Studies keep coming out documenting the decline of book reading in America,
and I keep interpreting their data, if not their thesis, as good news. Call
it a glass-quarter-full attitude.
Both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Associated Press polls have
revealed supposedly discouraging trends: In 2002, the NEA reported, only
56.6 percent of American adults read a book, compared to 60.9 percent in
1992. Last year the AP, using different criteria, announced that 73 percent
of Americans had read a book in the previous year. Better, but still.
And yet we're doing pretty well, all things - the Internet, increased
working hours, decline of the teaching of literature in schools, the white
noise of 21st century life - considered. Even accepting the gloomier NEA
figures, I can't help but think: More than half of Americans read a book
every year? Really? Not three-quarters bad at all.
And in "Staying Awake: Notes on the Alleged Decline of Reading," an essay in
the February issue of Harper's, Ursula K. LeGuin maintains that, electron
fans and short-sighted publishing conglomerates notwithstanding, books will
always be with us. "It's just that not all that many people ever did read
them," she writes.
"Why should we think everybody ought to now?"
LeGuin is especially insightful (no surprise to LeGuin fans) when she points
out the inherent conflict between the business of publishing books and
expectations of the corporations that have acquired publishing houses. The
entities at the top of these behemoths demand not only profits, but growth:
Last year's bottom line may have been in the black, but this year's must be
blacker.
That works, after a fashion, at the giddy sales heights inhabited by the
likes of Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. Fight for the rights to the next
mega-seller!
But publishers have traditionally existed, and made decent if not
stratospheric profits, by nurturing midlist authors and maintaining a solid
backlist. That is, they sign and publish good, promising writers, and stick
with them even if their first couple of books don't sell. Over time - and
that does not mean within the next quarter - an audience will build, at
which point the authors' books begin to make money in hardcover, and - what
do you know? - the publisher has the earlier books sitting on the shelves.
Do this long enough, with enough authors, and there's a solid income stream
that steadies the firm amid the year-to-year buffeting from the best-seller
lottery.
"To me, then," LeGuin writes, "one of the most despicable things about
corporate publishing and chain booksellers is their assumption that books
are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn't
'perform' within a few weeks, it gets its cover torn off - it is trashed.
The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. ...
"I keep hoping that corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is
not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to
capitalism ... inevitably, some of what publishers publish is, or is partly,
literature - art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it
mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is the
pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of
what profiteth a man are too different."
Yet good writers still get published, and their work remains available to
anyone with around $25 ($10 for the paperback) or a library card. Small,
high-quality publishers (e.g., Unbridled, MacAdam/Cage) continue to spring
up; some (Walker, Algonquin) thrive even when acquired by larger houses.
The numbers look bad, sure - if you come at them like a CEO. But it isn't
about reading numbers.
