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Each spring when we hold Tech Forum, we have some great speakers come out to talk about the latest in book publishing, data, retail, and technology, so we thought we’d share some of those talks in podcast form. A series of Tech Forum talks will be available right here on the blog throughout the summer, or you can subscribe on your podcast app of choice by searching for BookNet Canada.
Our first episode is from our 2015 keynote Kevin Ashton, the co-founder and former executive director of the MIT Auto-ID Center, who is also well known for coining the term, “the internet of things.” Yeah, he’s that guy. He also wrote the book, How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery, which came out earlier this year.
This talk is titled, “A history of the end of reading, or how to survive the ebookalypse,” but you may be surprised by how optimistic Kevin’s outlook actually is, and he’s got the data to back him up. He does reference some charts and other visuals in the talk, but you should be able to follow along without them. But if you’re really curious, you can find a full video of his presentation here.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
Transcript
Kevin: Every time we see a significant technology to do with reading like movable type or paperback books, literacy increases and that's a feedback loop. Technology is feeding literacy and literacy is causing a need for new technology.
Zalina: That was Kevin Ashton speaking in Toronto at Tech Forum, a conference on digital developments in the book industry hosted by BookNet Canada. That's where I work. Hi, I'm Zalina Alvi, the Community Manager here at BookNet. Each spring when we hold Tech Forum, we have some great speakers come out to talk about the latest in book publishing, data, retail, and technology. So we thought we'd share some of those talks with you.
This one is from Kevin Ashton, the co-founder and former Executive Director of the MIT Auto-ID Center, who is also well known for coining the term, “the Internet of Things”. Yeah, he's that guy. He also wrote the book, "How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention and Discovery", which came out earlier this year. The talk you're about to hear was titled, “A History of the End of Reading”, or “How to Survive the Ebookalypse”.
But you may be surprised by how optimistic Kevin's outlook actually is, and he's got the data to back them up. He does reference some charts and other visuals in the talk, but you should be able to follow along without them. But if you're really curious, you can find a full video of his presentation on Wistia by going to booknetcanada.wistia.com. That's Wistia spelled, W-I-S-T-I-A. Now without further ado, I'll leave you with Kevin.
Kevin: So this sort of topic to get us started this morning is the ebookalypse which is like the zombie apocalypse but with books. We're going to talk about how we're going to survive. No shotguns required, there will be no beheadings. The subtitle is a history of the end of reading because maybe you know, maybe you don't, but we live in an age of paranoia about reading and publishing, but that's actually not a new thing. That's been around for a while. This is the kind of thing that you can read. There's one of these every day. Somebody somewhere explaining in this case, "Oh my goodness, we're in this historic transition because of technology." You probably don't need me to tell you that the rest of this report is doom and gloom. Children are looking at screens and not reading books, oh no.
Here's another one. "The end of reading as we know it, going back to oral culture only", says Tina Brown, former editor of, I think she's been at "Vanity Fair" for a while and "The Daily Beast" and "The Sunday Times" in London. This was a delightful one. I had to read a whole bunch of these to make these slides and this was a standout. This was thousands of words in "The New York Times" a few months ago. The streets are haunted by you know, ghosts, slain corpses of thugs.
That means Nathan from Kobo, by the way, particularly being called out there. You can't make the names up on these people either. I've always thought it's funny Will Self being you know, the jokes tell themselves but you know, serious readers, deep serious readers will be in short supply. That specifically by the way, I'm pretty sure means people who would read his book. His book didn't sell very well but the reason was not it was a bad book, it was that there just weren't enough intelligent people around to really understand, like the good old days.
We'll talk about these people a little bit more but one of the beautiful characteristics of these essays, and as I say, there are many, many, many, many, they're all the same, lots of hand wringing, is they are almost always completely free of any verifiable facts. You can tell that somebody had a thesaurus next to them when they were writing it, and generally they are somebody who's just lost their publishing job or their book didn't sell very well.
