Sep 02, 08(a) According to R.R. Bowker, "the bible of the book industry" (May 9, 2006), "U.S. title output in 2005 decreased by more than 18,000 to 172,000 new titles and editions. This is the first decline in U.S. title output since 1999, and only the 10th downturn recorded in the last 50 years. It follows the record increase of more than 19,000 new books in 2004.
"Great Britain, long the world's per capita leader in the publication of new books in any language, now replaces the United States as the publisher of most new books in English. 206,000 new books were published in the U.K. in 2005, representing an increase of some 45,000 (28%) over 2004."
(b) In an article written by Rosemary Goring in October, 2004, "According to Mexican author Gabriel Zaid, author of So Many Books...a new book is published every 30 seconds. Although these encompass works in Urdu and Cantonese as well as English and include not only literary epics but treatises on particle physics, it's a statistic that could drive those of us who work with books into the sort of frenzy that afflicted Malthus when he heard the rate at which babies were appearing on the planet..."
(c) As quoted at the beginning of this piece, "Bowker, the world's leading provider of bibliographic information, today released statistics on English-language book publishing compiled from its Global Books In Print database.
"According to Bowker, publishers in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand released 375,000 new titles and editions in 2004. Anglo-American publishers published 80% of all new English-language books in 2004, while the U.S. alone accounted for 52% of the total. Including imported editions available in multiple markets, the total number of new English language books available for sale in the English-speaking world in 2004 was a staggering 450,000...
"The English-speaking countries remain relatively inhospitable to translations into English from other languages. In all, there were only 14,440 new translations in 2004, accounting for a little more than 3% of all books available for sale. The 4,982 translations available for sale in the U.S. was the most in the English-speaking world, but was less than half the 12,197 translations reported by Italy in 2002, and less than 400 more than the 4,602 reported by the Czech Republic in 2003..."
2. The Impact of Bestsellers
As noted in the U.S. News & World Report, "But for the most part, it seemed a winner-take all victory, with the top 200 bestsellers accounting for about 10 percent of the whole. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by itself generated 7.02 million sales — 1 percent. Would-be writers are advised to do the math before quitting their day jobs."
3. Indians are the World's Most Avid Readers
A survey reported on in the London Timesonline, "shows that (Indians) spend twice as much time reading books, newspapers and magazines as the British, and nearly three times longer than the Japanese. The article concludes: "....newspaper readership is up by 12% over the past three years, helped by a rise in literacy. According to the National Readership Survey, 64% of people in rural areas and 84% of urban Indians are now able to read." (This data is amplified in the section on the newspaper industry.)
4. Where The Book Business Is Humming
Reflecting also the realities of the worldwide newspaper business, the book business is still growing rapidly in countries that previously had limited access to books. According to Business Week, "In fast-modernizing Ukraine...Bertelsmann is enjoying dot-com-like expansion for its book club, a category that's a slow- or no-growth proposition in the U.S. and Western Europe. Family Leisure moved 12 million books last year - everything from cookbooks to local potboilers to Stephen King thrillers — while sales grew 55%, to $50 million. Today, Bertelsmann is Ukraine's biggest bookseller, with 12% of the market. And the operation enjoys profit margins that are triple the 4% global average for similar Bertelsmann units, which include the Book-of-the-Month Club and Literary Guild in the U.S."
5. Lulu Grabs the Long TailLulu.com is perhaps the most successful of the new breed of companies serving the "self-publishing market," which publishers referred to derisively in the past as the "vanity publishing" market. As this press release notes, "Lulu.com is the premier marketplace for new digital content on the Internet, with more than 100,000 recently published titles, and more than 2500 new titles added each week, created by people in 80 different countries."
Lulu does not charge authors to print their books, instead charging a commission on actual sales. A senior sales executive told a Toronto book publishing conference in March 2007 that the average title sold less than two copies, but because of the enormous number of titles sold, the company was profitable. This seems to mirror the broader industry trend described in the summary at the beginning of this section: "nearly 1.5 million different titles were sold in the United States in 2006, although 78% of those titles sold fewer than 99 copies."
6. Why Publishers Love the Bible
This article by Daniel Radosh, published in The New Yorker, is a fun and fascinating look at the business of bible publishing in the United States. Publishing and selling "Christian" books is a massive business, often overlooked when the book publishing industry is discussed. The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) reports that in 2004 religious books accounted for 11.4% of book sales in the United States. According to the Christian Booksellers Association (CBA, but not to be confused with the Canadian Booksellers Association!), "sales of Christian products by CBA member suppliers through all distribution channels were $4.34 billion in 2004..."
Bibles comprised nearly 20% of that number. As reported in Google Answers "No one really knows how many copies of the Bible have been printed, sold, or distributed. The Bible Society's attempt to calculate the number printed between 1816 and 1975 produced the figure of 2,458,000,000. A more recent survey, for the years up to 1992, put it closer to 6,000,000,000 in more than 2,000 languages and dialects. Whatever the precise figure, the Bible is by far the bestselling book of all time."
7. What Did Gutenberg Invent?
This fascinating Web-based series of articles challenges the most fundamental claim about Johannes Gutenberg: that he in fact was the European inventor of printing using movable type. Researchers Paul Needham and Blaise Aguera y Arcas have made a new discovery that throws doubt on this long-cherished belief. As the article notes: "Paul and Blaise's findings suggest that the development of the printing process was more gradual than previously thought.... Their working hypothesis on how Gutenberg created type is that a temporary mould was created, one letter cast and the process of taking the letter out of the mould disturbed the surface. So the same mould would have had to be recreated to make the second letter." They conclude that the process for creating movable type in Europe was more likely discovered in Italy some 20 years later.
8. The Writers in the Silos
Heidi Julavits' short piece of creative nonfiction, "The Writers in the Silos" projects the future of publishing as nothing has before.
9. Poetry
According the August 2007 Harper's magazine Harper's Index (not available online) a book of poetry must sell 50 copies per week to appear on the Poetry Foundation's bestseller list.