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Comment by Causality1 | Hacker News Reader

If I was, I'd be writing books nobody buys because nobody buys books anymore

Sales of printed books have been increasing every year since 2012. Last year alone saw a jump of over eight percent.

Thanks for posting this comment, I searched for sources on this topic after reading it and was very surprised to see corroboration. Here’s a quote and few links for those interested:

In the US in 2019, a high % of adults reported reading a book recently

https://www.markinblog.com/book-sales-statistics/

…who is reading in the US?

In October of 2019, over 80% of adults, age 18 to 29, have read at least one book in the previous year. Older adults, possibly because they are not spending as much time studying and more time working, read slightly less.

Lockdowns may have increased reading in the US

https://publishingperspectives.com/2021/02/aap-statshot-sees...

Political polarization in the UK appears to drive book sales

https://www.theguardian.com/books/datablog/2017/mar/18/the-f...

(edit for formatting)

Books sales are sales of anything with an ISBN. This includes adult colouring books, which I’ve heard is responsible for possibly all the sales increases in the past few years.

Come on...

After a flurry of activity in the last decade, I haven't heard anyone mention adult coloring books even once in the past two or three years. As long as we're all baselessly speculating, I will baselessly speculate that they were just an ordinary fad. My own anecdote is that disillusionment with internet content and electronic consumption in general has caused me to buy and read more books recently than at any point in my life.

They are prominently in bookstores. They did not disappeared and people did not stopped buying them.

Just the hand wringing over them stopped.

I'm blaming self improvement books.

Did they count only paper books? I read on average one book each month, but all are digital.

Overall I agree with the idea, people for sure haven't stopped reading books. But I'm not that sure about the paper ones.

I don't believe average person actually reads a book a month. There might be outliers who read a lot or something. It likely counts in bought and never read books. But most adults will openly tell you they finished last book five years ago and attempted to read one last year.

Overall sales might be up but are those sales making the head fatter, the tail fatter, or the tail longer? For any individual writer without sales in the head, increased sales only matter if the tail gets fatter. They don't individually make any more money if it gets longer (more books by more writers).

As long as the writers are making enough money to produce their best output, the ideal situation is as long a tail as possible. The greater the variety of author, the greater the variety of books.

But that's the core issue. A long tail is good for Amazon and theoretically good for readers. It's not really helpful for writers. Any in the long tail are unlikely to ever pay back an advance and actually make money off sales let alone be making enough to produce their best output.

So total unit sales being up doesn't necessarily counter that statement "no one reads books anymore". Unit sales being "up" has a lot of qualifiers.

It looks to me like the author was making a joke.

Agreed. I read it like the classic "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."

Same. Text can sometimes be hard. That text is fairly lucid. The tone and humor stand out fairly well. Like the author said: competent.

...which means a percentage of us will take it differently than intended.

I agree, I enjoyed the self-deprecating, comic tone of the article. I still appreciate the comment pointing out that large numbers of people apparently still read books. I was surprised to learn that!

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