But occasionally, you do get a little bit of data, and so this is one of the few bits of data that I was able to find in any of these zombie apocalypse predictions. And it's the percentage of American adults who did not read a book. Every few years somebody does a survey and they ask this question and oh, heavens, you know, since 1978 it's gone from 8% who said they did not read a book. We may be measuring how embarrassed people are to admit that they didn't read a book, to 23%. And this is one of the few facts.
From these few facts, there's a lot of extrapolation. Here's something to be afraid of. Here is the modern-day equivalent of the people screaming. This is a screen from a video game. It's one of my favourite video games at the moment, actually. It's quite a new one. You can be the monster or you can be the guy who's trying to kill the monster, which may be metaphorical in this context. So one of the things that all these very disappointed 60-something, nearly always male, definitely always White, very privileged writers will tell you is that one of the reasons nobody is reading anymore is because of video games, and it is true.
More video games are being sold today than were being sold before video games were invented. If you get your axes just right, you can make it look really dramatic. So that monster that's rampaging towards you is selling all these millions of units. This is units sold, so about 800 million units. This is not video game consoles, this is just the games. This is what is stealing your deep, serious readers.
That title slide I showed you was a little montage I made of these glorious 1950s American movie posters. And as I was putting them together, I noticed this common theme, which we can spot fairly quickly. So here's one. And oh, look, it's two respectable looking White people fleeing and the man is protecting the woman from something. You'll notice in this one, you know, the spider has already captured one of these poor White women. So this White man is just saving his White woman from this thing. This is 1950s America, so just think about what this might be.
Here's another one. There's a thing and the thing, again, is grabbing the White woman. But this very hard-jawed man somehow with his tie on without removing his tie, is going to save her and her pearls. You know, here we are again. Here we are again. When you see these essays and these stories from these privileged White New York people who are complaining about how everything is terrible and the written word is dying, these are the people I want you to imagine, okay. Because what these movies are about is rich, White, elite, suddenly realising everybody else is going to get a piece of the action too.
We just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Selma March in the United States where I live, which was you know, a civil rights protest. And obviously, what they're afraid about here is the Black people are coming. That's what they're really afraid of in the 1950s and that's why all these posters show this. But the more general thing is equality is happening. That's the fear. You know, the plebs are starting to become educated and I can show you that. So that's almost enough of me moaning about the complaining essayist.
Let's look at this chart again because this is kind of interesting when we look at this chart if you're someone who likes data like I do. Because the first thing you can do with this chart is flip it upside down. So what this chart tells you is that apparently in 1978, a long time ago, nearly 40 years ago, 92% of people told a pollster that they had read at least one book that year. And today that number has dropped to 77. So another way to put that is 77% of people read at least one book a year in the United States, I'm sure it's more here.
If you think about all the things that have happened since 1978, cable television, the internet, video games, people are having to work two jobs to pay the bills, everybody driving, fewer people commuting, all these things. This is not bad. There's a lot more competition for people's attention and I think people have less leisure time than they used to. So this is not bad. It gets even better, though. Because the other thing that's been happening since 1978 in the United States but pretty much everywhere, population has been increasing and ageing.
So the number of adults in the United States in 1978 is much lower, nearly 100 million lower than it is in 2014. So the fact that percentage is going down isn't telling you the whole story. The truth is, in terms of the number, not percentage, but number of American adults that have read a book in the last year has gone up and it's gone up substantially. So while it would be nice if everybody was reading, and that that trend was more people reading a book a year than fewer, the fact of the matter is, from a business perspective, the market for books is growing because of population, and you see this everywhere.
We are living in this golden age of book sales. Oh my God, how is it we never hear about this on the essay pages at "The New York Times" or anywhere else? If you read these fact free articles, you're being led to believe that nobody is buying books anymore. Well, more people are buying books than ever before. In fact, let's go back to the rampaging monster of video games. On a unit basis, books are far outselling video games even though books are a very mature technology and video games are very new.
So video game is not taking away from books. What is it taking away from? Well, if we'd had this talk in probably the '50s, the days of the screaming White people, we would have been bemoaning this new technology called television. Television was coming and television was going to steal our readers. Here's what's happened to television recently. Again, these are U.S. numbers, but this is a trend that's reasonably common and the U.S. is, you know, probably the most robust TV market. They like to be like this guy and sit on the couch with the cheeseburger or whatever and watch TV.
