Much of the loudest buzz within the book business is of Random House’s plan to swallow Simon & Schuster.
S&S among other advantages could enjoy more outlets for its books. But such a vision still reeks of “shuffling chairs on the Titanic.”
Merger or no merger, and regardless of Random House’s profits, the industry as a whole is a dismal underperformer, as shown by pre-Covid numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics—covering publishers of all kinds, large and small.
Americans in 2019 were spending 33 times more on big-screen TVs, Netflix, and other nontext diversions than on books and other forms of recreational reading.
Many U.S. publishers have enjoyed a bump in book sales during the pandemic (especially to well-off households locked up at home and interested in home-schooling children). But reading-related expenditures, in fact, might on the way down or at least end up flat for too long if we extrapolate long-term from some BLS numbers.
Yes, “Tiger King,” football, and the like are more alluring and more in-your-face to the population at large than is text. Still, the book business’s numbers stink even when we acknowledge the ratio between slack-jawed nonreaders and bright-eyed lit majors or even bestseller fans.
For recreational reading of all kinds, pre-Covid expenditures per household fell from $118 in 2016 to $92 in 2019. The $92 excludes, say, textbooks but encompasses nonbook reading of all types, so the statistic for books is likely to be noticeably lesss. The just-mentioned $92 would be a speck of the $3,090 devoted to other forms of entertainment in 2019. Nontext entertainment in 2019 fell slightly from 2018 but actually increased from 2016’s $2,913 to the $3,090.
So what percentage was the $92—the amount spent on recreational reading—of a total of $63,036 household expenditures in 2019? Would you believe, a mere .146 percent of the expenditures compared to 4.905 percent lavished on entertainment. Even tobacco and smoking supplies could claim .579 percent—several times the percentage spent on recreational reading—despite all the warnings on cigarette packages.
While publishing will never enjoy the full revenue potential of many other industries, I believe it deserve a big fat F in the marketing department and related ones.
Old habits, such downplaying electronic books in some cases because of the existing paper-oriented infrastructure, can be costly. So can onerous digital rights management, as opposed to watermarking or even the absence of any “protection” at all.
And oh how the industry is hobbling itself by using DRM to block many books from being usable with text-to-speech technology. Imagine what text to speech could mean in terms of expanding the reading time for many readers who could multi-task while, say, performing household chores. A market would still exist for audiobooks with skilled narrators.
I could go on and on about the changes the industry needs, both during and after the pandemic. Some are already happening, as shown by sales increases at large retail outlets such as Walmart and Costco—see COVID-19 and Book Publishing: Impacts and Insights for 2021, a comprehensive report by Cliff Guren, Thad McIlroy and Steve Sieck, covering this and many other details.
Thinking more strategically, the industry need to care more about marketing beyond the elite. “I feel there’s a major study to be done on this issue,” Thad emailed me last month. “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.” Paraphrasing BLS information, the report said: “The top 10% of earners spent nearly 8½ times more on reading than the bottom 10%.”
As I see it, we should regard libraries as key to increasing the number of readers. Yes, book expenditures are just a tiny fraction of household expenditures in the U.S. and probably in Canada and elsewhere, but regardless, consumers can be ultra-sensitive to prices. One partial solution would be national digital library systems in effect expanding the universe of readers and increasing sales volume rather than replicating the fixation of so many publishers on price per book sold. Digital library catalogues could include “buying links” not just to digital online bookstores but also stores near consumers who wanted to get books faster or keep them permanently. Certainly libraries can be a major source of book discovery, if we go by statistics from BookNet Canada in 2015:
Also, do you notice the importance of used books? At least back in 2004, the $2.2 billion in used books sales in the U.S. were 8.4 percent of total consumer spending on books, with textbooks the main show in that market although used sales of nontextbooks were rapidly increasing.
With lower ebook prices, publishers could more successfully encourage consumers to buy new rather than used books and could thus benefit financially. Same in regard to new purchases in place of borrowing books from friends or relatives. Moreover, borrowers could more easily be converted to buyers.
