From the latest fabulous edition of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern:

© 2011 McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and the contributors, San Francisco, California. This has been a strange few years for the book industry. There have been many changes and realignments, and these changes have led countless commentators to predict that (a) reading is dead; (b) books are dead; (c) publishing is dead; (d) all printed matter is dead. Or that all of the above, if not already dead, will be dead very soon. ¶These are upsetting predictions, given they’re based on assumptions and attitudes, and not data. Instead they point to the one reliable aspect of the literary world: that every decade, no matter the climate or the realities of the business, excitable people, many of them inside the industry themselves, will claim that reading is dead, that book are obsolete. It’s a common but ill-informed line of thinking, and it leads to some bad decisions and bad outcomes. ¶Back in May of 2010, amidst some of the most dour prognostications about the state of the industry, we asked fifteen or so young researchers to look into the health of the book. Their findings provide proof that not only are books very much alive, but that reading is in exceptionally good shape—and that the book-publishing industry, while undergoing some significant changes, is, on the whole, in very good health. ¶Let’s start with some bedrock data that disproves any statements that the industry is in freefall. According to Nielsen’s BookScan—a sales-monitoring service widely regarded as representing 70 of 75 percent of trade sales—Americans bought 751,729,000 books in 2010. Excepting 2008 and 2009, when sales reached 757 million and 777 million, respectively, that’s man millions more books sold than in any other year BookScan has recorded. (Five years earlier, in 2005, the total was just 650 million.) The decline from the all-time high of 2009 can’t be overlooked, but it’s worth remembering—in 2010, in the middle of a crippling recession, with unemployment in the double digits, people still bought more than 750 million books. (In all likelihood, quite a few more, considering BookScan’s tendency to underestimate.) And that figure doesn’t include e-book sales, which are no thought to make up as much as 9 percent of the overall book market—and which are growing by the year, representing at least a partial antidote to declining hard-copy sales. So: despite the prognostications, and the poor economic circumstances, total U.S. book sales in 2010 remained well above a billion books. ¶Other statistics—literacy, library circulation, overall book production—paint a similarly reassuring picture. Here are some examples, with each statistic using the latest available figures.

In 2008, there were more original book titles published in print that ever before: 289,729 different titles in the U.S. alone.

In 2007, there were more U.S. publishers than ever before: 74,240 (that’s compared with 397 in 1925). This figure has been rising every year since the data began being collected.

In 2005, there were more published authors living in the U.S. than ever before: 185,275 (compared, for example, with eighty-two in 1850).

Adult literacy in the U.S. is also at an all-time high: 240,220,540 adults (98 percent of the adult population) were considered literate in 2010.

Library membership in the U.S. is at an all-time high: 208,904,000 Americans held library cards in 2009. (That’s 68 percent of the population, the greatest number since the American Library Association began keeping track in 1990.)

Library circulation is at an all-time high: 2.28 billion library materials were circulated in 2008 (that’s 7.7 circulations per capita) compared to 1.69 billion in 1999 (6.5 circulations per capita).

¶That’s all good news. So much good news that we hope you’ll feel armed with the numbers to combat the next lazy assumption that book, reading, novels, or literacy in general is dead. It isn’t, by any available measure. ¶Still, though, there persists the idea that Reading Is Dead, and this assumption requires a corollary assumption, which is that there was some other, Golden Age of Reading and Writing Somewhere in the Past. For those who lament the death of reading, there is never a clear sense of just when this Golden Age was, but the idea is always there—that we are a fallen society, and that some earlier era was when books were read in greater volume and with greater depth and enthusiasm. ¶So let’s consider this the Golden Age of Reading and Writing that every successive generation and age is measured against. When would such an era be? ¶Let’s start with Dante. Sure 1321, when The Divine Comedy was published, was a time wherein the majority of citizens were walking around piazzas, reciting Ovid and Sophocles and talking about Dante’s latest works? Not exactly. At that time, barely 10 percent of the Italian population could read. And given that Dante toiled at a time before the arrival of Gutenberg’s press, books were incredibly scarce, and prohibitively expensive. The average Italian citizen—even if literate—had virtually no access to books. In the Italy of the fourteenth century, and indeed across Europe, reading for pleasure was an activity enjoyed by precious few. ¶So maybe it wasn’t Dante’s era that was the presumed Golden Age. How about Shakespeare’s? People were coming to the Globe Theater to see his plays performed mere weeks after he’d written them! Surely this was the era that marked the pinnacle of literate society, from when our decline began. ¶But no. The statistics from his lifetime, 1564 to 1616, aren’t much better than those from Italy during the time of Dante. In Shakespeare’s era, the vast majority of the books and pamphlets that were printed, bought, and read were practical hexes and quasi-religious tracts. Shakespeare himself was not read widely, in part because by 1600, only 40 percent of the English population was literate (about 1,680,000 people). Books read and bought for pleasure were rare, and still expensive. As it had been for hundreds of years, the reading life was one for the very well-educated (and wealthy) few. For example, the first printing of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, in 1667, was a mere 1,300 copies, and it took two years for them all to sell. So while those years were a time of some monumental writing, it was not our Golden Age of Reading. ¶Let’s jump forward a century of so. Certainly the time of Jonathan Swift and William Blake was one of great and widespread literary awareness? Not exactly. In 1792, the most widely circulated newspaper in England, the Times, made it into the hands of a mere three thousand customers a day, about .04 percent of the population. By 1800, literacy in England had reached just 62 percent for a population of roughly 8 million (having risen only about 20 percent in the previous two hundred years). The most popular books were still religious texts, and most households were lucky to own a handful of books—and those were not likely literary in nature. ¶Back in the nascent United States, things were worse. At the time of the signing of the Constitution, in 1787, only about 60 percent of about 3 million American adults could read. And though Jefferson might have had a vast personal library, most citizens did not. Owning large numbers of books was still prohibitively expensive for most. ¶So let’s set aside the lifetimes of Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift and Jefferson. Their eras, remember, were without systems of public education, and thus literacy was not equally accessible to all. Given the tiny percentages of people who could not only read, but had the time and money to read literature, their times cannot provide our Golden Age. ¶Would the nineteenth and twentieth centuries qualify? These were the years when literacy rates in America exploded. In 1870, about 80 percent of 38.5 million Americans were literate. BY 1940, almost 95 percent of 131 million citizens could read. ¶But today, as we noted, more than 240 million American adults (aged fourteen years and older), of about 245 million altogether, are literate. ¶In 1950, 5,285,000 Americans aged twenty-five and over had attained a bachelor’s degree—about 6 percent of the twenty-five-and-older population. ¶In 2009, about 60 million Americans in that age group had one, making for a 29 percent share of the same population. So those more recent decades don’t eclipse our own time, either. ¶To state the obvious, there are more people in this country and on the planet than ever before, and that means that there are more potential readers. More widespread and democratic access to education here and around the world means that there are more literate people—over 3 billion, by the last calculation. And with book production at an all-time high, it follows that more people are reading than at any time in human history. So that’s good news.

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