I AM slowly recovering from a year without fiction. I had to bin my beloved novels to fit in all the text books and academic papers I had to consume over the past months of study.
It felt weird at first, not falling asleep at night with a page imprinted on my cheek. But I had little time to dwell on this. Brookfield, Huddleston, Mezirow et al beckoned. So it’s a big treat to re-acquaint myself with text I don’t have to reference or cite.
I don’t think, though, that my recent lack of fiction reading is solely responsible for the surprise drop in UK book sales, which fell for the first time in five years in 2018.
The UK publishing industry was hit by a surprise fall of £168 million (5.4%) in sales of physical books last year, ending a period of growth stretching back to at least 2014.
Sales fell from £3.11 billion in 2017 to £2.95bn last year, according to the latest figures from the Publishers Association, which released its annual yearbook last week. Meanwhile, audiobook sales surged 43% to £69m last year, with Amazon’s Audible service dominating sales. Are we all just getting too lazy to follow type on a page?
Stephen Lotinga, chief executive of the Publishers Association, said the rise in audiobooks was not the sole reason for the decline in print sales.
“One of the biggest changes has been the increase in audiobook sales,” he said. “There is some substitution away from print, audio has surged, but there was also always going to be a point where print sales couldn’t continue rising every year.”
However, he warned against proclaiming the beginning of the end for physical book sales in the same way the music industry has seen decline with the move from CD to streaming.
Sales of printed books still accounted for over 80% of the combined print and digital UK book market of £3.6bn last year.
Overall, the digital book market, which as well as audiobooks includes ebook sales and subscriptions to services such as Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, rose 4.6% to £653m. So reading’s not dead yet.
I admit I love the idea of ebooks; all those stories in a tiny space. But when you fall asleep mid-chapter, screens just don’t soak up the drool quite as well as paper.
I have just had a reflective glance over our book shelves. There are tomes dating back more than 30 years, many of them unopened since then. The space they take up is considerable; the dust they gather annoying. Should we not just pack them into boxes and march them off to a charity shop? Imagine the extra space, the air clear of dust particles.
Sorry, I’m afraid I just can’t take that emotional leap. These books are like old friends. You might not engage with them much, but you know they are there. They are a safety blanket in paper and ink. Inside the leaves of one of them is the image of our son’s first antenatal scan. I have no idea which book, and it’s probably long since faded to blank paper. But I know it’s there somewhere. Anyway – there’s something quite exciting about blank paper.
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