The Mark 2010

Newspapers might be doomed, but books will likely go on. For today's youth, video games and iPods are no replacement for the paperbound book.

As hundreds of newspapers worldwide print fewer pages, print less frequently or even stop printing entirely, the question is being posed: “Is this the death of print?”

It might be for many newspapers: their business model is profoundly troubled and although the current financial crisis is exacerbating their difficulties the reality is that the recession merely accelerated a trend that has been apparent for decades. Fewer people read newspapers, fewer advertisers support them, and the cost of chopping down a tree, grinding it up, putting ink on it and then hurling it at your front door by 6 a.m. is quite a bit higher than $0.50 per day.

But not all trees are doomed to grow up to be newspapers.

The book publishing industry is doing comparatively well. As of most recent data, book sales are up 3.6 per cent, and although profitability isn’t at an all-time high, leading industry operating profit margins of 14 per cent are better than many sectors in the S&P500 – and streets ahead of the newspaper average. The fact that the book industry has not chased the “advertiser-supported" chimera is a big part of that story – for newspapers in Canada only 17 per cent of revenues come from subscribers.

While the average per copy price of a newspaper hasn’t budged in 20 years, the average price of a book (hardcover and softcover) has more than doubled in the same period. The best testimony for the current success of the book industry is that consumers have actually tolerated price increases a rate greater than inflation!

Last year Deloitte conducted its third Media Democracy survey in the U.S. and the U.K. (there's no Canadian data yet, but I suspect the trends apply here as well). The result of a rigorously conducted survey of 2,000 participants, the data is encouraging for fans of the printed page.

Reading books was the second most popular activity among all U.K. respondents, slightly ahead of listening to music or using the internet. And it was the fourth biggest when measured by hours, with roughly four hours per week devoted to reading books in both the U.S. and the U.K (and that only includes print, not eBooks from Sony or Amazon). That may change one day, but according to the Deloitte survey we are still reading books on paper, rather than electronically (4.2 hours per week versus 0.3).

What of the future though? Surely the next generation of readers is composed of a mob of semi-literate, instant-messaging, attention-deficit video game junkies? The kids who are growing up communicating by 140-character tweets cannot possibly be a viable market for novels. Oddly enough, the actual data on the youth of today indicates that the future of books may be even brighter than the present.

Not surprisingly, the youngest demographic we surveyed (14 to 19) are big fans of the internet, watching TV and listening to music. But reading paper books was a strong contender and finished ahead of listening to the radio or watching movies on DVDs! And the 20- to 25-year-old demographic reads books at more or less the rates of all the older cohorts.

But to me the most fascinating story isn’t that kids are reading – it is what they are reading. It is legitimate to worry about the attention span of young people today: the average shot length in the average American movie is down from 22.5 seconds in 1969 to under 4 seconds in 2009; and Deloitte data shows that more than a third of younger viewers are emailing, texting or surfing online while ostensibly “watching” TV.

Yet the data on youth publishing shows no sign of ADD. Where teen books like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew averaged 50,000 words and less than 200 pages, the current tween publishing leaders are the Harry Potter and Twilight series of books. The last four Harry Potter volumes averaged 750 pages and 200,000 words, and Stephanie Meyer’s vampire tetralogy is running at over 600 pages and 150,000 words per book. My 13-year-old daughter has read more words in the Twilight series than are found in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

I have a theory about why youth reading habits are trending in the opposite direction to their other media consumption patterns – and it is not in spite of video games and iPods, but because of them.

We have all had the experience of reading a favourite novel and being fully engrossed in the author’s created world. Yet when it is made into a movie, projected onto an IMAX screen 60 feet high and played at 110 decibels of Dolby Surround Sound it seems so much less detailed and rich and immersive than the book did.

The truth is that there is no medium that can match the human brain’s capacity to flesh out a well-crafted novel. And a generation of teenagers who have grown up with increasingly-realistic virtual worlds and computer games, who listen to music on buds inside the ear canal instead of boomboxes or Walkman headphones, is a generation that is inclined to equally immersive and internally focused novels.

If we extrapolate the current trend in kids’ books toward increasingly large doorstop-sized tomes, perhaps the biggest driver for e-book adoption will be teenagers’ inability to hold the two-kilogram paper copy at arm’s length. Either that or they will all start developing extra large triceps …