I was diddling around this evening and accidentally typed books into FRED. I discovered two interesting things. First, there's been zero book inflation over the past quarter century:
In fact, books today cost a little less than they did in 1998. At the same time, consumption of books has gone up considerably:
We buy twice as many books as we did four decades ago. And this is only physical books. Add in e-books and the total would be even higher.
Now, this doesn't automatically mean we're reading more. It just means we're buying more. Still, it probably means we're also reading more. I guess I'm surprised by that.
For something a little less surprising, compare this to newspaper revenue over just the past 15 years:
Newspapers are a dying breed. But you already knew that.
Oh no, not the dying New York Times!
The Times was nearly dying more than a decade ago. It had lost a ton of revenue by the time it added a paywall in 2011. Even then, things were dicey for the next half-decade. The moment that turned around its fortunes was the election of 2016. From that point, readership grew, subscriptions soared, and the paper expanded its offerings and its markets in a number of ways. It transformed itself from being the newspaper of record to a digital equivalent of The Today Show. Its stock price began to soar. During the Trump presidency, the NYT stock rose nearly 4x. That growth ended during Biden. Readership is down. The stock price has been roughly flat.
I don't think you can understand the editorial decisions that the Times makes -- i.e., its flirtation with the would-be fascist-in-chief -- without understanding the Times's financial picture.
One stat I read this year was pretty amazing. Now (it was far different till recently), readers spend more time online at the Times playing games than while reading all the other sections combined. The Times is now a game app with recipes, product reviews, and (mostly conservative) political commentary.
I blame Gannett
So where are most books printed these days?
Textbooks, on the other hand
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCU5111305111301
Textbook prices may have soared, but, also unlike for other books, sales, revenues, and profits all dropped precipitously. I'm lucky to have retired when I did.
I can speak only from experience with college textbooks, not the broader market in schoolbooks. But we took hit after hit over the decades. First, fewer students retained or trashed their texts as the used-book market grew. College bookstores, which profited from it while students reasonably sought to save money, promoted it heavily. That's one reason new editions come out so often, although staying competitive and current mattered at least as much.
This became a rental market, so that students didn't buy even one round of an edition. It also became a more far more costly market to enter, as profs demanded "supplements." Study guides are salable, of course. Teacher's manuals, test banks, and the like are not. (Pity profs who could no longer get tenure and earn decent salaries, as schools preferred adjuncts, and so longed for assistance.)
Free digital supplements entered around 1990, when I fought management at my author's urging to have a CD with star charts and other tools bound into an astronomy text. It paid off, at least at first. Of course, the media changed, and last came entire e-texbooks. These cost about as much to produce, but their prices are a fraction of that of bound books. That's because costs of paper, plant, printing, and binding are negligible compared to costs of peer reviews, market research, a sales force, and full-time editors acquiring new books and nursing an author for years on completing them.
Is that adjusted for inflation based-n overall inflation or on book inflation? Because given that books haven’t really changed in price, your chart is potentially very inaccurate.
The death spiral of newpapers -- especially local news -- is such a tragedy. The drop-off in ad revenue means fewer reporters which means less relevant news, investigations, etc., more people figure what's the point and stop reading, which in turn depresses ad revenue. Wash, rinse, repeat.
My local paper still has a few (probably half compared to a decade ago) reporters covering city hall and local stories, but it seems like 90% of the content is wire service pieces of national news, a crime blotter (with a comment thread featuring every old, crazed, racist uncle in the county), and high school sports box scores.
Newspapers declining; book sales strong. Obviously this is due to reporters saving all the good stuff for their books. Why bother with the newspaper? Just wait a few years and buy the book to see what was happening back then.
Personally, I am now totally finished with the on line papers-NYTimes and WaPo. Couldn't stand them any longer. Even the old freebies are now wanting money. I'll stick with The Guardian and BBC.
Still, it probably means we're also reading more.
This definitely doesn’t have to be true. For example, the millions of copies of books hawked by various Republican and even some Democratic presidential hopefuls and has-beens are almost all sitting on a shelf unread. People buy them to visibly support the candidate to their friends, or funnel money to the candidate (like when someone has already reached their donation limit, they can simply buy thousands of their books and hand them out as “gifts” to their employees or whomever).
There are other examples like this. People buy books to fill their shelves so they look smart to their house guests. Companies and professors strongly encourage their employees and students to buy books that align with their ideological values. The religious get lists of books that are alternatives to popular-but-blasphemous-in-some-way for their children, which are boring as fuck so the kids don’t actually read them. Books have become decorations or status symbols or virtue/vice signals or scams. (This was happening 2 decades ago when I worked for several large booksellers. The worst by far was the Books A Million chain. We joked when I was there that the chain should simply sell All You Can Eat (Carryout) specials: $10.99 per lb of books you consume on each visit. The customers there mostly bought books because someone at their church told them to - similar to how churches now get certain movies sold out in theatres and, when you go, the showing has tons of empty seats - and given their shitty attitudes towards the staff, never actually read them to become more Christ-like.)
My two cents:
The death blow for newspapers was losing their monopoly of classified advertising. The Sunday edition of my local paper used to include an entire section of classified ads--the go-to medium for real estate, job listings, cars, and rental apartments. Today, the Sunday edition runs a scant few pages of classified ads.
Editorial decisions had nothing to do with it.