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Big books in demand

14 December 2015

This article in the Guardian, Are books getting longer, shows that in both commercial bestseller lists and literary lists (measured by Booker Prize winners), the books that feature are tending to get longer. But this goes against a number of trends which you would expect to be pushing readers in the opposite direction.

There's little doubt that buying books in ebook format makes you less conscious of their length and in any case an amazingly low 60% of books bought in ebook form are ever even opened, let alone finished. So ebook reading may be making book purchasers less conscious of the length of what they're buying, but that seems unlikely to be making longer books increasingly popular.

Three other trends seem to suggest that books should be getting shorter. The first is the increasing popularity of short stories and novellas, and the general trend towards reading things online. Are these shorter forms being read by the same people who like longer books? It seems unlikely but no-one knows.

The second is that we are repeatedly being told that books are more and more being read on mobiles, and that this is rapidly becoming the preferred way of reading ebooks. But does anyone fancy tackling 800 pages on a mobile?

Thirdly, we're all under increasing time pressures which make it genuinely hard to work your way through a long novel. In fact you'd expect this to fuel a preference for short novels.
Of course the same people who may like short stories on their phone, perhaps whilst on the move, may be the very ones who will like to curl up with a long novel at home, or when they're on holiday. This still doesn't look like it would be fuelling a move towards longer novels in the bestseller lists.

So perhaps it's just that readers like long books, and will show their preference in how they buy bestsellers. After all, people have always liked losing themselves in a big read and it's very encouraging, particularly for authors, to know that that's still the case.

 

 

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