One of the problems with the future of publishing debates (and you know there are so many of those) is that there are a variety of publishers and not every scenario is going to equally fit each and every publisher.
A topic I don’t see mentioned too often is the difference between reading and book buying habits:
Not everyone who reads a lot also buys a lot of books.
The people who buy books represent a smaller segment than people who read. People who borrow mostly from the library or mostly frequent used bookstores are likely people who don’t buy a lot of new books anyway.
Maybe I’m wrong, but publishers are probably more concerned about people who buy books, which is a smaller segment than people who read. Invariably, someone will say that publishers have to decide which industry they are in - the book business or the information business. Good question. But the answer may not be the same for every publisher.
It’s also the same question that libraries face and later I’ll examine how libraries dealt with that.
Some book publishing stats from Para Publishing indicate that more people buy books than actually read them. If this is true, that means that the people that read are a subset of those that buy, as opposed to the other way around.
http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm
Hi Mark,
Thanks for the stats. I think a lot of people who buy books do buy books that they never get around to reading. At least, I certainly buy more books than I ever will read, though I have the intention someday of reading those books.
Yet, as a librarian, I witnessed many people who happily borrowed books from a library and proudly proclaimed that they didn’t buy books. Those people are definitely readers who don’t buy books.