Worried that ebooks will be the death of paper books? Sales of Dan Brown’s latest, The Lost Symbol, don’t back that up. At first, it looked like more people bought the book for Kindle than in hardcover. But, reports the L.A.Times:
By the time the week was out, with more than 2 million copies sold in the U.S., Britain and Canada — breaking the publisher’s previous one-week record set by Bill Clinton with “My Life” — hardcover sales had easily eclipsed sales of the ebook. Of the 2 million copies sold, only 100,000, or 5%, were electronic versions.
Which means, of course, 95 out of every 100 people who bought The Lost Symbol bought it–yep, in hard copy. Don’t write out that obit for paper books just yet.
Celeste, if I were you, I wouldn’t get overly optimistic about the future of printed materials. I just checked the Amazon bestsellers list under Literature and Fiction, and 6 of the top 10 were Kindle editions. Also, though not involving fiction, Conde Nast just announced the closure of Gourmet magazine. E-books haven’t reached their full market penetration yet by a long shot. Readers of The Lost Symbol are probably of the downscale variety and can’t afford Kindles. Print will probably be around forever, but on a reduced scale by historical standards.
Paul, thanks for the comment. I’m not an optimist by any stretch–but I do think that the pessimists out there are getting overly alarmed: it’s certainly premature to be sounding the death knell for print publication. And yes, the future of print may be smaller by historical standards, but we don’t know that’s such a bad thing, either.
The printed book will never die. Period. Will it evolve? Of course.
And Paul, your comments lost all credibility when you referred to readers of The Lost Symbol as being “of the downscale variety.” Ouch. Reading is reading and it should be encouraged. This sort of high-horse-attitude does no one who loves books an service. It seems to say: We don’t just want you, the public, to read books…we insist that you read the Right books…you know, the books that we say are “upscale” enough.
Ouch.
And are you suggesting that we are set to regress to a time when having books is a matter of class? Will only those who can afford a Kindle be allowed access to books? As the president of a library’s board of trustees, that kinda makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up…
Though I use my Kindle more and more, especially for important doc on the go, I don’t believe I could ever NOT read print versions. Too much aesthetics involved in curling up with a good book. But I’ll not turn down the new and exciting reading technologies either.
Joshua, I don’t apologize for being an elitist snob as far as fiction is concerned. I’ve been around for 59 years, know what I like and dislike, and can provide reasons if asked (or sometimes when not asked). I wasn’t saying that upscale is categorically good – Kindle is a new product that hasn’t migrated downward to the affordability level of the sorts of people who buy blockbuster best sellers. I agree that reading should be encouraged, which is not to say that there aren’t millions of oafs out there who wouldn’t recognize a work of art if it fell on their heads.
Paul,
Have you ever wondered if the “oafs” aren’t recognizing the work of art you’d like them to recognize…because you’re, uumm, dropping it on their heads?
I mean, it’s wonderful to know what you like and dislike…but just because you know what YOU like does not somehow make another reader’s own likes less valid.
Let’s encourage reading. Period.
Let’s encourage reading over all the other mind-numbing things our, say, teenages might choose. Reading. Period. Don’t tell them they have to or should read a certain book or certain type of book. Shit, what teen would want to hear that?
I might not find Stephen King, or Charles Bukowski for that matter, to be the highest art of literature, but I would defend them both.
Hell, if I hadn’t read the Hardy Boys, I might never have read Ray Bradbury. And if I hadn’t read Bradbury, I might never have read Bukowski. And if I hadn’t read Bukowski, I might not of cared the day I discovered Raymond Carver when I was 17. And if I hadn’t read Carver, I might never have read Chekhov.
So, to back up: what if you’d wandered up to the 10 year old me, smacked the Hardy Boys out of my hand, and said, “Oh, don’t read that crap! It’s like Dan Brown for kids! Here, you must read Kipling! And you must read Lewis Carroll!”
Well, if you’d done that…maybe I never would have read Chekhov…and Chekhov, my friend, is untouchable…even by the most elite book-snob.
Joshua, you seem to be taking up a personal campaign to inspire young people to enjoy reading. I don’t object to that. I simply draw qualitative distinctions between different works of fiction. Reading and fully appreciating a Batman comic, which I used to do, is a less significant experience than reading and fully appreciating, say, Wuthering Heights, which I did much later. The fact that I read the Batman comic first is immaterial. As best as I can determine, books such as The Lost Symbol encourage a kind of puerile fantasizing that may not be all that different from video games, both being elements of the thought control program disseminated by corporations to numb our critical thinking so that we’ll buy more products that we don’t need and vote for candidates like George W. Bush. It’s really quite sad that someone’s life would be reduced to drawing what little satisfaction it finds from reading a book like that. I certainly hope that the users of this site intend to produce better work than Dan Brown.
By the way, I think Bukowski stinks too.
But Paul,
I Don’t think Bukowski “stinks”! I think Bukowski arrived in my life when I was 17 and filled a much-needed gap in my reading life. He was the gateway to so much more! I never would have read Knut Hamson’s Hunger, or Pan, or The Growth of the Soil. I may never have read William Sarayon. Or Fante’s Ask the Dust (which is his best!)
So, while I can see what Bukowski lacks now…I would never say he “stinks.” No way. You know, just this summer I gave Factotum to a young painter who was sharing my studio with me. He barely reads. 24 yr old, I think. But he gobbled up 3 Bukowski this summer. AND THEN I gave him In Patagonia and some MFK Fisher because he said he was interested in some travel writing…and he’s loved those, too…but he would never have started with those…the Bukowski was like training for him to build up his reading muscle!
I, for one, have read every single Dan Brown book. Have you? I read them so I would be able to speak about them specifically, not generally. I wanted to know for myself. I also had a few flights to London…
On the other end of your literary scale, I also suffered through Franzen’s Corrections because I wanted to know for myself…though I wanted to put that mean, mean book down so many times…
I also think, when you mention something like reading Batman, that reading is not just about the book…but also about what the reader brings to the book. I mean, it would be hard to argue that someone like Chip Kidd doesn’t bring a pretty sophisticated reading style to Batman…
I guess what I’m saying is that everyone’s version of a “significant experiance” is different. Let’s honor that… At least in terms of reading. I mean, if someone is holding a Fern Michaels paperback, my thought is: well, at least they have a book and not a McDonald’s hamburger in their hand…
Well, I’m probably getting old, like Gore Vidal, who doesn’t read new fiction unless he’s paid to review it. Since I’m not entertaining a career as a reviewer, the exercise of spending time reading things that I have a high probability of finding uninteresting seems pointless. The principle that one ought to be open-minded and that people could be writing marvelous things that I should experience firsthand begins to appear a bit naive after one has been doing it for a few years, particularly in the unhappy commercial environment that is the United States.
I still have all my old DC comic books from the late 50’s and early 60’s and enjoy looking at them occasionally, though they’re beginning to crumble.
…and I have a row of several dozen Hardy Boys books on my book case…and I cherish them…and that my 7 year old little girl started collecting Nancy Drew books this summer…she’s up to five already!