The Death of Books
About 15% of my collection of beer titles.
Writing and selling books has been a dicey affair for a long time. If you go all the way back to the mid-20th century, to the radio age, perhaps things were different. At least since the internet arrived, however, it has been a major crapshoot. Publishers developed a movie-studio approach: spending big on titles they thought would be blockbusters, hoping that one would be a rainmaker sufficient to fund the rest of the company. Most books were flops, but so long as a winner came along every now and again, the ledgers balanced. It was a rickety system, but it worked.
That delicate balance is changing, and freelance writer Elle Griffin has a Substack article rich with the gory details. I’m going to look closely at her findings, which came out in an industry-wide lawsuit from 2022, but first I want to place them in a larger context. People are reading fewer books than they have in decades, and I would argue that the book as a medium in our smart phone era is about to become a very niche communication. Books will still exist, but they will be a medium consumed by only a small number of readers. Books, once the default medium for storing human knowledge, are becoming obsolete.
The end times have already begun. People often focus on the supply, which is actually up in recent years. Covid offered a moment not just for more reading time, but writing, and we’re seeing that in the boosted numbers of new titles. The hearty supply of new books is an artifact of how lowered barriers have made it easier to put books into print though, not a demand for new books. If you look to the revenue side, it’s bleak. The overall revenue for all books sold in 2004 was a robust $23.72 billion—$40 billion in 2023 dollars. In 2023, the entire industry generated just $12.6 billion. Which is to say, in inflation-adjusted dollars, the book industry has lost more than two-thirds of its value in twenty years.
Let’s turn to Elle’s report for a forensic description of the pathologies dooming the industry. Her post was based on the 2022 (successful) antitrust trial to prevent Penguin Random House from acquiring Simon and Schuster. “During the trial,” Elle wrote, “the head of every major publishing house and literary agency got up on the stand to speak about the publishing industry and give numbers, giving us an eye-opening account of the industry from the inside.”
The findings, as she reports, include these nuggets:
Of all the books published each year, only fifty sell more than 500,000 copies.
“The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies.”
Authors receive advances of $250,000 or more in just 1-2% of books published, and that accounts for 70% of the money they pay writers. Of these, 85% lose money.
Three-quarters of the advance money goes to celebrities or famous people like politicians (the Obamas’ books sell so well they have to be removed from the data set to avoid skewing it too much).
Except in exceptional cases, publishers don’t expect a book to sell more than 75,000 copies, which they consider top-tier performers.
A lot of publishers’ money is earned on backlist titles, some that may have been around forever. Children’s titles, the Bible, books like lord of the Rings.
Elle adds this note, which functions as a summary of the situation: “In 2020, only 268 titles sold more than 100,000 copies, and 96 percent of books sold less than 1,000 copies.”
To summarize: nearly every book published in the US today is a flop, a substantial chunk of the industry’s money comes from old titles, and the only people making any money writing books are celebrities. If you’re a working writer, it might make sense to write a book if the advance is large enough to justify the year’s work, and if that book offers some downstream benefits to your career, like consulting or speaking.
Do We Need Books Anymore?
People have been telling stories as long as they’ve had the speech to do so, but the narrative form has never been stable. Poetry and opera, to take two examples, were once popular and important forms. Both still exist, but almost no one reads poems or goes to opera performances. Poetry, to take a written form, was for millennia the written medium. It was high art, low art, closely connected to music, seemingly the indivisible essence of language. Now fewer than ten percent of people have read a poem in the past year. People who read a book look healthy by comparison at nearly half (same link), but reading is down 8% in a decade, and the benchmark “read any book,” could hardly be lower. Read a Dr Seuss to the kids, a cookbook, or a book on training your dog? You’re a reader.
Poetry didn’t just start dying in the 21st century. Its status changed irrevocably during the Renaissance, with the rise of the novel. In those days there wasn’t a great difference between fiction and nonfiction—Shakespeare is the quintessential writer of the time—but people were drawn to the spectacle of the novel, its grandeur and scope. Of course, it was considered lowbrow at the time—I mean, just sentences, no meter or rhyme? A monkey could compose this stuff. Eventually it pushed poetry to the margins as it became the default medium. This has been the way of things as new technologies arrived (the printing press was key in the novel’s success), and fashions and trends changed. Old art forms mostly don’t vanish, but they become attenuated, twee pursuits of the weird, nerdy, or wealthy.
A couple hundred years ago, books took on a new status, as repositories of knowledge for an increasingly educated population. (Novels followed a different track and I’ll leave them aside for now.) Short-form pieces were disposable. People might clip an article from a newspaper or magazine, but their function was more like dialogue, temporary and passing. Books were more serious matters, and in them we found the kind of information that was meant to persist. We catalogued human knowledge book by book, and saved it in libraries. It was a bother to retrieve the knowledge, but it was there if we ever cared to.
I don’t think we’ve appreciated how profoundly the internet has changed that calculus. Human knowledge has moved online, and thanks to the little pocket computers we carry around, we can access it in seconds. Wikipedia now contains enough information that when you, say travel to Budapest, you can adequately get up to snuff on Hungarian history in a half hour’s time. Names, dates, and events are all catalogued for our consultation. Some scholarly and technical information still requires a library, but this is a tiny fraction of the world’s information. Almost anything we need is online.
Finally, and this is the biggest reason books are going to go the way of poetry, is that we’ve rewired our brains so that the experience of long-form reading is no longer pleasurable. Books, fiction and non-, require sustained attention and an appreciation of the slow boil. If you look at your own reading habits and are a typical reader, I’ll bet you relate to my experience. I read far fewer books than I did a decade ago, almost no fiction (I’ve switched to audiobooks), and when I read a book, my mind immediately wants to start scanning. I’m looking for the essence of the information, the nut of the argument. I can settle into reading the deliberative structure of a book, but it takes effort. And I would describe myself as a huge reader—I mean, I write books.
If we’re being brutally honest, we don’t really need books any more than 17th century readers needed poetry. Some percentage of people will continue to read them and enjoy them. It will still be important to create book-length arguments or put serious research in between the covers of a book. But the vast, vast majority of the books written every year are inessential. They exist to amuse, entertain, or reward the reader. If the readers have gone, the book has no function. That process is already underway, and Elle Griffin’s article captures all the ways it is playing out now. In twenty more years, books will still be around, but people will read them infrequently. They were once an important, an essential, form of information. They no longer are, and as a consequence, they’re slowly fading away.
As a postscript, I’ll add that this hits very close to home for me. I love writing books. I think it’s the one thing in life I’m really good at. And by the standards of the moment, I’ve been a successful book-writer. Only one of my titles has flopped in the way most books do (Cider Made Simple), and one of them is in the top 1% (The Beer Bible).
Do people actually need the books I’ve written, though? I believe the information in them is more complete and more accurate than what they’ll find online—but still, they can find most of it in seconds on their phone. As a writer, I think about projects that would fill gaps Google can’t reach, and there aren’t many.
What I didn’t appreciate when I started doing this full-time is that I could succeed as a book-writer while failing to make a living at it. Writers entering the field, beware.