Readers turning back to print
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 the Covid-19 virus and locked in with technology, people turned to the printed book to curl up on the couch with as a welcome escape.
This week, Durban Book Fair and Booksellers of Mzansi co-founder 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 this had expanded to people who had become unemployed by the pandemic and were looking for a way to make a living – and the books continue 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 in a release that 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.
The 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 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 any more.”