I Am Greying Woman, See Me Read
The other day, the National Post published an essay written by Canadian author Katherine Govier. I’ve never read any of Ms. Govier’s work—they don’t “fit” my personal preferences—but, in checking her out, it’s clear she is a very highly respected writer.
Anyway, the gist of her piece is that older women are readers with a vengeance.  She talks about speaking to a book brunch filled with row upon row of mostly post-45-year-old women who are, not to put too fine a point on it, rather ordinary, what most would call unexciting. Ms. Govier is not being derogatory with these comments, just honest. She goes on to say that these are the people who love books, who read constantly and can recite the backlists of their favorite authors much the way sports fans spout statistics, who buy books for everybody they know. Perhaps most importantly, they love the camaraderie that comes from books.
Ms. Govier tells us, quite eloquently, what those of us in the book industry have seen for years. Yes, the reading population has been getting older, much like the boomer generation. We used to see it in the store and especially in our book clubs which are consistently, shall we say, older than spring chickens. This does not, though, mean we’re seeing the end of books, far from it.
We always had a healthy bunch of younger readers, in their early childhoods through their twenties, slacking off a bit in the thirties and then picking up again later. This makes perfect sense to me as the thirties are when folks are most likely focused on raising young families and probably read a great deal to the babies and toddlers but don’t have much time for personal reading. The advent of the Kindle, the first of the really significant ereaders, had not made much of a difference in our traffic by the time we closed and had little or nothing to do with our demise (damn the lousy economy) and the Nook and iPad weren’t out yet.
Keeping my ear to the ground, I feel sure that many more younger folks are reading than the pundits would have us believe but the METHOD has changed, largely because of the economy. One of the nails in our coffin was the number of people who stopped buying our books—they’d do their “research” on our shelves and then head for the used book stores and libraries (many of them used to actually tell us this, a piece of information I’d just as soon not know). In addition, many readers have moved to ebooks because, although the readers are pricey, the books themselves are frequently downright cheap.  So much attention is on ebooks these days that I think publishers are losing sight of what needs to be done in the print market.
I’d like to see publishers restrict large print runs of hardcovers to those they believe will be true blockbusters and have only limited runs for others, enough to cover the collectible market. Trade paperback or mass market editions should be published simultaneously with those limited print run hardcovers. Prices on trade paperbacks should be in the $12 to $17.00 range and the $9.99 premium mass market needs to just go away entirely, leaving mass markets at $6.50 to $7.99. The whole system of returns needs to change but that can’t happen overnight and industry muckety-mucks should stop TALKING about it and actually form a task force to figure out how to do it without crushing bookstores. Among other things, that means they have to stop printing prices on the books and embedding them in the coding and they have to arrive at a fair time frame to allow book stores to return all the books currently on the shelves and replace them with new editions in a no-return system at low net prices rather than discounted off of retail. The wholesalers need to agree to this also and do away with the current restrictions and penalties on returns. Nothing, though, can begin until people who can make things happen actually start the process.
All of this would help put the print market on a much more level playing field with ebooks and we would all have so many more affordable choices in how we want to read. There is room for all of us, ebook sellers and brick & mortar and online print book sellers, if we as an industry can just get off our duffs and make it happen.
See Ms. Govier‘s article here:
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2010/05/19/katherine-govier-in-praise-of-older-women/
May 22, 2010
Posted in: Tales of a Bookseller
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