The phenomenon of swag books. You read less and leave early
People spend less time reading books, abandon a book early, but books grow pages. We have already talked extensively about the first phenomenon, commenting on the data that the specialized agencies periodically disseminate. For the second phenomenon - abandonment - Kobo Inc., the Canadian company that produces the Kobo ereader (anagram of book), has announced that the completion rate of books read on the device is 20%. A percentage close to that achieved on the most widespread and used Kindle. Although Amazon does not disseminate data of any kind, it has been noted that the vast majority of public highlights on Kindle (Popular Highlights) stop at the first chapter and hardly go into the subsequent parts of the text.
Jordan Ellenberg, the Wall Street Journal's literary reporter, enjoyed drafting a standings of the least read bestsellers. For example, in the summer of 2014 the least read bestseller was Capital in the XNUMXst century by Thomas Picketty: All highlighting stops at the first 20 pages. It follows closely from A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking with an alleged 6.6% completion rate of the entire content. A book that appears to have been read in its entirety is The Goldfinch by Donna Tart with a stellar 98,5% completion rate.
It happens, as we have known for a long time, that many books are bought but not fully read. With digital reading, this phenomenon has continued and will continue to expand because there is no longer the book on the bedside table to remind you that you left it on page 40 and that it is there to tell you how negligent you are. In fact, after a few days of inactivity, a book that has just started on a digital device disappears from our field of vision and eventually also disappears from the opening screen, sinking inexorably. After a month you no longer even know that you have started it or even bought it. When you see it again in Amazon's recommendations and feel like buying it again, the bookstore informs you that you've already downloaded it. An embarrassing matter, but only the algorithm knows about it.
Publishers care little whether the book is read or not, for them the important thing is to sell it. If it is read and shared better, much better, but the fact that it is read in part or not at all does not rob anyone of sleep general director. There is no “completion rate” column in their spreadsheet. It doesn't even rob authors of sleep who should instead sleep worried, because a reader who soon abandons reading a work is unlikely to go back to purchasing a subsequent work by the same author. More than the size of the advance, authors should be concerned with how many people finish reading their books.
If 80 pages more there they seem poche
If people read less, abandon reading early to devote themselves to more rewarding activities such as keeping fit or devouring the latest television series produced by Netflix or Amazon Prime, then it will be necessary to rethink the reading offer by preparing shorter and more quick to complete? That's not what actually happens in the book market, because books aren't getting smaller and shorter to read. The exact opposite is happening.
This is stated by a survey conducted by Vervesearch on 2.500 books that have entered the New York Times bestseller lists since 1999. Compared to a book that was in the rankings in 1999, today a book that is lucky enough to be in these highly coveted lists has, on average, 80 more pages. An increase of 25%: from the average 320 pages in 1999 to 400 today. Explaining this phenomenon is quite a challenge. How do you combine the decline in reading demand with the increase in the supply of titles and even pages to read?
The first impression is that there is something not working properly in the sense that there is a misalignment between the behavior of book suppliers and that of the mass of reading consumers. Category A publishers and authors tend to have the strong reader as the main point of reference for their proposals, ie the reader who consumes more than 25 books a year. The problem is that this type of reader is in decline and also tends to be seduced by other forms of content that reach their devices like a tidal wave. The other 75 percent is in fact considered lost or can only be activated with sporadic blockbusters that are difficult to give an impression of continuity. The latest cosmic bestseller have been Le 50 shades of gray, but after that very little happened and the book industry shows the same performance as the European economy.
Today, the key goal of the book industry is precisely to broaden the reader base to include this 75% of dormant subjects through product innovation. A rather alien concept to the big players in this industry, including famous authors. Instead, the big players in the book industry should look at what happens to television content with streaming. James Poniewozik, the TV critic of the "New York Times", writes in this regard:
“More than any other innovation in TV, streaming has the potential, indeed the possibility, to create a whole new story genre – which is defined as Netflix TV –; a genre with elements of television, cinema and the novel, but different from each of them. But it takes time to master all this.
Other explanations for the increase in the volume of books
Many publishers have begun to invest in page readability, offering more spacious, airy and less congested text. This may be one of the reasons for the increase in book pages over the last 15 years.
A second explanation – more generous than the first – could be the desire of the entire book ecosystem (authors, publishers, distributors, bookshops) to offer the consumer a better product also in terms of quantity and packaging. The book is still a commodity and the value perceived by the consumer is also given by its materiality. More pages, more monetary value. A study of comments posted on Yelp and Trip Advisor by customers of restaurants and eateries shows that the negative ranking of these places is largely determined by the size of the portions. It could be a clue, because books are food too.
