Jim Baen's Universe

Notes From the Buffer Zone

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The Future of Reading

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

God bless Dave Eggers.

Dave Eggers, who wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Dave Eggers, who founded McSweeney’s http://www.mcsweeneys.net/, the influential literary magazine. Dave Eggers, who founded 826 Valencia http://www.826national.org, a nonprofit center originally founded to teach literacy and the love of books to young people in San Francisco and which has since expanded to six other cities. Dave Eggers, who has done all those things and more, has written an essay for the October Esquire on the future of reading.

And finally, finally, I feel vindicated.

Because Dave Eggers, unlike so many other great literary figures of their generation (as Esquire calls Eggers) does not engage in fear mongering.

Dave Eggers engages in statistics.

Dave Eggers points out the fallacies of the studies by pointing to facts.

Like this one: Since 2002, juvenile book sales have shown compound annual growth of 4.6 percent for hardcover books and 2.1 percent for paperbacks.

He also debunks fake facts.

Like this one, which has been a thorn in my side for a year now: The National Endowment for the Arts released a study that claimed young people are reading fewer books than they did a generation before. As I wrote to half a dozen terrified professional writers’ listserves at the time, the NEA study’s methodology is flawed. If you look in the bowels of the report, you'll find that the sample was limited: it came from a follow-up Census Bureau report that queried only a few thousand people in one section of the country. The conclusions in the NEA report were clearly done by a non-statistician. Yet news organizations ran with it, and scared entire groups of writers. (Oh, no! No one will buy my books five years from now!)

Of that study, Eggers writes, “Now, thankfully, the study is taken with a grain of salt.”

Eggers deals with the growth of the internet (which has provided more things to read (like, um, this magazine) and the gaming industry (many of whose fans get introduced to reading by reading game tie-ins) and on, and on, and on.

Go look up the article. You can find it here http://www.esquire.com/features/75-most-influential/dave_-eggers-1008?click=main_sr/.

What makes me so happy about it?

Sometimes I feel like a person whistling in a wind storm. For some reason, everyone who reads wants to believe that the younger generation isn't reading enough or isn't reading at all when the statistics prove otherwise.

I have been arguing for decades, literally for decades, using facts and figures to back up my words, that the number of readers of all ages has grown. But the largest growth, especially in the last ten years, has been among young readers.

J.K. Rowling herself has disproved all of the negative talk just by writing the Harry Potter books. Kids not only read Harry Potter, they live Harry Potter. Remember all those midnight parties? They were for a book launch. And they were filled with children. Excited, interested children.

Study after study, done with proper methodology, has found that once a child finds a book to love that child will read for the rest of her life.

And here's the fun stuff for the sf/f genre. The biggest selling YA titles are fantasy. Harry Potter, of course. Lemony Snicket. The Phillip Pullman books.

Cory Doctorow, another big fan of statistics, pointed out in a recent Locus column    http://www.locusmag.com that science fiction (not fantasy) has a greater audience in the YA category than it does in the adult category. Single titles of YA sf books sell more copies than single titles of adult science fiction books.

What does that mean for the sf genre? Well, Cory believes it means that sf has found its niche again. That sf's ideal reader was always twelve and we've only returned to that now.

Well, yes, I suppose that's right.

But what it really means is that we sf readers are going to experience a boom in the number of sf titles published in the young adult and the adult category in about ten to fifteen years. We will hit a new golden age of science fiction. We're going to have so much to read that we won't be able to look at it all, let alone read it all.

Why am I so certain of that?

Because I've seen it before.

Back when I was editing The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, I wrote a series of editorials on reading. One of those was on R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series. My tenure at F&SF overlapped the R.L. Stine phenomenon.

Here's an excerpt from my August, 1995 editorial (which you can find in full on my website http://kriswrites.com/2008/10/12/august-1995):

"According to Publisher's Weekly, the Goosebumps series (which is aimed at the 9-12 year old age group) accounted for 13 of the 15 paperback front list spots on the children's bestseller lists in 1994. (It also accounted for 13 of the 15 paperback backlist spots.) Since the series debuted in 1993, it has sold 13,880,000 copies (or over 500,000 copies per novel). Children are reading. Goosebumps appeals to both boys and girls in the target age group, and for older children, Stine has another series called Fear Street. It's not quite the same phenomenon—only 4 million copies sold to date—but the numbers are impressive enough to make R.L.Stine the hottest writer in America today. He's hotter than John Grisham, Stephen King, and Danielle Steele."

