I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking it must be wrong because we still had radio, we even had books everywhere as far as I could see. Of course we still do, but it's not just literary fiction suffering; book sales tend to go down (pandemics excepted) while the numbers being published goes up.
Anecdotally, I followed an interesting ex-MI6 bod on Tiktok (@theenglishspy) who had ~50k followers and admitted, maybe a few months after publishing a book he'd been pushing, that he had sold less than 100 copies. I had my own go [1] at narrative non-fiction for a cause and also didn't manage to break 100 copies.
Perhaps it's a good thing; the market's saturated, while overall demand for books is falling it's because there are more instant, engaging formats that people are seeking to invest in finding stories. If the internet ever goes down, those books will still be there, we'll just have to find a way to order them.
According to the author this isn't the case, but the take is complicated:
> People don’t read books or short stories in magazines anymore because they’re too busy scrolling? There’s data on this: according to the National Endowment of the Arts, the number of Americans who “read literature” has fallen from 56.9% in 1982 to 46.7% in 2002 to 38% in 2022. I’m not even going to bother pulling data on the percent of time people spend on their phones or on the internet. So the internet means people spend less time reading books and (presumably) less time reading literary fiction in particular because it’s weighty, boring, dense, etc. There are two problems with this theory: one is that the facts are wrong — the actual size of the fiction reading population has not shrunk a meaningful amount (population growth), and the second is that even if the facts were right, it couldn’t be correct: in 1955, the number of Americans who even read one book a year (39%) was lower than it is today (53%).3 And the 1950s and 1960s were supposedly the golden-age of American fiction. What’s actually going on?
Most easily digestible evidence submitted by the author is https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/DRBKRA3A086NBEA showing that actual per capita expenditure on reading material has increased indexed to 2017 dollars...
Lies, damned lies and statistics, but I'm not sure any of that contradicts my view. Print sales are down since the pandemic bump, they're back at ~2008 levels when the US population was >40m fewer.
That the percentage of people who can read (and do read one book per year) is higher, clearly isn't translating to more book sales, so people are reading, or at least buying, fewer print books.
I remember listening to that as a kid and thinking it must be wrong because we still had radio, we even had books everywhere as far as I could see. Of course we still do, but it's not just literary fiction suffering; book sales tend to go down (pandemics excepted) while the numbers being published goes up.
Anecdotally, I followed an interesting ex-MI6 bod on Tiktok (@theenglishspy) who had ~50k followers and admitted, maybe a few months after publishing a book he'd been pushing, that he had sold less than 100 copies. I had my own go [1] at narrative non-fiction for a cause and also didn't manage to break 100 copies.
Perhaps it's a good thing; the market's saturated, while overall demand for books is falling it's because there are more instant, engaging formats that people are seeking to invest in finding stories. If the internet ever goes down, those books will still be there, we'll just have to find a way to order them.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0DVC8XG1X/