News From The World of Books (A rare Sunday Post)

Many folks (naysayers) have predicted that because of e-books all printed matter is dead or will be dead very, very soon. In fact, that is not true. 


Did you know that book sales are way up? And did you also know that Young adult readership is booming? Amazon does report that e-sales are up. But *ahem* they are a company that would favor electronic text. They are based on the internet. So it stands to reason, right? 


There was a decline because of the recession. But we are climbing out of the recession. Aren't we? 


Statistics for you:

In 2005, there were more published authors in the U.S. than ever before: 185,275 (compared, for example, with eighty-two in 1850).
 In 2007, there were more U.S. publishers than ever before: 74,240 (that’s compared with 397 in 1925). This figure has been rising every year since the data has been collected.
In 2008, there were more original book titles published in print than ever before: 289,729 different titles in the U.S. alone.
In 2008, the last year complete numbers are available, overall revenue from book sales in the U.S. was at $24.255 billion, down just a bit from $24.959 billion in 2007, the all-time high.  
Library membership in the U.S. is at an all-time high: 208,904,000 Americans held library cards in 2009. (That’s 68 percent of the population, the greatest number since the American Library Association began keeping track in 1990.)
Library circulation is at an all-time high: 2.28 billion library materials were circulated in 2008 (that’s 7.7 circulations per capita) compared to 1.69 billion in 1999 (6.5 circulations per capita).

So all printed matter is dead or dying right? I think not. *smiling*


Have a wonderful day.