why some books remain unread

Beth Carswell on the top ten reasons why books remain unread

7: the siren call of the bargain bin

When we’re standing right there, and a book costs $2, and it has a UKRAINIAN SPY with an OMINOUS MOUSTACHE, and a TORRID LOVE RHOMBUS and a SUSPICIOUS DASCHUND in it, it’s difficult to not grab it on the spot – after all, it’s cheaper than a fancy coffee. And oh man – suspicious daschund. Good times guaranteed. Even the covers tempt me. A woman in a silver leotard, draped unconscious in the arms of a swarthy astronaut, while the rings of Saturn loom behind? How can it NOT be good? And such a steal! But when you do this a lot – and Lord, I do this a lot – it’s amazing how quickly they build up, and sit there, judging you, accusing you, when you walk down the hall.

Read the rest.

question of the week

People who need bookmarks aren’t paying attention to what they’re reading

google and copyright debate continues

“Looking back over the course of digitization from the 1990s, we now can see that we missed a great opportunity. Action by Congress and the Library of Congress or a grand alliance of research libraries supported by a coalition of foundations could have done the job at a feasible cost and designed it in a manner that would have put the public interest first. By spreading the cost in various ways—a rental based on the amount of use of a database or a budget line in the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Library of Congress—we could have provided authors and publishers with a legitimate income, while maintaining an open access repository or one in which access was based on reasonable fees. We could have created a National Digital Library—the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Library of Alexandria. It is too late now. Not only have we failed to realize that possibility, but, even worse, we are allowing a question of public policy—the control of access to information—to be determined by private lawsuit. While the public authorities slept, Google took the initiative.”

Google and the Future of Books – New York Review of Books

there’s an evolutionary reason for everything

… including novels, it seems:

WHY does storytelling endure across time and cultures? Perhaps the answer lies in our evolutionary roots. A study of the way that people respond to Victorian literature hints that novels act as a social glue, reinforcing the types of behaviour that benefit society.

Literature “could continually condition society so that we fight against base impulses and work in a cooperative way”, says Jonathan Gottschall of Washington and Jefferson College, Pennsylvania.

New Scientist

And you thought you were reading them just because they were good stories!  Sorry kids, we’re all part of the herd.

It is interesting though, that the novel became a prominent form of writing during the industrial revolution, a time of great social upheaval.  So maybe there is something in the theory after all.  But if it is a reasonable theory, what do today’s declining fiction sales and the rise of non-fiction say about social evolution?

what price books?

Malcolm Knox has an interesting article in the SMH today, touching on some of the issues around local publishing and book  imports, and how these impact on the price of books.

He points, out, rightly I think, that books are not an elastic commodity.  If the price of books halves, we won’t necessarily buy twice as many books.  What he doesn’t touch on is the reason for this: books require time.  We consume books in proportion to the amount of time available to us to read, and the amount of time available will be subject to a value judgement as to the best use of time, by different people. As more demands are made on our time, we will read fewer books.

Knox’s article also completely ignored the second-hand book market. Unlike many other small commodities of similar price, books can be sold over and over again.  The ABS reports:

Sales of almost 80 million new books valued at $1,406.5m were reported by the 1,572 employing businesses identified as having retail bookselling activity in 2003–04. The majority of businesses were newsagents (991 businesses), responsible for 6% (5.1 million) of the new books sold. Most new books (67% or 53.2 million) were sold by the 561 businesses classified as bookshops.

ABS Book Retailers Australia 2003-04

The ABS doesn’t seem to have statistics on the size of the second-hand book market, but I would be willing to bet that, in terms of the numbers of books sold, it would be of similar size to the new book market.  After all, every second little country town has a second-hand bookshop.  And second-hand books may be a more elastic commodity simply because they are not new and they are cheap. Personally I am much more likely to descend into a buying frenzy in a second-hand bookshop than in any other shop.

Anyway, what do you think? Does price influence your decision to buy a book?  Would you buy more books if they were cheaper?  What about second-hand books?  And how much does influence does time available for reading have on your purchase decisions?

19 Jan: edited to add:   David Marr makes an  acerbic contribution.