> The demand for books in the US is also disproportionately driven by women. Surveys over at least the last couple decades have consistently found that American women are more likely to read books than American men, especially when it comes to fiction.
It's in the article, with citations. I just accepted that as a given, from my own anecdotal experience.
Women account for 80% of fiction sales in the US, UK, and Canada [0].
The stats mentioned show that women are more likely to read at least one book by 5% margin, but they buy many more books. The sales show how much more they buy.
This is not true at all. The empirical evidence shows the exact opposite: Americans tend to read far more than almost all other countries.
This "we Americans are a bunch of ignorant louts who don't read" narrative is a distressingly persistent misconception illustrating self-hating biases popular with certain segments of Americans. Fortunately, it is entirely false.
What does the data say?
* According to the chart on page 14 of [4], the US is ranked about #8 or #9 in the world (of 200+ countries) in terms of "books published per capita."
* The US "title production per capita," or "books published per 1 million inhabitants," is about 1,000 -- not the very highest in the entire world, but pretty high.[3]
* Over 25% of all books sold in the entire world are sold in the United States, which has about 4% of the world's population. [1]
* More books are published in the US than in any other country but China, which has about 4x the population of the US. [1][2]
* In 2016, the US was by far the largest book publishing market in the world by market value, larger even than China. [4]
There was an article a while back about how the driving demographic for the sales of the Kindle is women who do not want everyone to know that they're reading bodice-ripper romance novels.
More people report reading a book than you'd think. But the median books read per year is still too low for this to be a problem the author thinks it is.
Hypothesis: We have more books authored per capita today than then, suggesting a broadening of the types and training of authors.
"In 1907 there were 9,260 books published in the United States according to the New York State Library Bookboard. ...Compare that to 2010 when there were 316,480 books published by traditional publishing companies according to Bowker." [1]
Meanwhile the U.S. population has grown from 92,228,496 in 1910 to 308,745,538 in 2010. [2]
Calculate ratios. In 1910 there was a book published per every 9,959.0 Americans. In 2010, there was a book published per every 975.5 Americans. Ratio of ratios: 10.2x in 1910 individuals per book published.
I'm not going to bother with any stat test. There has been a magnitude of change during this span. We have more authors (or publications) per capita than before, likely reflecting a broadening of the socioeconomic and educational classes of the authors.
If this theory is true, one needs to take it up with women: In my country they are the majority of book buyers and yes, many of them would probably respond to the memoir angle.
Pretty aside (while not denigrating its value in videos), the book market has long been dominated (reading, writing, and publishing) by well-off white women.
Not always dominated, mind you, but when they took it over, they grabbed ahold of it with both hands.
On the contrary, edanm's premise is that the number of viewers cited in the parent comment was the number of viewers on the day of release, and the number of book sales mentioned was cumulative. If that premise holds, then probabilistically speaking it'd be very safe to say that more people have consumed the visual media than the literary media.
Thus my source perfectly illustrated the point I was making. 72% of adults are reading every year, and most are reading several books, this isn't some elitist niche.
The largest demographic of readers, who have the ability to make or break a book is middle class white women. If you can convince them to read your book, you have made it.
I think at least half of the top level comments didn't read the article, and mistook it for an article about reading habits. It's actually about the number of books that sell well, not the number of readers.
> Even on the high end, there were only 11 books that sold more than 500,000 copies—which is paltry when you consider that the 10 best-performing Netflix films saw more than 68 million views.
Reading a book takes far longer than watching a movie. Assuming ten hours for a book, that's 5 million "read hours" compared to 102 million "watch hours" (assuming 90 min) for the top movies. Plus, movies can be watched in the background or socially in a group. I'm not saying reading is not a niche - it probably is far smaller than it used to be -, but it's not as niche as this statement makes it out to be.
It's in the article, with citations. I just accepted that as a given, from my own anecdotal experience.
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