The number of people watching primetime broadcast television is dropping rapidly. That's the kind of thing that is being affected by things like video games. It's not reading. But that's not the most interesting thing about this wonderful golden age of reading. People aren't just reading recipe books or how-to books. I thought this was amazing. This is in August, and this happened all over the world. This picture is from New York but this happened everywhere. We have this book, the "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" by Haruki Murakami, a Japanese writer writing in Japanese and when the translation comes out in English, bookstores are holding midnight parties for all the people that can't wait to get their hands on it. This is what I say to Will Self and his lack of deep serious readers. This is a novel, if you haven't read it, I recommend it, it's beautifully written and beautifully translated in which not very much happens, frankly.
This is not...if they make this into a movie, I don't recommend you go see it. This is not you know, "The Hunger Games". And while everybody gets hung up on ovals looking at the internet, a large proportion of what people are doing on the internet is not watching movies, or listening to music. In one form or another, it's reading. And it may sometimes be, you know, 10 things you never knew about when it gets snowy in Toronto or you know, whatever, but not always. I write articles online, I get the data. The longer ones do better than the shorter ones and I can see on some of the places where I publish whether people get to the end or not.
So not everything people are reading online is lightweight and here's why, and here's the big point, and here's the thing that is the most important thing. In that same period when you know, a few Americans didn't read a book one year, global literacy practically doubled. So in 1970, not that long ago, about two-thirds of the world could read, and today, it's getting close to 90%. And we're probably going to cross that 90% mark very soon. So this is not the end of reading. This is the beginning of reading. This is a trend that's been going on since the beginning of the 1800s.
We can forget that a few hundred years ago, practically nobody could read, anywhere in the world. I know that we can get very focused on our own lifetimes and this can seem like a long time. It's not. So let's look at this chart another way. Let's imagine as I think, you know, quite a few people were...that you were born around 1975. If you were born around 1975 and your family has a typical generational cycle which is about 25 years. You know, the average age at first birth in the world is around 25. What are the chances your grandparents could read?
Now we're assuming that you have global grandparents. We don't know where they were born. But the chances your grandparents could read if you were born in 1975 is about 30%, your grandparents. Now, chances are for most people, your grandparents were born somewhere around here, so the odds for them are higher. But depending on where you're from globally, that would be 30%. Your great grandparents, 21%, and your 3-times great grandparents, less than 20%.
The point is, you don't have to go back very many generations before none of your ancestors can read. This is not the end of reading, this is the beginning of reading. And if we look at this globally, interestingly, neither United States or Canada make the top 10 most literate nations in the world according to UNESCO. They come in at 99%. But what's interesting about this to me is the 10 least literate nations. The least literate nation in the world for which we have data and we have data for most of them, there are a few sort of island nations and places where we don't, is South Sudan with a 27% literate rate. It's higher than the world was 70 years ago.
This is how fast the world is learning to read. It's remarkable. Let's talk about what's driving that because that's really relevant. This is 50,000 years of human history. From the point of view of reading, nothing really happened between 50,000 years and 3,500 years, so please note there's a gap in the axis here. We go along and you know, eventually we … right here. This is why I say it's a golden age of reading, right? The chart suddenly goes crazy.
Now, if I didn't tell you what this chart represented and I said, "Yes, this period here is when this thing stopped happening and it all went into decline", you would think I was crazy and I would be crazy. So what's driving this? Part of what's driving this, a lot of what's driving this is technology. Okay, this is Tech Forum, let's talk about technology. There was nothing to read for a very long time apart from cave paintings which is what this first symbol here represents. And gradually cave paintings became cuneiform and hieroglyphics, sort of pictographic writing schemes. But you know, even then, it was 1000 years after hieroglyphics that the Egyptians happened upon Papyrus. Before that it was clay, and walls, and stone, and things. And then it was another 1000 years before we moved to a more kind of alphabetic way of writing, i.e., moving away from pictograms and having symbols that represent sounds. So this is a Phoenician alphabet about you know, about 1500 years BCE.
