Ad Supported Content Hits the Library

Amazon has been notoriously vague about sales of Kindle ebooks and of the Kindles themselves, but looking at the Amazon stats at The Millions, we can see that Kindle ebook sales have jumped by an order of magnitude since the launch of the new version.When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled the second iteration of the Kindle in February, he confused lots of folks when he said "More than 10% of the units we sell are Kindle book sales." It was later clarified that he meant that, when looking at the 230,000 titles available for the Kindle, Kindle ebook sales account for 10% of the sales of those titles. Meanwhile, analysts have been trying all along to wrap their heads around what the Kindle means for the still nascent ebook market. To give an example, one analyst last year suggested that Kindle ebook sales could hit $2.5 billion by 2012.Nonetheless, in the wake of all the hoopla surrounding the Kindle launch in February, it was hard to get a clear picture of whether we were seeing a lot of media hype from gadget-obsessed tech writers or a real watershed moment in how people will read. If our numbers (which are, admittedly, a very small sample size) are any indication, the launch of the Kindle in 2007 raised awareness of ebooks, but the launch of the Kindle 2, this past February, brought ebooks to the mass market.In early 2008, with the first Kindle a few months old, we had anecdotal evidence from an ebook publisher saying that the Kindle wasn't posting impressive sales. More recently, as the Kindle 2 hype was ramping up, a pair of established book bloggers noted that their Amazon stats didn't show much interest at all in Kindle ebook sales. Michael Orthofer at the Complete Review wrote "only one out every 726 items purchased at Amazon after reaching it from our site in 2008 was a Kindle download." Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading had similar findings: "While a few readers have purchased Kindle ebooks through my links, the vast majority have been sticking to the print editions."For The Millions, Kindle ebook sales through late February of this year were similarly underwhelming. To use Orthofer's metric, Kindle ebooks sales from November 19, 2007, to February 21, 2009, the day before the Kindle 2 started shipping, amounted to one out every 99 items purchased at Amazon after reaching it from The Millions. So, a good deal better than what Orthofer was seeing but still not exactly an impressive number. (Incidentally, pre-Kindle ebook sales - presumably ebooks meant for devices that predate the Kindle - amounted to one out of every 272 from the start of The Millions to November 18, 2007)But what's interesting is what's happened since the Kindle 2 started shipping on February 22. From that point until today, even though we still only link to the physical editions of books, Kindle ebooks have accounted for an incredible one out of every six items purchased at Amazon after reaching it from The Millions. Again, I have to stress that the sample size isn't huge and that this is just one data point, but it certainly seems that with version 2, the Kindle has gone from a novelty to something much closer to the mainstream.

“The Short Story is Not Dead.”  This headline appeared in The Nervous Breakdown in January above an essay written by my friend Alex Chee in which he discussed the ways that technology was making the short story more accessible, and specifically, accessible on his iPhone.  The assertion of the negative – not dead – seemed to me an odd way for the copy editor to introduce an article on good news for short story reading.  I wondered what he meant by the possible ‘death’ of the story.  I find that when someone asserts that a thing (the story), or an idea (God), is not dead, they usually mean that a nostalgic version of the thing has lapsed and not been replaced by something comparably satisfying. What has changed with the story?  Not the writing.  Short story writing is alive and well.  The evidence:  Three of five of the New York Times’ notable works of fiction in 2010 are short fiction collections (counting Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad).  And consider all the print and online journals that survive on paid contest submissions, which is evidence of the large number of writers who aspire to be published authors.  The human impulse to tell stories has not diminished. What then?  Short story reading has declined.  With few exceptions (The New Yorker is one), mass circulation general interest magazines no longer publish short stories.  And, editors and agents blanche at the prospect of debut story collections, and often publish an author’s collection only with the promise of a follow-on novel.  The popular wisdom – and commercial reality – is that story collections don’t sell. What to make of this conundrum?  Is today’s short fiction not as good?  Hardly.  Why aren’t readers holding up their part of the bargain?  The answer, let me suggest, is related to how readers are given the opportunity to read – distribution, in commercial terms.  The short story became one of the great 20th century art forms when inexpensive publishing technology gave rise to mass market general interest magazines.  