8 Books

By Dave Bostwick

When I began planning my first online Open Educational Resource (OER) project in 2020, I made a few assumptions about books and my target audience of college students. Consider whether you agree with these three initial assumptions.

• Printed books are in decline.
• Students (and Americans in general) don’t want to buy physical books when they can find similar online information for free.
• As a whole, modern readers prefer the convenience of reading from a screen.

Current statistics about U.S. book consumption tell a much more complex story than my assumptions in the bullet points above. Since the pandemic, books sales have increased. Almost 800 million copies of printed books were sold in the United States in 2022, which was the second-highest sales figure since 2000, although sales decreased slightly in 2023.

Globally, the book market was valued at approximately $130 billion in 2023, and that number is projected to increase through 2030. Furthermore, a New York Times article reported that in the post-pandemic book market, “as the number of stores has grown, the book selling business — traditionally overwhelmingly white — has also become much more diverse.”

Customers aren’t just buying books through online sites such as Amazon.com. The U.S. bookstore chain Barnes and Noble, which relies heavily on bricks-and-mortar stores, in 2023 announced plans to open new locations.

Despite the proliferation of digital reading options, it seems unlikely that the fate of printed books will resemble the near extinction of the telegraph, silent movie reels, 8-track audiotapes, or, more recently, printed newspapers. Devoted print readers are passionate about turning paper pages and touching what they read, so they’ll keep buying physical books.

I’m still devoted to my OER work and happy that I can help students save $100 or more per course. However, I’m now more fully aware that not everyone prefers to read from a screen.

OPENING PERSPECTIVE ABOUT PRINT MEDIA

As has been noted in previous chapters, media history often repeats itself. Several centuries ago, the widespread adoption of the printing press forever changed the control and flow of information. The printing press gave writers and publishers the power to change the process by which ordinary people accessed information and entertainment, but it also led to criticism that information had become less reliable.

In a 2020 Atlantic article titled “Our Predictions About the Internet Are Probably Wrong,” Cullen Murphy wrote the following:

“When people can publish whatever they want, they do. The printing press made individual books more uniform and more numerous, but it also put the idea of universal truth up for grabs.”

We see a similar process playing out with online publishing. Some media critics argue that online books are generally less reliable (or even less truthful) than printed books. An online-only book can be published with minimal costs and no printing press involved, so in theory anyone can become an author.

One key takeaway: The history of the printing press suggests that the internet was not the first medium to spawn concerns about the reliability of information. Keep that perspective in mind as we study the evolution of print media in the next few chapters.

A BRIEF HISTORY LESSON

Next, a quick history lesson is in order. The following interactive timeline provides an overview of print technology.

Most historians consider the printing press as the beginning of mass media. SFBook, a books-focused website, credited the printing press with playing “a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation and the Scientific Revolution while at the same time spreading a means of learning to the masses and forming the basis for the modern knowledge-based economy we see today.”

However, one can also argue strongly that misinformation and disinformation in mass media began with the printing press, not with computers and social media.

In his book The Gutenberg Parenthesis, Jeff Jarvis gave this perspective:

In its youth, print was seen as less reliable than what we would now call rumor. With word-of-mouth, one could judge the source: the Courier who had just written in from Florence, whose word has been proven reliable before, and the Innkeeper and postmaster who pass on reports, mindful of maintaining their own reputations. Relationships were the wires that connected early, oral news networks. Print, on the other hand, was new and suspicious because its provenance was opaque; someone unseen had produced it.

Jarvis suggested that the situation is reversed today, as “print conveys authority while content and conversation on social media are regarded as unreliable rumor, and users there are viewed as naive and inexperienced speakers.”

For those who want a more in-depth chronicle of book history, an SFBook summary, titled “The Evolution of the Book,” begins with an explanation of symbols on tablets and advances through paper, printing presses, paperbacks and Amazon’s Kindle.

COPYCAT CONCERN

The history of books also gives us some historical perspective on the impact of popular media on audience behavior long before radio and television. Writing for the Society of Professional Journalists, Julie Scelfo described an early glimpse of a troubling copycat phenomenon that still concerns ethical journalists today.

