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.
Long list. Or more of a short one in truth. I would love to have the time and leisure to read new things, but mostly I get what I need from the library or Anna’s Archive.
It varies - there’s a few authors/series that I follow and will buy their book as soon as it drops as a paperback: Charles Stross’ Laundry Files, China Mieville’s fiction if he ever writes another one, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore and I will be all over Christopher Buehlman’s next fantasy. I also enjoyed Gareth Hanrahan’s Black Iron Legacy, so bounced on to his new, unconnected series.
However, most books I dig up are from recommendation threads where I’ve liked something and want more of the same. I’m usually late enough to that party for the books to be a few quid secondhand. So I recently finished Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief and it was exactly the kind of fantasy I was looking for, so I Googled for similar and took a punt on a few more, but realised one was already in my to-read pile so I took my life in my hands and dug it out.
I’ll obviously also buy new for presents, for myself or others.
I’s a mixed bag.
I’ve read a number of books when they were new. Some were OK, some were good (The Martian), and some sucked so much that I forgot their names.
