Providing Rich Reading For Time Poor Readers

How do we get people reading again or introduce them to reading?

We have to accept that reading is different in that it stimulates thinking and imagery that is often served up on a plate with other media. After all, you don’t have to imagine what someone looks like when they are stood as large as life in front of you on a screen.

We have seen many charity and government-backed initiatives and ones driven by the industry itself but the bottom line is that at best they are treading water and at worst losing the battle. We may all cheer from the battlements when books are donated and given away free to folk but if this is not succeeding we have to ask whether the focus and process is correct and what we have to do to really engage and make a difference.

The YouTube age is impacting not just the young but the older generations. We are becoming more and more visual and increasingly time poor. Giving someone a book is not addressing the problem and merely compounding it. We have to create the thirst and feed the habit not just give someone War and Peace and expect a convert. The studies don’t lie. The latest from the National Literacy Trust study of 34,910 young people, claimed nearly a third of children between eight and 16 say they read no text-based media at all in their daily leisure time and that the number of children who read outside school has fallen by 25% since 2005.

Many thought that children's reading was migrating from print to digital, but in reality their consumption of information is moving away from reading or writing text. Their attitude to reading have also become more negative over time. This was reflected in 21.5% of young people agreeing with the statement, "I would be embarrassed if my friends saw me read," up from 16.6% on the 2010 study.

In the US, The National Endowment for the Arts claim that only 46.9% of Americans interacted with art and literature in 2012 and that again reading is in decline. That’s down from 2008 (50.2%) and it’s down considerably from the 1992 survey (54.2%) and the 1982 survey (56.4%).

So let’s skip past the doom and gloom and look at ways to stimulate reading. Giving books away is probably not going to be the answer.

Should we focus on the children, the young adults or the older generations? Who are the social influencers and who are the responders? Do parents teach and influence their children or is it visa-versa? Can reading be combined with other activity such that it is less solitary in an increasingly virtual social world? Can the movement towards self-expression be harnessed to create a virtual circle of reading and writing?

There is no silver bullet or quick fix but we must understand what used to work and see if it can be reapplied to today.

We would point to that reading revolution and creative writing explosion of the second half of the 19^th century and early 20^th century. What captivated the masses many of whom had just learnt to read?

When we look at our daily lives many will relate to the time spent commuting to and from home. For many the newspaper is a vent to boredom, others it’s scrolling down the email and Facebook alerts that are fed to our smartphones and tablets. For others it’s being plugged in and switched on to their music. Then there are the gamers who apply fast dexterity over the keys of their smartphones whilst some animated character dives and ducks to save themselves from being zapped. The point is that commuters want to do something more than stare at the person opposite whilst contemplating some fantasy liaison with the good looking person two seats away. Giving them something that can’t be consumed in the journey is like offering them a five star gourmet meal and suggesting that what they can’t finish they can have cold tomorrow or can be put in a doggy bag for later. Time poor people will demand speedy service.

Poems on the London Underground was launched in 1986 and was the idea of American writer, Judith Chernaik, who wanted to bring poetry to a wider audience. Some 3,000 advertising spaces in train carriages displayed a diverse range of poetry including classical, contemporary, international and work by new poets, has been a great success. The service was geared to the audience. It is like a gentle thought for the day, a quiet moment of reflection, a digestible read for a brief journey. Some would say that poetry doesn’t engage but others would suggest when served alongside music, it works, and on the Tube it works especially well. Perhaps the way we bundle and package literature is the problem.

Then we have to look at the huge success of the short form writing competition today. Some will say that they just promote more slush and a feed a writing habit that goes nowhere. It’s true, printed short stories are not often top of the publisher’s agenda or the charts but that doesn’t mean they don’t work or there isn’t a latent demand for them. It just means that trade publishers still tend to publish 256 page volumes and short stories and poems have to be shoe-horned into collections.

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was the brilliant short story master, Alice Munro.

It’s no wonder we are working on bringing Read Petite to market!  

The History That Gives us Read Petite

The digital era allows us to revisit what once worked but became inefficient and uneconomical in the physical world. It is not a case of repeating the old ways but understanding how digital technology and network connectivity can redefine the process and make what once work , work again.

We are working on a new venture Read Petite which reintroduces and redefines short form for today’s time poor readers.

Humans love short-form reading.  The recorded history of the short story goes back to the likes of Homer and collections such as Aesop’s Fables. Much later came Chaucer, Boccaccio and the early translation of collections such as The Arabian Nights. Then came Sir Walter Scott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Brothers Grimm and Edgar Allen Poe whose definition of the form still stands: a narrative that can be read at one sitting.

The age of mass literacy ushered in even more opportunities for short-form reading.   The widespread popularity of periodicals created a vast appetite for short-form reading of all types, creating opportunities for the likes of Dickens, Hardy, Kipling, Wells and Conan Doyle in the UK and Melville, Washington and Henry James in the US. Russian writers such as Tolstoy and Turgenev rose to fame on the back of the short story, and their fellow compatriot Chekov is widely credited as defining its structure for others to follow.

Today's publishers would be envious of the commercial successes of many of these pioneers of the form.  For example, in 1837, Dickens was selling some 50,000 copies of his Pickwick periodicals at a shilling a time.  By the time that Great Expectations was published in installments in 1861, he was selling 100,000 units a week.   Interestingly, installment-publishing didn’t cannibalise sales of the complete single-volume book - in fact, serialisation fuelled interest in the full-length work.

In the early 20^th century, periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Scribner’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire and The Bookman in the US and  The Strand, The Sketch, Harper’s and Story-Teller in the UK continued to feed an apparently-insatiable market.  Many of today's "classic" authors were given their first platform and public recognition through short-form writing, including Somerset Maugham, Saki, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton and Agatha Christie. In the US, writers such as F Scott Fitzgerald, Parker, Hemmingway and Faulkner often earned high fees for their short stories.  In the 1920s, the Evening Post was paying Fitzgerald $4,000 for a single story, (the equivalent of $80K today).

The market broadened still further with the rise of mass-market weeklies and monthlies.  For example, in the UK, weekly magazines such as Woman, Woman’s Own and Women’s Weekly started to dominate the short-form market.  "Name" authors gave way to genre fiction, literary to mass-market. 

The Fall and Rise of Short-Form

In the latter half of the 20^th century short-form writing took a tumble.  Outlets for short fiction atrophied: for example, IPC Media who dominate the UK woman's magazine market have seen a 22.5% drop in year-on-year sales (2011 compared to 2010).

While readers were as keen as ever on the medium - and writers certainly wanted to write it - book publishers found it increasingly difficult to package it in a profitable way. Physical production costs for a short story are close to that of a full-length work ten times the size - yet consumers clearly would not pay the same price for a 2,500 word piece as they would for a 125,000 word tome.  Distribution costs are identical, too.  To put it simply, the short-form story became largely uneconomic for publishers to sell.

The golden, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity created by the ascent of digital publishing is revolutionising every aspect of the publishing business, but nowhere more than in the realm of short-form publishing.  Physical productions costs have vanished.  Distribution expenses, while not disappearing, are now simply one more minor amortisable cost - and physical distribution costs, such as warehousing have of course vanished completely.

All this makes the rise of short-form reading little short of inevitable and Read Petite both viable and exciting.