I remember reading an article a few months ago about how the vast majority of books published don’t make their production costs back. And this got me thinking. How many ‘new’ books do you read each year?
I’m not the most avid reader in the world (although, I’ve read 14 this year so, you know), but I’ve noticed that I rarely end up buying a book that’s brand new.
Some of this is marketing (I just don’t see potential new books), some of it is price (money is tight, new books can be expensive) and some of it is time (I work and have 2 young kids, I don’t have that much time to read any books, let alone the new bestsellers).
So my question: How do you consume your books. Are you a day 1 pre-order sort of reader, or do you keep a long list of books you’ll get to (maybe)?
I am reading one at the moment: Adam Biles Beasts of England, published last month, and am planning to read Sandra Newman’s Julia next. Both are based on George Owell books. However, this is very much an outlier. I very seldom read new books in general, and seldom have.
Pre-ebook, I would almost always haunt secondhand bookshops, which were the source of most of mine, and the bulk that I picked up would be titles that were a decade or more old and that had developed enough of a reputation that I thought them worth reading.
Nowadays the majority of my reading is ebooks, but I still go for titles that have had a while to establish. Of the last dozen or so that I have read, I doubt that more than a couple were published in the last decade, and at least as many were closer to a century old, or more.