Paper didn't happen until, you know, about 10 BCE in China. Printing started in the early hundreds and it was one woodblock and you cut the whole thing and you stuck it down. There was probably a conference back then about how printing was the end of reading. Yeah, gradually, that moved to movable type, first of all in wood and then in metal. The most sort of, famous at least in North America and Europe example of movable metal type is probably the Gutenberg Press. That didn't happen until 1450. We'll talk about that a little bit more in a moment.
First of all, there's nothing to read because nobody could write, and then even though you could write, there wasn't very much ways to distribute writing in any significant way. But then when we move to movable type and industrial scale printing presses, you know, we ended up fairly quickly, a few hundred years later with the emergence of these things called public libraries. And then only in the end of the 1800s did somebody have the idea that it'd be useful if the population could read, and that's when elementary schools started all over the world. One of the things that's suddenly become elementary was reading.
Then as people start to graduate from elementary schools, we have another, the original bookalypse probably, oh my God, paperback novels in the 1930s, intimately, by the way, connected to the development of railways. People were wanting something to read on the railway train and they were buying newspapers at railway stations and somebody had the idea, "Oh, what if there was this paperback format but they were trashy novels? What if we put good writing into paperbacks?" Paperbacks happened and that helped drive literature even higher. And then we ended up in, you know, the last few decades things like hypertext and e-readers.
But the point here is, notice, and obviously this is very large scale and some of the dates are approximate, and I picked just a few things from the timeline. But every time we see a significant technology to do with reading like movable type or paperback books, literacy increases and that's a feedback loop. Technology is feeding literacy and literacy is causing a need for new technology. That is a trend we see everywhere, but it's certainly the trend we see in reading.
And to put it into microcosm, here's the history of reading in Canada. Now, there's not great data, at least not that I could find about literacy in Canada, so these numbers are somewhat approximate. You have a little clue here and a little clue there, and what do we mean by literacy? Does it mean you can sign your name or does it mean you can read a road sign? What does it mean? But basically, you see the same thing. I mean, the first printing press, by the way, didn't arrive in Canada until 1750. So it's less than 300 years since there was a printing press here.
You know, booksellers kind of emerged later on. The printing presses were printing pamphlets and newspapers mainly. "The Clockmaker," which is kind of, probably one of the first that I could find anyway, sort of novels written by a Canadian in Canada, sort of in the early 1800s. You know, the same as the rest of the world. You started to see libraries in schools at the end of the 1800s. 1900, you have the first kind of million unit Canadian authored selling novels sold around the world to Sky Pilot.
Quill and Quire which is still going, you know, emerges to support this...did I hear a whoop from the audience? Hey, a shout-out. Sort of emerged in the 1930s to start this sort of monitoring this new trade of Canadian publishing. "The Manatee" is the first Harlequin book. So that was kind of in the 1950s, so somewhat analogous to the emergence of Penguin paperbacks in the '30s. In the '70s, the Canadian government starts sort of developing some protection for the Canadian publishing industry. And then, 2009, I think it is, we get the Kobo, you know, the Canadian e-reader that's sort of taken over the world.
So, again, you see these upticks in literacy that are coincident with changes in technology or society around publishing. Which leads me to the problem that the ebook must solve. I'm really going to talk about the problem and then leave it to other people to tell you what the solution is because I don't know. But the population of the planet is increasing and the literacy rate is increasing. And if you do the math, what that means is, we'll probably be at 100% literacy by about the end of the century, which is about the time the human population will exceed 10 billion people.
Which means that from now, well, from a few years ago, say 2,000, the number of readers in the world will double. This century, the number of readers in the world will double from about 4 billion to about 10 billion. That's the point. That's the revolution. That's the major historic transition that is happening because of technology partly and because of society. That's the problem we have to solve. That's why I say this is not the end of reading, this is the beginning of reading.
Here's the problem. You'd have to grow and chop down nearly 20 million trees a year if you were going to supply 2 books for each of those readers annually. Having a world where books are exclusively made of paper does not scale to the needs of a literate global population. It's nice when only a few people can read, it doesn't work when everybody can read. I love printed books on paper. I have thousands of the damn things, but they do not scale. They are a transitional reading technology.
