The other barrier

[nancylebov]

seanan_mcguire posted about the importance of paper books for poor people. Books can be resold and don't require infrastructure.

There's another barrier which I haven't seen discussed much, and that's literacy. There are plenty of poor people who read well, but illiteracy is more likely to be common among poor people.

It seems as though there should be video for teaching adults to read-- possibly even competently produced and entertaining.

This isn't just for poor people-- illiteracy is so embarrassing that people are apt to conceal it. Video can be viewed in privacy.

There's a common belief that people can't learn to read as adults, but I have no idea what it's based on. The belief has been around since I was a kid, and should probably be revisited.

I also don't know to what extent illiterate people can use existing electronic media-- it seems as though the facilities for blind people would be enough with a little hand-holding to get started.

And one more issue, though I'm not sure how important it is. Non-fiction is likely to be more expensive than fiction. It's less likely to come out in cheap editions, and less likely to become cheap if used. This might just be an accurate measure of the demand, but it kind of gets to me.

I've been waiting for small presses to be able to produce mass-market-sized paper backs competitively, but I don't know whether it's even on the horizon. Weirdly, the prices for trade paperbacks don't seem wildly different between large and small presses. The prices for hard covers seem higher from small presses, but maybe they're aiming at the collector's market for that format. It's even possible that I'm not quite right about the trade paperbacks-- they're hard to evaluate because the sizes and prices vary.

Comments

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Prices for the sort of print runs small press are likely to use have been improving, but the barrier up to now has been that set-up charges for small runs have been the same as for large runs so that the unit costs for small runs were traditionally very high (and print-on-demand unit prices have been higher still).

As you probably know, the reason that mass-market paperbacks can be relatively cheap is that long print runs mean unit prices of a dollar or less for paper/printing.

[subnumine.livejournal.com]

Children are generally better at new language skills, as those of us who have attempted to pick up new languages in adulthood know. Presumably the coding involved in reading a known language is included.

But I doubt the actual claim is that learning to read in adulthood is impossible; it's harder, and the pool of illiterate adults in first-world societies is disproportionately salted with those who have special cognitive difficulties; that's why many of them didn't learn in childhood.

Nineteenth century working class publication included an impressive amount of non-fiction, often on the level of Macaulay or Gibbon. This was before the full development of mass-market fiction as a genre.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

A ridiculously tiny straw in the wind, but I've heard a (presumably inner city) kid quoted as saying non-sarcastically, "Have you tried the public library? It's like Netflix for books."

[avram]

Mass-market-priced books require a mass market. And they require cheap distribution.

Even the big publishers produce fewer mass-market titles than they used to, because the big-box store business model squeezed just a few percentage points of income out of mass-market (and magazine) distribution, which was already small enough that lots of books that were once just-barely profitable in mass-market no longer are.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

And the coding for English is ghastly.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Paper books are more expensive, for poor adults anyway, than e-books. Thanks to discount buy-here/pay-here cellphone shops like Cricket Mobile, poor people have cell phones; judging by what I see on the bus every day, they may have a higher smartphone saturation level than the middle class do. (Given that all of the major carriers offer free Android smart phones, I'm baffled that anybody doesn't have one. The data plan isn't THAT expensive.) E-book readers are free software if you already have a smartphone, and are available even for some feature phones. The entire Gutenberg collection is free; most non-public-domain e-books are cheaper than buying the paperback at Walmart.

But the biggest savings? Mass. Both space, and weight. One thing that I really hadn't gotten through my head until I read Venkatesh's Off the Books is just how much space is at a premium for poor people. Due to irregular income, it's routine to cram 20 people into a house that was built for a family of four; it's equally common to have to move several times per year. How compatible is a hardcopy library with that lifestyle?

[avram]

How many poor people keep their books once they've read them?

For many people, books are something you can pick up for a quarter in the used bin (or maybe even get for free, from other people in your apartment building getting rid of their excess), and throw away (or give to someone else) when you're done.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that it's not that children are better at picking up languages but rather that they have more time and less opportunity to opt out. It's somewhat challenging to not learn a language if you are dunked into a community that speaks it and forced to socialize as you are in school.