Helpful, too, would be national library endowments in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere, which, among other activities, could promote libraries, family literacy, reading and even individual titles—to the benefit of libraries and the book industry alike. See LibraryEndowment.org. For more information on synergies and potential synergies between libraries and the commercial side of publishing, see the Panorama Project and TeleRead’s look at it.
Simply put, publishers could do much better at developing markets than they are now. While the pandemic may provide a boost, especially if the reading habit lingers among some at-homers, it is dangerous to be pat about the status quo.
On the brighter side, think of the vast revenue opportunities if only the industry will show more flexibility and receptiveness to new ideas.
BLS definition of “reading” excluding textbooks: “Reading includes subscriptions for newspapers and magazines; books through book clubs; e-books and digital reading material; and the purchase of single-copy newspapers, magazines, newsletters, books, and encyclopedias and other reference books.”
Addendum #1: I see that Statistica service has come up with print book unit sales from 2004 (648 million) to 2019 (693 million) and virus-boosted 2020 (751 million). Not very impressive growth, long term, in my opinion, if you consider that the 2005 stat was 778 million and that the corona created special tailwinds to increase 2020 unit sales 8.2 percent over 2019! Sources are Publisher’s Weekly and Nielsen Book Scan. Now, how about household expenditures on books? BLS-based Statistica stats going back to 2007 show that the long-term trend has been more or less flat. That would jibe with the household numbers I saw on the BLS site for 2016-2019.
Addendum #2: “Expenditures consist of the transaction costs,” BLS says, “including excise and sales taxes, of goods and services acquired during the interview or recordkeeping period. Expenditure estimates include expenditures for gifts, but exclude purchases or portions of purchases directly assignable to business purposes. Periodic credit or installment payments on goods or services already acquired are also excluded. The full cost of each purchase is recorded, even though full payment may not have been made at the date of purchase.” Since BLS is gathering information in this case at the consumer end, publishers’ sizes or whether they were included in certain industry-reported statistics would not make any difference. Remember, we’re talking about household expenditures.
Image credit: “Bookstore” by Martin Cathrae is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
teleread.org 
From Thad McIlroy:
Hi David: As you know, we’re on the same page for much of your analysis and conclusions. The big fly in the ointment for everyone using BLS “reading” data is that their definition includes everything up to, but not quite including, reading the labels on medicine bottles. We are in desperate need of more granular data about book reading, preferably cross-referenced to how the book was obtained (plus a few other data correlates). Until then, some of our observations must remain broad. Which is a pity, because there are clearly issues that must be addressed, soonest.
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Yes, Thad – here’s to more granularity and transparency! Books are a long way from newspapers. We indeed need to address these issues soonest.
At the same time, based on non-BLS information, too, it is already clear in my opinion that the industry could be doing a lot better in expanding the universe of readers.
Meanwhile, thanks again to you, Cliff, and Steve for writing that wonderful report, which inspired me to do this and the earlier post.
David
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I read that the annual (pre-Covid) per capita spending on music in USA is $15, and that over 50% don’t pay anything. If you remove the people who pay nothing, it’s about $40 per person. In 2019, globally, streaming accounts for 56% of music spending (42% for subscriptions, and 14% for advertising streams). Digital downloads/purchases account for 7%, physical media account for 21%, performance rights account for 12% and synchronization revenues account for 2.5%.
Music is still a gigantic part of the culture — and in fact, musicians make a slim percent of music spending because music streaming services get a significantly higher piece of the pie that the musicians themselves when compared to authors. So the real question I have about this data is: what’s the breakdown of entertainment spending? I don’t think it’s only netflix here; that includes concerts, plays, movie theatres, sports events?
Second, this statistic doesn’t include the public spending on libraries. I wonder what the per capita spending (or median/mean) for libraries. That’s probably a lot.
