OCTOBER 13 2018 LISTENER 15
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ut not as many as we used to. In
2012, Kiwis spent $142 million
on books. Since then, spending
has hovered around the $
million mark. Nielsen data from last
year showing we spent $122 million
probably reflects an increase in the
number of retailers providing data.
We tend to buy non-fiction titles,
mostly biographies, autobiographies
and cookbooks, making up 47% of
sales. Children’s books account for
another 29%, and fiction 24%, topped
by crime novels, thrillers and adventure
stories. Although poetry print runs tend
to hover near the 500 mark, in the past
year, a surprising 30% of us read poetry
books.
We have stuck with, or returned to,
physical books. According to Nielsen,
80% of New Zealanders read only
hardcopy books and just 5% read
only e-books. Readers, says Publishers
Association president Peter Dowling, are
returning to print, “and publishers are
responding by producing better-crafted
books”. New Zealand fiction is still “a
bit of a challenge”, he says, but books
for children and young adults are in
good health, audiobooks are staging a
comeback and bilingual books are flying
out the door – Auckland University
Press’ first fully te reo Māori book He
Kupu Tuku Iho, by Tīmoti Kāretu and
Wharehuia Milroy, sold out in a fort-
night and has since been republished.
The pressure put on printed books
and bookshops from the early 2010s by
“digital disruption” and easy access toWe buy books ...
overseas suppliers has abated. Between
2009 and 2015, the number of inde-
pendent bookstores in the US jumped
35%. In May this year, the Association
of American Publishers reported 1.3%
growth in book sales from 2016 to
2017, thanks, it says, to the stubborn
reading habits of baby boomers and
book-movie tie-ins such as Harry Potter
and The Hunger Games pulling in a
younger demographic. In New Zea-
land, bookshops have come and gone
over the past decade, but according to
Booksellers NZ, retailer numbers are
beginning to stabilise as old bookshops
pass into new hands and new shops
open (this year’s Bookshop of the Year
award went to Volume, a Nelson book-
shop in operation for only two years).
The Government plan to apply GST
to imports under $400, the so-called
“Amazon tax”, is also expected to stop
bookshops being used for tyre-kicking
by people who then go online to buy
their reading material (last year, only
about 60% of books were bought from a
brick-and-mortar bookstore).
Similarly, after several large multi-
national publishing houses pulled
operations back to Australia, a number
of new, small, independent publishers
and collaborative publishing enter-
prises have emerged. In last year’s New
Zealand Book Awards, all winners were
from independent publishers and uni-
versity presses. “We are a smaller, leaner
industry than we were,” says Dowling,
“but a sustainable one, which is seeing
some growth.”losing that.”
In Reader, Come Home, Wolf explains her
“digital chain hypothesis”, whereby how we
are being asked to read is influencing how
we read, how we read is influencing what we
read, what we read is now influencing what
is written and what publishers are asking of
their authors, namely, briefer text, less-dense
sentences and a more reduced syntactic load
on the reader. The ramifications of this are
serious. Writing in the Guardian, Wolf says
the subtle atrophy of critical analysis and
empathy “affects our ability to navigate a
constant bombardment of information. It
incentivises a retreat to the most familiar
silos of unchecked information, which
require and receive no analysis, leaving
us susceptible to false information and
demagoguery.”
And if people are skim, skim, skimming,
she tells the Listener, “and not going deeper
to understand the complexity of issues, they
will be far more attracted to false news or
worse. The US is suffering this. They will be
more susceptible to people who give false
promises and false fears. That is my worry as
a reading researcher and as a citizen.”
This view was backed up by neuroscientist
Susan Greenfield from Oxford University,
who reminds us that endless, unprocessed
information isn’t knowledge. “Of course,
you can be bombarded with endless infor-
mation, endless facts,” she told Australia’s
ABC, “but if you can’t make sense of them,
one fact is the same as any other fact. You
can cruise on YouTube or on Google going
‘yuck’ and ‘wow’, but you’re not actually
making sense of things.”
It is true in one sense that we are reading
like never before. Toddlers play with laptops,
children communicate on cellphones, teens
post Twitter and Facebook updates, adults
read e-books, emails and news feeds. In this
digital space, however, we read differently.
We skim, we scroll, we hover over flashing
ads, we click our way through rabbit holes
of hyperlinks, we make myriad decisions –
agree or don’t agree, like or don’t like, accept
Fiction is three times
more popular with
book groups than non-
fiction, but last year’s
most requested title
was Lance O’Sullivan’s
The Good Doctor.