Oral story telling is a deeply human tradition, but it was only with the blitzkrieg of 19th century mass publishing that the written short story became a specific art form.  Magazines served up stories as snacks for readers, and did so with relish. The Saturday Evening Post, and other widely circulated magazines, provided outlets for stories by writers with now-household names, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton,   There were more than 25 mass market magazines in the 1920s and 1930s that published one short story each week.  When Life magazine published Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, in 1952, that issue sold 5.3 million copies. Stories in magazines could be read in one sitting.  And, story collections became the publishing industry’s way to capitalize on already popular works when they were repackaged in compilations.  Poe’s, Chekhov’s, Hawthorne’s, Gallant’s, Updike’s, and Cheever’s great stories all first appeared in periodicals.  Only later in books. The decline in short story reading is, I suggest, linked to the precipitous decline in mass market magazine readership. Magazines’ sales decline began in during the 1960s when consumers shifted their entertainment and news interest to television, but the decline recently accelerated with the explosive growth of online and mobile real-time access to news and information. The story, which was popularized by new printing and distribution technologies, has slowly become a victim of the displacement of those technologies.  To be sure, stories themselves also suffer from the crushing competition for consumer’s attention posed by TV, video games, and the Internet.  But, without mass market distribution outlets, readers entertain themselves in other ways. Literary journals continue to publish stories, but they come out seasonally, or occasionally, and the months’ long gap between issues doesn’t serve a creature of time-worn habit, accustomed to weekly soap operas, weekly television dramas, or the weekly story in The New Yorker.  Consumers like predictable engagement.  There are hundreds of online literary journals that publish bi-weekly, or monthly.  Many -- and there are a great many for readers to discover -- are better suited to launch new voices than to publish top authors.  And the seductive distractions of Facebook and Twitter make literary reading on a computer a difficult act of will. What’s a reader to do? Technology gave rise to the flowering of the short story, contributed to its decline, and technology will, in my opinion, again solve the problem of connecting readers and stories. Like the song, the short story is perfectly suited for mobile consumption.  The iPhone and iPad and other tablets are with their owner all the time, and a story on these devices can be read on a treadmill, in a bank line, on an airplane, wherever the user has a few minutes and wants to be transported to the magical place stories can create.  Poe’s definition of the short story remains as true today as when he wrote it: “a story is a thing that can be read in one sitting.”  If he were writing today he might rephrase it: “…in one hour on the tread mill.” So, how many Americans actually read short stories?  How large is the market?  There are no accurate answers to the question, but there are ways of approximating the number who read, which of course, is reduced by the fact that many people who might like to read stories don’t know where to find them.  A few facts: 9 million adult Americans annually read more than 50 works of fiction (NEA study, 2008). 2 million adult American publish personal creative writing (NEA study, 2002; writers are usually also readers.) 1.1 million: the subscription rate base for The New Yorker in 2009 150,000: the graduates of creative writing MFA programs in the past 20 years (all of whom learn to write and read short stories). 50,000-100,000: the estimated annual sales of The Pushcart Prize collections of stories (my estimate). These population snapshots overlap, of course, but suggest that there are 500,000-to-1.5 million American adults who are frequent readers of short stories. Stories are meant to be read one at a time, savored individually, taken in, and reflected upon.  Collections are ways of repackaging known works.  Publishing executives today don’t expect collections to sell (because they haven’t in the past), so they aren’t marketed, and this cycle of low expectations and insufficient care creates a self-fulfilling outcome: collections don’t sell. Web connected devices, like the iPad and the iPhone, can connect readers of short fiction with the best writing in the market.  Mobile and web technologies reduce friction in markets.  Storytelling is a deep human need, and readers of stories are entertained and instructed by clever plots, sympathetic characters, and artful writing.  Words create imaginary worlds that provide readers with an experience that is similar to, but different from, the worlds of movies and television.  Technology provides a new way to connect story tellers and fans.  We’re all ears. (Image: 732 - Power Grid - Pattern image from zooboing's photostream)