’s bipolarity, it will be impossible to predict, with any degree of certainty, what its future will be – no matter what the pessimists and extreme optimists would have us believe.