Take a visit to your local Borders or Barnes and Noble, and stare in awe at all the potboilers, partisan rants, celebrity biographies, self-help pablum, religious tracts, recycled newspaper and magazine columns on display. Then visit your local supermarket, and look at the general quality of the discounted hardcovers and paperbacks. Consider that a record 195,000 new titles came out in 2004, a 14 percent jump over the previous year and 72 percent higher than in 1995. But while more titles are being published, fewer books are actually being sold, AP reported last year. "Publishers are coming to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that the market cannot handle 200,000 books each year," Bowker consultant Andrew Grabois told The Associated Press May 9. This year, the number of new books and new editions of old works published last year dropped to 172,000, about 18,000 less than in 2004. Publishers, especially small and middle-sized ones, all cut back. Proft margins in publishing are in single digits, The Washington Post reports. Could too much overhead -- too many intermediaries between writers and readers -- have something to do with that?
And then consider this: "According to a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts survey, only 56.6 percent of adults had read any book at all in the 12 months through the end of 2002, down from 60.9 percent a decade earlier. And the amount of time devoted to books has declined, too: according to a report by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a private equity firm serving the media industry, Americans will spend an average of 106 hours reading books this year, down from 123 hours a person in 1996." -- "Authors Meet Fans Far From Bookstores, At Company Events," The New York Times.
