Huge spike in sales of printed books
LOCKDOWN has seen a phenomenal rise in the sale of printed books, with US print book sales up by 82% and more than 200 million print books sold in the UK.
As the world retreated from Covid19 and locked in with technology, people curled up on the couch with a book as a welcome escape.
This week, co-founder of the Durban Book Fair and Booksellers of Mzansi, Kiru Naidoo, said he was not surprised by the figures because “books in ink are making a huge comeback”.
Before lockdown, street book selling by homeless people was a successful project under the Denis Hurley Street Lit project.
Naidoo said that had expanded to people who had become unemployed by the pandemic and were looking for a way to make a living. Books continued to fly off the shelves.
“Hundreds of pre-loved titles are lapped up each week, earning people without formal jobs a dignified living.
It’s great for the environment too, as we recycle books from one hand to another,” said Naidoo.
This week, Pamsa (Paper Manufacturers Association of SA) said the predicted demise of the printed book had not come to pass and that reading patterns had shifted dramatically in the last year.
“The pandemic, it seems, was good for book sales with more than 200 million books sold in the UK, the first time since 2012 that number has been exceeded. In the US, printed book sales amounted to just over 750 million units last year, marking growth of 82%, the highest year-on-year increase since 2010,” the release said.
With people experiencing fatigue and burnout because of interminable “screen time” be it on laptops, phones or TV screens and the lines between home and work becoming evermore blurred, turning back to printed books had been seen as a form of release and relaxation.
Pamsa communications manager Samantha Choles said: “The feeling or scent of a ‘real book’ aside, paper is the perfect panacea for the digital overload.”
She said countless research papers and numerous studies around comprehension and brain function had shown that “paper and ink seem to eclipse their electronic counterparts”.
Founder of NGO Early Inspiration and ECD (Early Childhood Development) specialist Dr Lauren Stretch said contact with books, such as turning the pages, created a greater feeling of engagement with the medium as opposed to holding a device or tablet.
According to website Brainfacts. org, scientists have found that reading long, complex texts are best read in print for proper comprehension.
Literacy professor Anne Mangen, from the University of Stavanger, Norway, said: “Print reading is kind of like meditation, focusing our attention on something still. And it’s a whole different kind of immersion than responding to digital stimuli. I think it’s healthy for us, as human beings, to sit down with something that doesn’t move, ping or call on our attention.”
Known as the “shallowing hypothesis”, constant exposure to fast-paced digital media trains the brain to process information more rapidly, but it does so less thoroughly.
Lauren Singer-trakhman, who studies reading comprehension at the University of Maryland, said of digital content: “It's one of the best parts of our digital world, everything at our fingertips and we can get headlines in a second but it may also be one of the pitfalls.
“Everything is so quick and accessible that we may not be truly digesting what we read anymore.” to him read to us.
"I love reading a traditional book, I'm not really one for Kindles. I'm looking forward to the book fair because I can talk from the heart and I think this book can help educate our children about the virus," she said.
Also at the Durban Book Fair – which will observe World Book Day celebrated yesterday – will be the launch of The Silhouette of Hope by Madge P Dube, as well as Covid Petals by Ilza Osthuizen.
S'BO Vilakazi, author of Who Shall Stand, will be in conversation with Elwyn Bonhomme, author of Chasing of The Wind and Did You Tell Them?
In a 2016 study, Singer-trakhman examined undergraduates’ comprehension after reading print and digital copies of articles, finding that students missed details when reading on screens. To retain on-screen text information, Singer-trakhman and Mangen suggest slowing down and hand writing the details, as research has shown while typing works, handwriting is likely to be a superior memory tool.
And as children’s author Julia Donaldson, who famously refused to have an e-book version of her best-selling The Gruffalo, said: “They said, ‘look you can press buttons and do this and that’ and they showed me the page where Alice’s neck gets longer. I thought, well, if the child's doing that, they aren’t going to be listening or reading.”