Another very fascinating, but equally unsatisfying, explanation is that readers who continue to love the written word and prefer it to the cutthroat competition of other less cerebral but infinitely more attractive media, love being inside well-written stories and are willing to make us an investment of time and emotion. The longer this immersion lasts, the more rewarding it becomes. For them, 80 more pages are just pure lust.
A third explanation is that it was e-commerce that indirectly encouraged the production of larger books. On an online bookstore, the number of pages in a book is very diluted information. It's not clear from the cover thumbnail or preview whether the book is 80 or 800 pages long. The reader pays less attention to the materiality of the object. Then with reading books on the Kindle and on tablets, the size of the book does not weigh in the suitcase. On reading devices, the pages are never the same because the text is liquid and therefore generally we tend not to pay much attention to the extension of the script, certainly less than what can happen in a real library.
The growth of the pages is the manifestation of a cultural turning point
For the literary agent Clare Alexander, interviewed by the "Guardian", the gradual increase in the size of the book is the manifestation of a cultural turning point. Here's how this cultural breakthrough happened in Alexander's words, reported by the English newspaper:
“Despite talk of the book's death due to competition from other media, people who choose to read prefer expansive, expansive narratives—the opposite of the bits and pieces of information that appear on our smartphones or Internet-connected electronic devices. It is the Americans who have led the way – think Donna Tart, Jonathan Franzen, Hanya Yanagihara and Marlon James (Jamaican but living in America) – but they are not alone. Hilary Mantel in the UK or Eleanor Catton in New Zealand have written long novels, and if you keep listing authors who love extended stories, you'll notice how this trend has been recognized by critics and literary awards. Evidently the literary establishment loves long books too.”
The literary establishment loves long books
Il Man Booker prize it has been the mainstay of the literary establishment in the UK since the 300s and evidence of this trend can be found in the winners' roll. The winning novels of the first five years of the award averaged 2011 pages, but even taking into account Julian Barnes' 160 triumph with a XNUMX-page short story (The Sense. or an Ending), over the past seven years, the award-winning novels average 487 pages. Brief history of seven murders by Marlon James, winner in 2015, is 700 pages, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, winner in 2013, is 829 pages, Wolf Hall (Roads) by Hilary Mantel, which won in 2009) and 779 pages.
Max Porter, editor of Granta which published Catton's 829-page book, thinks it's difficult to envisage a market-wide breakthrough, but thinks it's encouraging that such big, ambitious books still resonate with the public and the favor of critics. Porter explains:
“Across cultures, people are debating about going digital, what devices will be used to access it, and so on. I think it's important that there are still great books that say “Read me!”. The boom in television series, to which people dedicate dozens of hours to follow a single narrative, has encouraged publishers to support those authors who intend to paint a large fresco. People have been seen to have the will, the patience and the stamina to stand behind a story and its characters as it unfolds over a large expanse.”
“A large book occupies an important space in the reader's field of vision – continues Porter. It is the physical manifestation of your intention to spend the time necessary to read it. The current tendency of books to increase one's waistline can instead be explained by a proud affirmation of identity. The novel has come to the brink of its denial. There are so many stimuli that demand our attention, so many forms of competition that novels have decided to be large and extensive to the point of requiring us to sit in an armchair, turn off the cell phone and devote the time to reading.
Anything in between is difficult
"There's been an inflation of swag novels in recent years," Alex Bowler, managing director of Jonathan Cape, which published the 900-page debut novel in the UK, tells The Guardian. City of Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg. However, the increase in pages that was revealed by Flipsnack's investigation is not what he verifies with the manuscripts that happen to land on his desk. “High-profile books may be big, but I'm not inundated with 200-word publication proposals. Novels of 250-350 pages are the majority of the proposals I receive and I assume it is also the size of the majority of manuscripts that circulate in publishing houses”
“I think books are becoming more spacious than long,” says Bowler. By altering page space with more generous line spacing and slightly larger font, publishers can increase the size of a book. It may be that the genre fiction audience likes books that are airier in what they buy.”
A sense of the perceived value of money in a bulky book was important in the heyday of physical commerce, says literary agent Clare Alexander, and this factor may still influence some readers, but that alone does not explain the growth of volume of novels. I would say that an element of compensation is given by renewed interest in the well-conceived and narrated short story or novel. These days, the real struggle is publishing an insignificantly sized book. As an agent, the hardest thing is to stay in the middle. Mid-table, mid-size, mid-career, everything in between is tough."
