Minority sport

Joel J. Miller points out that Serious Reading was Always a Minority Sport.* His thesis is basically that, after a period of mass book buying, we are reverting to the norm. After all, book reading has for most of history been a minority activity (governed by access to sufficient funds to participate). It was only briefly, he argues, that books became cheap enough for the mass of people to join in the frenzy and buy books for entertainment in their idle hours. Now that so many other options have been invented, time no longer needs filling, he suggests that the job of reading has reverted to the literati. He does quote some apparently worrying statistics. “In 1995, annual unit sales [of mass-market paperbacks] in the U.S. hit 532 million. But the wave has since crested and ebbed. By 2024, mass market sales were down to a fraction of that figure, just 21 million, a 96 percent drop.” This looks terrifying until we recognize that publishers were actively abandoning the mass-market…