“The fact of the matter is that most people under 40 do not read very many books,” an anonymous editor complained to me earlier this week. And it’s true that earlier this month, industry pundit Albert Greco told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that adult Americans spend only 108 hours a year reading books, accounting for roughly 3 percent of the 3,530 hours they spend engaged with any and all media.
Still, Greco assured his interviewer, “the econometric indicators for the book business were stable,” and last week he revealed one of the reasons why. Greco informed a reporter for the Roanoke Times that teen book sales increased 23 percent from 1999 to 2005, and the market segment “will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.” A sidebar to that article offers further encouragement, as the American Library Association polled 1,200 teens and discovered “31 percent visit the public library more than 10 times a year, and 70 percent use their school library more than once a month.” And among those kids, “78 percent indicated they borrowed books or other materials for personal use; 60 percent said they did so from school libraries.”
Granted, this doesn’t necessarily prove anything about how much time teens actually spend reading those books, but we’ll take our optimism where we can find it for now. And then we’ll move on to a tentative question that admittedly doesn’t have an easy answer, and might not even be framed properly: What would make YA fiction so much more appealing to its intended audience than adult fiction is to its intended audience?
More importantly: If teen book sales are up, what can the publishing industry do to keep that momentum as those teens become adults?