Third, I’d be curious how much of the READING budget includes subscriptions to news media (NYT, Washington Post, Atlantic — and whatever the rightwing equivalent is). I think book-averse people see the value in subscribing to online content they really dig. Certainly educated people do.
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Thanks, Robert, and I hope you’re bouncing back from the storm-related complications down there in the Houston area. A few points:
1. Yes, musicians as a group are badly underpaid, just like writers.
2. For BLS’s definition of “entertainment” spending, go here and scroll down. Among the big categories there would be “fees and admissions,” “television, radio and sound equipment,” “pets, toys, hobbies, and playground equipment,” and “other entertainment and services.” Streaming services like Netflix would fall within “fees and admissions.” Even basic Netflix service costs more than $100 a year. Of course, that’s just a smidgen of the entertainment category. But it’s still a helpful example of nonbook spending.
3. Public library spending wouldn’t be a consumer expenditure. But for what it’s worth, the operating budgets of U.S. libraries could come to around $13 billion a year. Actual content spending would be maybe $1.7 billion. Per capita, that is not very high.
4. Yes, the reading category includes lots of nonbooks, driving the book total even lower.
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Gosh, $92 per household per year, what a sad statistic. I didn’t realize my wife and I are such outliers. We spend about that much per month. While our sons and grandson are not so book- or reading-impoverished as the average American, I do doubt that younger generations will value reading as much as my siblings, in-laws, wife and I do. We may be the last literate generation, and America may be entering a post-literate era. A friend who teaches religion and philosophy at the college level says that’s already happened. College students who are sent to a religious college by their parents don’t have very basic knowledge, never heard of Abraham nor Moses nor the three Abrahamic religions. College students I taught could name the seven dwarfs but not more than 2 Supreme Court justices.
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Excellent points, Jim. Among other things, voters’ ignorance is ultimately one reason for the abysmal quality of so many public officials – including, of course, corrupt ideologues like Justices Thomas and Alito. Trump himself thrives on many people’s ignorance, not just their anger. Improved mass literacy would pay countless dividends in countless ways.
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Improved mass literacy is difficult to achieve. Having taught middle school, where the pressure on teachers to improve student reading and comprehension scores is heavy, I had 32 students in class. The students who are slower readers or who have learning disabilities or ADD tend to create distractions and act out. Non-native English speakers have additional obstacles. Tutoring programs help for sure. I initially thought computers and smart phones would encourage literacy, but dazzling graphics and videos capture attention at the expense of real reading, especially long-form books. Even in good schools, turning the lowest 20% into readers is extraordinarily difficult. They will of course go on to become non-voters, or low-information voters vulnerable to disinformation and demagoguery.
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@Jim: I’m curious how you feel about the K-12 potential of AI – ideally used with human tutors as well. The right AI not only could help spot gaps in kids’ knowledge but also create highly individualized drills. The tutors could offer encouragement and help keep the kids on task. As the challenges of the One Laptop per Chiid initiative showed, tech by itself isn’t enough. You need the humans too! Needless to say, the AI could be used not only to help teachers upgrade their own subject matter knowledge, but also their pedagogical techniques.
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Jim, continued thanks for your valuable comments. I knew the situation was abysmal, and now, based on your first-hand experiences, you’re saying it’s even worse than I expected.
Most of all, I’m worried about society as a whole, but if nothing else, your comments serve as a warning to major publishers. They need to look beyond the elite for markets, and the only way for this to happen is to consider not only companies’ immediate needs but also those of society at large.
Perhaps not reading aloud to children and otherwise encouraging them should be considered a form of child abuse – with special provisions made for families where the parents themselves are illiterate or where they must work several jobs. I know – dream on. But I myself think the parents are as much at fault as the schools. If nothing else, we need to change laws that give parents too much clout at the expense of their children’s education. And, yes, we need tutoring as well as accommodations for non-English speakers. Carrots, too, not just sticks!
Higher standards for teachers colleges would help as well. One problem is that many teaches themselves are not that much into books.
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