Because my real job as a science fiction writer is to study trends and how these trends will have an impact on the future, I predicted what would happen to R.L. Stine's readers. Most of them were 10-12 years old. I figured that when they became college students, they wouldn't have time to read for pleasure. But they would continue going to the movies. So around the year 2000 or so, horror movies would become big business among the coveted 18-25 year old viewing set.

And if you'll notice, more horror movies have appeared in the last eight years than nearly the entire decade before that. Just this year alone, over two dozen horror movies have appeared according to the Internet Movie Data Base, and those were the ones I could track down.

I understood the pattern. It has proven me right. Once those 10-to-12-year-olds from 1994 became responsible adults (out of college, with a job and at least one child) they'll start reading again. Why? Because going to the movies is too expensive. Compared to two ten dollar tickets plus snacks and gas and babysitting fees (what one friend of mine calls the $100 married couple date), a book with a $7.99 cover price for days of entertainment seems like an incredible bargain.

The person who was 10 in 1993 is 25 now, working a job, no longer doing, homework for school, so she has some time to read for pleasure again.

And sure enough, the horror novel has returned. It's still growing, but last year was the first year that Borders separated books into a horror section again. New horror writers, like Joe Hill, have appeared on the bestseller list.

That trend will only continue. Because a large group of leisure readers will spend their book-buying dollars on one of their favorite genres—the one that got them reading in the first place. Horror.

Thank you, R.L. Stine.

J.K. Rowling will have the same effect on generations of readers. Right now, young readers are discovering long-time fantasy favorites from C.S. Lewis to Tolkien, while exploring the newer books in both the adult and young adult parts of the genre. Adults who read the Harry Potter books aloud to their child remembered how much they once loved fantasy novels and are returning to the fantasy aisle of the bookstore.

This trend will only continue, replicating the R.L. Stine phenomenon in movies and adult book titles.

Science fiction is the next boom. It won't be as great as fantasy or even as the horror boom of the mid-1990s because as of right now, no sf writer has hit the heights blazed by R.L. Stine and J.K. Rowling.

But we're only at the beginning of our phenomenon. And we have some candidates for upcoming superstardom, from Cory himself to Scott Westerfield, to name just two.

So—are kids reading? Of course they are, in greater numbers than ever before. And they're reading books. Actual, physical books, as well as downloading e-books and listening to audio books on their MP3 players. Kids aren't averse to reading online, so online markets will continue to grow.

But the books will remain. Because right now, no one has improved on the actual physical book. It's easily transportable. It's easy on the eyes. And it's pretty when it sits next to its buddies on your bookshelf. A nice little visual of accomplishment, a great reminder of the worlds you’ve visited and plan to visit again.

We as readers should stop complaining that kids aren't reading. They are.

We should notice.

We should applaud.

And we should support organizations like 826 Valencia which helps disadvantaged kids get their hands on books, learn how to write creatively, and get scholarships to college so that their enjoyment (and their reading) can continue.

So I mean it. God bless Dave Eggers. He has a bigger platform than I do. At the moment, Esquire has a bigger circulation than Baen's Universe. (And why is that? Have you failed to encourage your friends to subscribe?)

People listen to him because places like Esquire call him one of the towering literary figures of his generation. And, in all fairness, he is.

But he also works in tandem with people like Michael Chabon. You know, Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize winner author who said in August that one of the most meaningful awards he's ever won is the Hugo? You know. That Michael Chabon. The man who is doing more than anyone else to unite the mainstream of literature with our ghettoized genre.

Chabon co-founded the 826 Valencia scholarship program, which is going to get more and more young people to read. And getting some of them to read sf, even if it’s published by a Pulitzer Prize winner and shelved outside of the sf section.

What's the future of reading?

To say it's bright is an understatement.

It's spectacular.

And it will only get better from here.

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