“With Kindle, Can You Tell It’s Proust?” the New York Times asked, rather banally, last Friday (although at least that wasn’t as insipid as the alternative headline on the Times website: “Is a Book Still a Book on Kindle?”). The premise of Joanne Kaufman‘s article was that if people start buying books on Amazon.com electronic reading device, so we can’t immediately see what they’re reading or what they’ve read, “it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.” So various people who might be considered minor celebrities within the literary world (defined by breadth of recognition, not by significance) are invited to weigh in on the signficance of that, and the first to be quoted was former Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson, who claims that by buying a “really expensive” Kindle, “you’re giving a statement to the world that you like to read—and you’re probably not using it to read a mass market paperback.”
Oh, really? Assuming that “mass market paperback” could be considered roughly equivalent to “commercial fiction,” we decided to take a look at Amazon’s bestselling Kindle books, and here’s what we found in the top ten: Conservative talk radio pundit Mark Levin, all four Twilight novels, formerly self-published sensation The Shack, David Baldacci, Charlaine Harris, a free Cook’s Illustrated cookbook, and a Kindle guidebook for a penny.
Moving down the list, and further undermining Nelson’s off-the-cuff analysis, we spotted (among other things) relationship advice from stand-up comedian Steve Harvey, that wacky Jane Austen zombie mashup, thrillers by Lee Child and Harlan Coben, fantasies by Robin Hobb and Naomi Novik, and (at #18) Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers. Also, a book that probably made it to #11 because Glenn Beck endorsed it.
The first “literary” work of fiction doesn’t show up until #20, the Pulitzer-winning Olive Kitteridge, followed by A Reliable Wife at #23. The next “serious” (i.e., descriptive rather than prescriptive) nonfiction after Outliers isn’t until #29 (Columbine) and #31 (Three Cups of Tea). So we think it’s safe to say that the so-called “literary elite” aren’t even close to being a dominant force in the Kindle economy… or the Kindle culture. And it’s not just a Kindle thing: Look at the Fictionwise.com bestsellers and you’ll see e-book buyers snapping up The Lord of the Rings, the Twilight saga, and an assortment of romance and erotically-tinged fantasy.
In other words, the e-book market isn’t the intersection of “refined literary tastes” and “higher economic brackets,” and if you’re willing to spend the money to acquire a Kindle or any other electronic reading device, chances are you’ll be looking for a story that might well have been published as a mass market paperback (and, even when oversized, would be unabashedly commercial) if you’d gotten it in its printed form.
(Note: a previous draft of this post used a different Kindle Store list which, though including most of the same books, was determined to be a less reliable marker of bestseller status.)
ADDENDUM: In the comments, “ErinMarion” suggests that basing the counterargument to Nelson’s statement in the bestselling list for Kindle-based books is flawed, as “‘more thoughtful’ readers… aren’t necessarily all picking up the same books… So their purchases won’t be as concentrated, and won’t be exemplified by individual books ranking high on Amazon.” Yet the original statement, as quoted by the Times, clearly implied that the price of the Kindle was so “really expensive” that it was a barrier which only admitted passage to people who both “like to read” and were “probably not using it to read a mass market paperback.” (And, really, there’s a bundle of socioeconomic assumptions in there we haven’t even begun to unravel.)
If that were true—if Kindle owners were somehow more “literary” than the readership at large—the Kindle bestseller list would reflect such tastes, instead of so closely reflecting Amazon’s most popular print-based titles. That’s not to say fancy books don’t occasionally gain significant traction among Kindle owners: As we previously noted, the Pulitzer pushed Olivia Kitteridge up to #20; meanwhile, Jhumpa Lahiri‘s Unaccustomed Earth squeaks into the top 100. But these are by and large the same literary crossovers that are taking place among all readers, in all formats. As far as we can tell, there are no “literary” titles of which Kindle owners are enamored that print-bound readers have been overlooking, nor are Kindle owners scorning titles that are popular in print when those books are available on the Kindle.