BuzzMachine

A book is considered a best seller when it hits 1 million in sales. That’s about one third of one percent of the American population. Americans by and large are not a book reading culture.

Yesterday at Comic-Con I attended a panel on big fantasy books. Anna Groel of Bantam/Dell informed the audience that she was very nearly driven away from reading by a teacher who insisted she read Silas Marner. It was her parents’ approval of comicbooks and science fiction that kept her literary interests alive. I can understand the teacher’s wish to pass on a good book to a new generation, what I have problem with is her insistence that the book had to be read.

We’ve made certain books too important for their own good. Thus, instead of reading being something you do for pleasure, it’s come to be something you do because you must. The educational establishment does its absolute best at pushing kids away from books, all in the name of promoting literacy.

Later on in the panel the Lemony Snickets was mentioned as one of the book series for young children – those too old for picture books, but too young for Harry Potter. But what do teachers want kids that age to read? Happy Tree House. Described by one panelist as, “Dick and Jane for the 21st century.”

It comes down to this, instead of encouraging young people to read books like Silas Marner, they demand they read those books. And that is something your typical child is just not going to tolerate. (Needs rewrite, I’ll post that over at my blog.)

So tell me again why newspapers waste so many pages (usually advertising-free, incidentally) reviewing books???

Alan Kellogg:

You don’t have to sell anywhere near 1 million copies of a book for it to be a bestseller.

Bestsellerdom is best understood as an elastic term. It can be achieved by as few as 75,000 books (total) sold, or fewer. It is determined by a secret formula known only to the institution/publication that publishes a given bestseller list. It has to do with the rate of sales per X. (The X factor is the secret.)

Sadly, this means there are even fewer readers than you calculated.

Philip Roth once said he thought there are only 7,000 serious readers in America.

Jeff: what a great link!

I’m not so sure that these stats show the whole picture. Shool children seem very interested in reading books. Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl have done much to stimulate reading in this generation. At least, here in London, you will seem many kids with thier noses in books. My belief is that the book as a future.

Flip it and think about it:

“80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.” That means 20% did. The US population is approximately 300 million, call it 100 million families. So 20 million US families bought and/or read at least one book last year. And that doesn’t count those of us in more literate cultures around the world.

Also, how can the following stats both be true?

“One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. …
58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.”

Doesn’t “…never…after high school.” = “…for the rest of their lives.”?

So how is the number of people who never read a book after high school both 33% AND 58%? Someone’s seriously demonstrating their innumeracy. Call John Allen Paulos – oh wait! He’s a writer. He must have starved to death. And look up the Pareto principle while you’re at it.