Whither reading?

[Twit 2]

Split/carried over from the Orr/Self thread:

I actually agree with Self that the novel is dead. Young people do not read novels. Even my parents have given up reading in favour of mindless iPad scrolling. It'll be an evermore niche interest as the older people who read/used to read die. Sales figures are very grim for all writers except the few top sellers who are heavily marketed. Anyway, maybe a subject for another thread but I think it's a bit cheap to say Self thinks the novel is doomed just because his didn't sell.

This has always been the case, surely? When three of the best selling 10 or so novels of all time were released in the last twenty years, I'm not sure how dead the novel is. But there's almost certainly a bad trend in this that I'm glossing over.

That fact could as much prove my point as disprove. It seems you can be hyper-successful or struggling with very little middle ground. Authors who used to be able to make a living from their writing are unable to do so. Advances are getting smaller. Literate, articulate kids who would have read through their teenage years just stop reading at teenage years. I don't know a single teenager who reads books regularly. I don't think "''twas ever thus" applies: the way people live and consume information has totally changed.

Probably worth its own thread, but I remember the "kids don't read any more" stories from before the Boy-Wizard phenomenon, after which we got "kids are reading too much". I read articles about lots of people doing well off of e-publishing, too, but admittedly this is a few data points and might not a trend.

Remind me (if you do start a thread) to bang on about pulp horror and those ultra-violent western novels for a bit.

Carry on.

[gilbertharding]

I read quite a lot, but mainly books by people who are dead. However, while I'm in the shop (usually Waterstones, if I'm honest) looking for the latest book written at least 50 years ago, I see many, many books by people who are not dead. I presume people are buying them. I further presume that some of the people buying them are also reading them...

Sometimes a quite new book by a living author will cross my transom, but I tend to find them unsatisfying somehow. Either lightweight, or trying too hard. Perhaps they will set the book in the past, but lazily.

I'm not the person to ask, in other words.

[Famous Mortimer]

We could start from here - https://www.statista.com/topics/1177/book-market/ - that has all sorts of statistics and so on about book sales, independent bookshop numbers, and so on.

I love pulp horror novels and those ludicrously violent Westerns that had their heyday from the 60s to the 80s. But the more I learned about them, the more I understood why they weren't around any more. They were created largely to satisfy the baser desires of people who weren't getting what they wanted from the sanitised entertainment on TV and in the movies. As soon as video nasties became a thing, people stopped giving a shit about lurid horror novels and the latest Edge masterpiece. Roughly speaking.

Also, Twit 2 mentioned the lack of job opportunities, ways for authors to support themselves, and so on. That's not a good thing, obviously, but...there are still an awful lot of books being published, and like music, it's not like the high street is always the best way to find the genuinely interesting stuff? Maybe?

[Funcrusher]

I was thinking today that whenever a recommendation comes up for me on YouTube which is a books channel, it's always someone who looks to be at least in their late teens/early twenties who only reads YA fiction, mostly dystopian trilogy stuff that seems to be  a Hunger Games rip off, and the shelves behind them are full of only this kind of stuff. 

[Famous Mortimer]

I was thinking today that whenever a recommendation comes up for me on YouTube which is a books channel, it's always someone who looks to be at least in their late teens/early twenties who only reads YA fiction, mostly dystopian trilogy stuff that seems to be  a Hunger Games rip off, and the shelves behind them are full of only this kind of stuff. 

To be fair, I spent the enormous majority of my teens and twenties reading sci-fi and fantasy series. I have read Joyce and Dostoyevsky and David Foster Wallace, but if someone asked me what genre I was most a fan of, it'd be sci-fi with no hesitation. Maybe these people you're referring to are like that?

[Small Man Big Horse]

Statistics from The Guardian:

Statistics from UK book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan show that the print book market in the UK grew 2.1% in value and 0.3% in volume in 2018. In total, 190.9m books were sold last year, for £1.63bn. The Bookseller magazine said this was up £34m on 2017. Volume also increased, although more marginally, with an extra 627,000 books sold last year.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/03/leading-the-entertainment-pack-uk-print-book-sales-rise-again#targetText=Statistics%20from%20UK%20book%20sales,up%20%C2%A334m%20on%202017.

So everything's fine. End thread.

More seriously, I buy all my books from charity shops so the authors get fuck all but cancer is cured. Is that right? Or WRONG?