E-readers may also be a transitional reading technology, because everybody has a portable screen in their pocket nowadays. Now, you will not be surprised to know that in United States, 90% of people have a cell phone. You may be surprised to know that in Africa, 85% of people have a cell phone. Now, most of those phones today are not smartphones but they are about to be smartphones.
A few years from now, about 90% of people in Africa, which is a country that if you watch only American cable news you'd think is full of starving babies swatting flies from their eyes, 90% of Africans will have a cell phone, most of those will be smart in the next few years, and the same is true in Asia, by the way. People are going to have screens in their pockets, connected screens in their pockets. And maybe we can't make 10 billion e-readers either if we're also making 10 billion smartphones.
Maybe the thing you read on is not in your pocket. We're also moving to the age of the self-driving car very quickly. What are you going to do in your self-driving car? You're probably going to stare at a screen. Maybe the screen won't be in your pocket. Maybe the screen will be where the windshield is. Maybe you'll have your library on a screen in your car and as you're, you know, making your way from A to B or your car is for you, reading is what you do.
Changes in transportation gave us the paperback. Maybe changes in transportation will give us some other way to consume ebooks. Maybe this is the e-reader of the future. This is also coming very fast now. Virtual reality has been talked about for decades, but there are a number of consumer products emerging onto the market which are very good. I have no idea what you would do if you were reading a book like this with these goggles on apart from you know, every picture of people using this technology, they kind of...
I'm just going to set up Nathan from Kobo a little bit here because the other thing to think about before I close as well, in addition to the problem of scale, what else can you do with ebooks that you can't do today with regular books? Kobo had this wonderful press release where they had a report and they are monitoring what books get finished. So this is kind of a percentage by genre. How many people finish a particular book in a particular country in a particular genre. The thing I love about this, you can't make these names up. We had Will Self and now we have this lady, Francine Prose, writing in "The New York Review of Books", which I don't think has ever reviewed a book I've ever heard of. Some biography of some guy, the third volume, and who was the guy? I don't know. You know, 82% of readers lost interest, and notice this is a memoir that Francine is thinking of here. These people love their memoirs. Lost interest on page 272 and the publisher is telling the writer about it, "This is terrible," apparently. So the same people who bemoan the end of reading and the lack of serious readers also don't want to know that people aren't reading their books, so they do their screaming White-person face. This is good data. We need to know this. This is helpful.
You know, what you see as we think about ebooks, is that the new technology always starts off by copying the old technology. So this is a Bible, a manuscript Bible in 1250. This is the Gutenberg Bible using movable type. It looks pretty much the same, right? The coloured bits are done by hand. But of course, now we do interesting things with typography and movable type. There's really not much reason technically why you couldn't have done this with the Gutenberg Press. It just didn't occur to anybody because we had to get our heads around it. Same thing happened in movies. So this is a stage play called "Arsenic and Old Lace" from 1939. And this is the very good movie with Cary Grant, which I recommend, which looks exactly the same. The framing and the blocking is exactly the same as if you're watching a stage play.
This is a Wes Anderson movie today. This is not a special effect. Technically, you could have probably done this shot in the '40s but it just didn't occur to anybody because we were figuring out the new medium. So this is kind of the image I sort of want to leave you with in a way. It's like, this is us, we're sort of staring into the future. How will the book transform for the new medium of the ebook? That's the question we must answer because this is the problem we must solve. By 2100 there will be 10 billion readers, there will be 100% global literacy. That is the good news unless you're one of the White elite, in which case, "Ah, run away, run away from the masses." Please buy my book.
Zalina: If you'd like to hear more talks like this, make sure to subscribe to the podcast. Coming up, we've got Nathan Maharaj from Kobo talking about how price affects reader engagement. Later it's Mary Alice Elcock talking about the hybrid reader and ebook bundling and lots more. If you want to learn more about what we do, you can find us at booknetcanada.ca. Thanks to Kevin for speaking in Tech Forum and to everyone who attended or helped put it together. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada to the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
