Anonymous Patron writes “AP Story With a struggling economy and competition for time from other media, 23 million fewer books were sold last year than in 2002, according to a report issued Wednesday by the Book Industry Study Group, a non-for-profit research organisation.
Sales fell to 2.222 billion books, down from 2.245 billion in 2002.
The decline was in both hardcovers and paperbacks, in children’s books and general trade releases.
Even sales of religious titles, often cited as a growing part of the publishing industry, were flat.”
hmmm… one for Tim Coates…
So this must mean that US bookshops will be defunct by 2020
(One for the UK folk…)
Not a big drop
The “big” drop comes out to just over 1%
Books Defunct?
I don’t know where they get their information. Book dealers such as Border, Barnes and Noble, and online dealers such as Amazon seem to be doing well. The Jewish religious publishing industry is booming. I am sure that Christian religious publishing is growing as well. We should only hope that the written word doesn’t die. As Attorney Cogley said when he defended Capt. Kirk, the real law is in books not in the console. Remember he won the case and showed the flaws in the computer. I wonder if this report is an attempt to sell more computers and make society believe that point and click is the only way to gain knowledge.
Re:Books Defunct?
Good grief. The Book Industry Study Group is funded by booksellers and publishers: They’re not precisely out to get rid of their support!
I mean, conspiracy theories are fine, but this is really over the top. (But I suppose “seem to be doing fine” does mean more than actual industry numbers.)
As already pointed out, it’s a numbers dip of 1%, in 2003, generally a depressed year. It’s meaningless in any overall scheme of things. And it’s 2.2 BILLION books in the U.S.–9 books per adult, in a nation where we’re constantly told that almost nobody reads books any more.
Re:Books Defunct?
Nobody DOES read. We are buying most of these I’ll bet. Unless they are about makeingmoneyfast.com or the liberalmediaisevil.com nobody cares.