More than two centuries ago in Europe, officials in multiple countries noticed a dreadful pattern: soon after local residents read a popular novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe featuring a protagonist who takes his own life, there was a spike in actual suicides.

This is more evidence that, in many ways, media history repeats itself.

STATISTICS ABOUT AMERICANS AND BOOKS

See how well you can answer the following flip-card questions about post-pandemic book-reading habits in the United States. The statistics on e-book reading and information about who doesn’t read books come from the Pew Research Center.

Click on Turn to see the answers, and use the forward button to advance through additional questions. 

Based on the statistics in the flip-card questions above, one general observation emerges: Some Americans avoid books altogether, but others read enough books each year to maintain a thriving book industry.

BOOKS AND LEARNING

The debate between printed books and e-books began around 2010, especially as educators began adopting digital textbooks to save money for their institutions or for their students. Here’s a light and brief infographic video to frame the debate.

As more college professors adopt digital sources for their courses, students rely less on books in their campus libraries. In an essay for The Atlantic, Dan Cohen wrote that “university libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves.”

At the University of Arkansas in 2018, for example, a library annex was deployed to store books that were previously held in the main library. A major reason cited for an annex system was that the use of printed materials had decreased by 68% in a 10-year span. The annex allowed more space on main floors of Mullins Library to be utilized for student study spaces and meetings.

On other college campuses across the country, similar debates have surfaced about the role of campus libraries.

On the other hand, a strong argument can be made that digital platforms and file types are transitory. Printed books are better sources for long-term documentation and archiving. A Pew Research Center study found that 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible a decade later.

TRICKLE-DOWN EFFECT

Books traditionally have a trickle-down effect to other media. One good example from the current century involves coverage of the steroid scandal in baseball. In 2006, Mark Fainaru-Wade and Lance Williams, who were reporters for The San Francisco Chronicle, published an investigative book titled Game of Shadows. Most Americans did not read the book but instead learned about the investigative reporting through summaries and excerpts in newspapers, magazines, cable news coverage (think ESPN) and on websites.

Another example is author Susan Patton, better known on popular media sites at the time as “Princeton Mom.” In 2013, Patton wrote a guest-contributor letter to the Daily Princetonian student newspaper advocating that many college women should focus on finding a husband before they graduate.

The letter sparked nationwide attention and led Patton to write a book titled Marry Smart. Promotions for her book included numerous television interviews, including some network talk shows such as the interview below with CBS.

The following list outlines instances of the trickle-down effect from books to other media platforms:

1. Magazines and newspapers (print and online) publish excerpts from books.
2. Newspapers and online sites publish reviews of books or stories about author appearances, such as book signings.
3. Authors appear on television and radio shows to discuss their work.
4. Movies are scripted and produced based on books.

For casual media consumers, examples for #4 abound. Here are just a few notable movies based on books.

• The Color Purple
• The Godfather
• Twilight
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• The Harry Potter series
• Gone With the Wind
• The Lord of the Rings
• Schindler’s List
• Forrest Gump
• Jurassic Park
• The Exorcist

Another fascinating example applicable to this list is the 2023 movie American Fiction, which was based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett. It’s a movie about an author whose novel is being made into a movie. If you are OK with edgy humor and a bit of profanity, you may enjoy watching the movie trailer for American Fiction.

DEFINING BOOKS

Are you reading a book right now? This Open Educational Resource (OER) text is organized in chapters like a traditional textbook, but it’s not printed on paper, and it includes videos and interactive elements.

I’d like to think my OER project fits the expanded concept of books in the digital age. However, this OER text is published through an online platform that may not exist a couple of decades from now when I want to explain my work to my grandchildren. A printed book still seems like a more dependable medium for long-term archiving.

Another question for the future is whether a book can exist primarily through sounds, such as an audiobook on Audible with no text equivalent beyond an automated script of the audio.

Our definition of books will no doubt evolve in future decades, but printed books seem likely to remain an impactful part of the American media landscape.

ADDITIONAL SOURCES

(from the OER text Understanding Media and Culture)

• History of Books
• Books and the Development of U.S. Popular Culture
• Major Book Formats