MORE BOOKS, FEWER READERS?

Library Administrator's Digest, Sep 2004 by Robinson, Charles W

The two adjacent articles in this month's News Section certainly give rise to a puzzling situation. Bowker reports the highest number of new titles in history in 2003 and the National Endowment for the Arts reports a decline in the reading of literature.

But maybe not so puzzling if you read carefully. The NEA's study was concerned with only "literature," which it defines as fiction, poetry and drama.

And Bowker reports that general adult fiction is down 1.6 percent. On the other hand, 51 percent of all new titles published by "print-on-demand" publishers were, hey, fiction, poetry and drama! So maybe it's not to worry, NEA!

Years ago, I was amazed to read that 50,000 titles a year were published, and our library was buying about 8,000 titles, which seemed to satisfy the demand quite well, thank you.

Now we have 175,000 titles, up 19 percent in 2003 alone. (Goodness knows how many titles are going to be published in 2004!) And I always have thought that libraries like Cuyahoga County, OH, were absolutely nuts for buying maybe 35,000 titles or more. (I still do.)

Think what all this means to the harried materials selectors in public libraries: given a stable materials budget (you're lucky if you have that, in this day and age), the more titles you buy, the fewer copies of any one title you will buy, and it's the multiple copies of in-demand titles that people borrow. Much of this is fiction, of course, but I would bet that very little is poetry and drama.

So what are all these new titles? You can self-publish a lot more easily these days, and I'll bet a lot of these new titles are the result of self-publishing. What used to be the field of vanity presses is now available to almost anyone who lives near a Kinko's, and these authors love to get an ISBN number - cool!

A lot of librarians, as well as members of the general public, have always been at least faintly disapproving of fiction, classing it as somehow lower-brow than nonfiction, and they can now cheer at the decline of fiction publishing, at least general fiction, which may represent "trade" fiction.

With as many as 175,000 titles being published, I would guess that really a small percentage get into general distribution. Most titles are printed in less than 2,000 copies, I'll bet, and a fair percentage of these aren't sold or even given away. The returns of even mass-market titles which have been heavily advertised are growing, if those titles located in the Borders' entrances discounted to less than $5 are any indication.

But as the professor at Pomona College says, "We are reading all the time, just not reading in ways that might appear visually literary."

Quite right, I believe. But still, pity the library selector!