The Decline of Reading and the Fall of the Literate Society

Doom and gloom seems to sell, no doubt about that. One only has to look at the massive crop of disaster films and media that has bloomed in the past uncertain decade, experiencing something of a real-world affirmation from the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and now pooling into the next decade with the Mayan apocalypse in 2012. There's a feeling of being on an uncertain precipice, and while it would be millennial generation arrogance and plain stupidity to assume that this is a sentiment unique to the early 21st century, you can be forgiven for feeling that these feelings are somehow more intense and visceral than in years past. The tide of technology and culture has turned from a regular ebb and flow to a frothing maelstrom over which the pundits and guessers, seers and historians cry out to be heard and heeded.

The decline of the newspaper is certainly quantifiable, and it mirrors the slow decline of quality journalism. So too, then, has the book publishing industry seen itself eaten away from within and without. In a myopic sense, it is easy to trace the ills of both back to the Reagan-capitalist 1980s. As newspapers were swallowed up by corporations, so too did small publishers seek refuge in conglomerates. The hope was that by allying themselves with the big corporate world, the publishers would solve cash issues and be able to better ride out the lean days (note 4).

The problem was, as author Gerald Howard noted in his essay "Mistah Perkins-He Dead", a commentary on the then-current (late 1980s) business, the trade houses went into these deals with the misunderstanding that "they would run their business as they had before with similar independence of taste and action, safely cocooned within their conglomerates. The corporations, however, with far less naivete, expected and insisted that their new assets adopt the same financial lockstep as their other assets..." In short, rather than being happy to get by with relatively small profits, the imprints were expected to cultivate double-digit margins (4).

That isn't the full reason for the decline of publishing of course, just one element in a veritable sea of conspiring factors. Reading "What is an editor" by William Targ (the guy who published The Godfather, natch), visions of aMad Men-style industry spring forth. A literary editor, Targ says, absolutely must go to Europe at least once a year; must do something reckless every year (he offers "fire an employee for purely personal reasons; take a lover; demand a raise out of hand") (3).

Sound bizarre and old-fashioned? It is. But book publishing is still, by and large, an old-fashioned enterprise. The steps to getting your book published are generally, 1) find an agent, 2) contact a publisher and send in a manuscript, 3) After a few months someone reads it, decides if they like it, and presents it to the publisher at large, 4) the publisher as a whole decides to go with the book, 5) the book is copyedited and proofed, discussions with the author, 5) design, art, and marketing chores are prepped, and then 6) the print run, distribution, and (hopefully) profits. It can take far more than a year from start to finish to read a manuscript and then make a book out of it. While some parts of the industry have modernized (you can now make much smaller initial print runs, and I'm sure email and teleconferences have replaced that necessary trip to Europe), book publishers are a stodgy as their products seem to be in the internet age.

And yet there's still a sense of recklessness, despite all the corporate takeovers. Ironically, while editors place the blame on literary agents, the agents turn right back around and blame editors. But there's enough blame and poor business practices to go around. For instance, when bidding for the rights to publish a book, some publishers let their small subsidiaries or imprints big against each other, thus driving up the final price paid. That's like fighting for a product on eBay with your family when you're all going to use the item anyhow. There's also the enormous advances paid to authors who are supposed to be the next big thing, or hot stuff, or whatnot--and oftentimes, these books go bust. For instance, James Frey (of the lying "nonfiction" book A Million Little Pieces) was given a cool $1.5 million advance for his second novel, this time actually labeled as fiction. But with an initial print run of 300,000 only 65,000 hardcover copies were sold--a $1.06 million loss for publisher Harper on the advance (2).

But poor choices and inflated advances aren't the only issue here. Hardcover editions often lose money--in fact, some publishers treat hardcovers as mere advertisements for the more lucrative paperbacks. Yet hardcovers are still the only way "serious" books are marketed as. The result is that many good books are squeezed out because they won't perform on hardcover. Releasing direct-to-paperback, however, comes with it a stigma akin to a Disney sequel released direct-to-DVD; it's not a good book or one that will sell well.

Book readers are generally introspective folks, so it's not surprising that there's been a great deal of analysis about what to do about all this. One idea that hasn't caught hold with the industry at large but is pursued by smaller publishers is to ditch the advance entirely. Rather than money upfront, the idea goes, the author gets a far higher cut of the royalties--a 50% split rather than the usual low single digits figure. The hope is that the advance money is instead funneled to marketing, which drives up sales and eventually make everyone more money; as it's less risky for the publisher they are more likely to take the smaller risks. Another idea is simply to cut out the middlemen, but publishing is notoriously against that for obvious reasons; they are the middlemen. Electronic media like the Kindle is highly dangerous because if Amazon gets enough marketshare with their proprietary Kindle book format, then they can strongarm the publishers and squeeze them out. Like the music industry, the book industry is afraid of the internet--and rightly so.

But why does this matter to us? Because where the industry is in trouble, there's disturbing evidence that reading is as well, and that's where the real worry lies. In 1982 about 57% of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the past year, a proportion that dropped to 54% by 1992 and 46.7% in 2002. These statistics were released by the National Endowment for the Arts with a companion that showed correlations between a lack of reading and income disparity, exercise, and voting. As reading has declined, so have the mediums of reading--the books, the newspapers--and it's a global trend, not something you can pawn off on "stupid Americans" or a stereotype (1, 2).

The decline of reading comes at a time of increasing media saturation. And so it can be said that just because people aren't reading doesn't mean they aren't being informed. They're watching movies, television, listening to music and podcasts. But all forms of entertainment aren't created equal. Someone reading a book and someone watching the movie adaptation, in fact, think differently. Watching a television show, even a thought-provoking one, is not akin to a thought-provoking novel (1).

Take for example the experiments of Soviet psychologist Aleksandr Luria. Luria experimented (not in an evil genius way) on literate and illiterate peasants during the 1930s and found remarkable differences in their responses to tests. Literates would see optical illusions where illiterates did not. Illiterates were much worse at picking out items among drawings that did not belong. They were worse at making logical inferences. Illiterates think in terms of pictures, and to remember pictures means a loss of substance--people become cliches, ideas become stereotypes. A whole level of nuance is lost in an audiovisual world (1).

But what does 1930s Soviet experiments have to do with our modern world? Much, as more recent research shows. University of Washington scientists showed that babies aged 8 to 16 months knew on average six to eightfewer words for every hour of baby DVDs they watched daily. That's right, those "Baby Einstein" videos are actually harmful. Whereas small amounts of television helped children, the more the kids got the worse they got, with effects that can be seen even when the children grow to adolescence. By supplanting reading with watching videos, the evidence is that we are hurting our future and the ability for our future to grasp concepts and think logically (1).

So what's the solution? Burn DVDs and ban television? Of course not. The pace of reading might continue to decline towards irrelevance as a whole... but that doesn't mean that informed citizens cannot fight against that tide. Once again, parents and teachers are the most powerful tools as agents of social change on an individual level. The point is: reading a book is good. And while returning our levels of literacy to a high level might not save a foolish book industry, we have to realize that at some point if left unchecked, those pages will disappear altogether... and that would irreparably damage our culture in ways we cannot begin to imagine.

Sources:
*(1) Crain, Caleb (2007-12-24). "Twilight of the Books". The New Yorker.
*(2) Kachka, Boris (2008-09-14). "The End". New York Magazine.
*(3) Howard, Gerald. "Mistah Perkins--He Dead". Editors on Editing anthology.
*(4) Targ, William. "What is an editor?"Editors on Editing anthology.