“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen
The scent of pages of an old book, there is nothing else like it. Nothing beats the feeling of opening a thick paperback for the first time. Even if it is a dusty book, the weathered feel of it just adds to its charm. Every avid reader knows the excitement that rises in one’s chest when you see books piled together. The itch that is felt in the hand to just hold them once, give them a read, and absorb all the words. It is heart wrenching that today we are at the funeral of paperbacks and are merely narrating their eulogy in front of you. Every book lover saw the imminent death of books coming from a mile away, but nobody was ready for it because they all did not want it. It is a slow death that has been dragged across decades and every day is painful to witness for all book lovers but there seems to be no way out.
The weight of a good thick made makes the heart of a book lover dance with joy but it seems that the world cannot handle that weight. It is the reason why paperbacks are dying out and are being replaced with digital books or e-books. Since the rise of tablets, mobiles, and laptops, more and more people seem to be opting for e-books. It might have not been such a problem but the tradition of buying real books is vanishing slowly but surely. As APJ Abdul Kalam, scientist, teacher and writer and also served as an 11th president of India, put it rightly;
“Books are my favorite friends, and I consider my home library, with many thousands of books, to be my greatest wealth. Every new book, based on some new idea inspires me and gives me a new thought to ponder.”
Since the arrival of Kindle, it was seen that paperbacks suffered a huge setback. It seemed like most people just abandoned the real books and went and bought Kindle. The sale of printed books went down tremendously, and many publications got shut down. Even big corporates like Barns and Nobles felt the threat. All the while, sales of Kindle kept going up and Amazon was taking over the digital book sphere.
Three years after its launch, Amazon was selling more e-books because of Kindle than printed books. The percentage of the sale was astounding i.e. 1,260% of e-books were sold more than paperbacks. After Kindle, we all saw that the sales of printed books took a real hit for many years. Neilson Bookscan found out that printed books’ sales went down by 9% in the year of 2011 and 2012.
Can it be that paperbacks are coming back? Can they really be revived? Indeed, a certain population of book lovers never let them die but can they be brought back in their full force and back to their whole glory?
In 2017, CNN reported that the sales of e-books went down 17% and it looked like paperbacks were coming back into fashion. It was also summarized that 2016 saw sales of printed books going up by 7% in the UK and the U.S. saw paperbacks and hardbacks making a comeback with 7.5% and 4.1%, respectively. Phil Stokes, head of PwC’s entertainment and media division in the U.K. said, “The print format is appealing to many and publishers are finding that some genres lend themselves more to print than others and are using them to drive sales of print books,”. According to the U.K. regulator Ofcom, this change was brought about because many adults went on a digital detox where they limited their screen time and went back to paperbacks.
Cathryn Summerhayes, a literary agent at Curtis Brown talked about why e-books became popular but then reality set in, and people went back to the good old-fashioned printed books, “It was new and exciting. But now they look so clunky and unhip, don’t they? I guess everyone wants a piece of trendy tech and, unfortunately, there aren’t trendy tech reading devices and I don’t think people are reading long-form fiction on their phones. I think your average reader would say that one of the great pleasures of reading is the physical turning of the page. It slows you down and makes you think.” We could not have put it better, reading books is about absorbing every word. It is basking in the emotions that the writer elicits.
James Daunt, managing director of Waterstones put it precisely when he said, “Part of the positive pressure that digital has exerted on the industry is that publishers have rediscovered their love of the physical”. People tend to follow trends which is what is happening with books too. They are now considered to be objects of beauty; everyone seems to see certain aesthetics in them. Now that the trend has taken force, everyone wants to be a part of it and feel connected to each other socially. They want to experience the “out of this world” sensation that people talk about when they read books.
A hashtag that goes by #bookstagram is to be seen trending on Instagram where people show off the books that they are reading. Some avid readers call it shallow but just because they are showing off does not mean that they are giving paperbacks their due respect. Printed books are back in business and people of every generation are buying them. We see people posting a picture of a book with an aesthetic background like at a café, artsy coffee nearby, or some other prop.
As Jennifer Cownie, owner of the Bookifer website and the Cownifer Instagram, which matches books to decorative papers said, “All these people are really thinking about how the books are – not just what’s in them, but what they’re like as objects,”. Books are now considered to be art just because of their physical dimensions and the value that they hold in this world.
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