Samuel Cameron   Editor The Economics of Books and Reading The Economics of Books and Reading Samuel Cameron Editor The Economics of Books and Reading Journal of Cultural Economics Previously published in “ ” SpecialIssue:EconomicsofBooksandReading Volume43, Issue 4, 2019 123 Editor Samuel Cameron Bradford, UK ISBN978-3-031-18198-6 ISBN978-3-031-18199-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18199-3 ©TheEditor(s)(ifapplicable)andTheAuthor(s),underexclusivelicensetoSpringerNature SwitzerlandAG2022 Thisworkissubjecttocopyright.AllrightsaresolelyandexclusivelylicensedbythePublisher,whether thewholeorpartofthematerialisconcerned,specificallytherightsoftranslation,reprinting,reuseof illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmissionorinformationstorageandretrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilar ordissimilarmethodologynowknownorhereafterdeveloped. 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ThisSpringerimprintispublishedbytheregisteredcompanySpringerNatureSwitzerlandAG Theregisteredcompanyaddressis:Gewerbestrasse11,6330Cham,Switzerland Contents Cultural economics, books and reading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Samuel Cameron Economics and novels: good, evil and becoming better people. . . . . . . . 11 Dwight R. Lee and Cecil Bohanon The economics of the modern American comic book market. . . . . . . . . 29 Jerry Hionis and YoungHa Ki Unraveling the effect of extrinsic reading on reading with intrinsic motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Sara Suárez-Fernández and David Boto-García Don’t judge a book by its cover: examining digital disruption in the book industry using a stated preference approach. . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Paul Crosby More than a good book: contingent valuation of public library services in England. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Daniel Fujiwara, Ricky N. Lawton, and Susana Mourato List of Reviewers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 v Journal of Cultural Economics (2019) 43:517–526 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-019-09365-0 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Cultural economics, books and reading Samuel Cameron1 Received: 8 September 2019 / Accepted: 14 September 2019 / Published online: 11 October 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract The field of cultural economics is surprisingly short on research on the book market and on the activity of reading compared with other more recently invented media such as films and musical recordings. There are a number of traditional economic propositions relevant to books and reading which could be further researched. In addition, books and reading are strongly impacted by the disruptive innovations of digital technology and the use of online distribution platforms that fuel much of the research on the more recently invented cultural media. This paper gives an overview of some key new papers collected in this special issue and identifies additional lacu- nae in this general field of research. Keywords Reading · Books · Economics of literature · Libraries · Comic books “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”—Ray Bradbury 1 Introduction If someone unfamiliar with the field of cultural economics was asked to speculate on what it was about, then the activity of reading and the production, storage and pricing of books might be some of the first things that would spring to mind. How- ever, this has been a somewhat neglected area compared with other more recently invented media although there are occasional recent papers, such as Asai (2016) and Borowiecki and Navarrete (2018). A useful earlier study of the field can be found in Canoy et al. (2006). Books and reading are the longest established field of cultural production and consumption embedded in some form of media which can be repro- duced and circulated. They are many centuries older than movies, computer/video Samuel Cameron (Retired). * Samuel Cameron [email protected] 1 Bradford, UK 1 3 1 Reprinted from the journal S. Cameron games and the various hardware formats of music output that preceded the rise of digital platforms. Books and reading have allowed the formation of cultural capital that has accu- mulated over many centuries. Hence, we still have access to texts generated hun- dreds of years ago. Thanks to investment and research, this capital expands beyond its original source as we now have access to information that enhances the under- standing of the prior stock of literary cultural capital such as letters and draft manu- scripts from authors and participants in the original work. As such, many books are related to other areas of cultural consumption such as music, visual art and films, as they provide biographical information and critical and appreciative inquiry. At present, we do not seem to be receiving research work in this crossover area, such as a study of the market for books about music or, say, the symbiotic relationship between book sales and a powerful movie franchise like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. In terms of reading per se, we could also note the symbiotic relationship between comic books and franchise movies of the superhero type. This is touched on in the paper by Hionis and Yong Ha (2019) in this issue who fail to find a statistically sig- nificant relationship between comic-based movie releases and sales of comic books. This is, of course, the first test of such a relationship and the finding that requires scrutiny by further studies. There is a growing number of economic studies of the comic book market which are reviewed by Crosby (2019) in this issue, but these also tend to be about the internal market and such things as collecting habits, not the crossover with other areas of culture. It is not necessary to define reading, for present purposes; however, there is more of an issue as to what we mean by a book given that we now have a growth in audio books and e-books. Some surveys report a snobbery against audio books that they are not proper books and are inferior. These divergences could be very important in empirical work looking at sales of books or at time spent reading and volume of books read. A book is not the same thing as a magazine or a journal, but they may perform an identical function in terms of being delivery mechanisms for infor- mation or enjoyment. In the pre-digital era, part of the distinction between printed books and part-works relates to permanence and access. For example, an academic might seek to collect their individual papers into a book collection or might write an extended monograph which draws on these individual papers. Items which were not consolidated in books might be less readily accessible via borrowing from libraries and so on. Clearly, things have changed with a vast array of material of different provenance swirling around in the googled digital soup to the point where readers may not be entirely clear if they have just read a blog, a book, an academic article or a newspaper piece. The act of reading like the act of listening to music can now be more fragmented. It does not have to rely on books as the prime delivery mode for large amount of it as an individual could actually read quite a lot on a regular basis whilst rarely reading any of the sources in their entirety. The supply-side drivers encourage this as online reading material relies on ‘click bait’ as its revenue source, and thus, there is competition to get the viewer to another source of material from the one they are consuming. We would expect this to be detrimental to the long-run consumption of books in any delivery format. Reprinted from the journal 2 1 3 Cultural economics, books and reading In the field of poetry, there was a clear status hierarchy where having one’s poems published in a book collection signifies artistic success and potentially greater long- run revenue and earnings. The revenue factor derives from copyright as an individ- ual is, in most fields, greater able to derive personal income from a book than from an article in a collection where they have signed away a great deal of copyright. This may be in the form of a lump-sum payment or in journalism has often been of a pay- ment by results type such as a fee per word written. In contrast to the collection in a magazine or journal, the book represents a cul- tural artefact embodying the work of usually one or a selected group of people. As with other media, the production of books faces problems of risk and uncertainty in terms of sales forecasting; hence, there is an incentive for publishers to struc- ture contracts in such a way that they do not end up losing money. For such things, as literary or entertainment blockbuster novels or intense biographies, much of the upfront cost burden is laid on the author in terms of sustained hours of effort. Such effort cannot by itself result in payment unless the person is directly hired as an employee to do the writing which only tends to occur with short form recurrent writ- ing—typically journalism. This justifies the granting of advances by publishers, but to date we have not seen any actual economic analysis of advances and how techno- logical disruption impacts them (although Hionis and Yong Ha (2019) do touch on the payment system for comic books which is return based not advance based). One consequence of disruptive digital innovation is a change in the perception of self-publishing as the upfront fixed and sunk costs of physical book output and distribution can be bypassed by e-books. In the era before digital disruption, self- publishing was generally looked down on as vanity publishing, which took place because work was not good enough to be placed with ‘proper’ publishing outlets. Format conversion software is needed to render the text into the format of an e-book which can be read adequately on as many hosting devices and platforms as possible. This is commonly referred to as ‘the meat grinder’ in the form of such packages as Smashwords and Amazon KDP. As with music and film making, the presence of new distribution platforms would seem to increase competitiveness in the book mar- ket. New entrants may have fewer barriers to entry, but they can face an increased supply from existing books and the incumbent publishers. For example, older books can be republished in the e-book format when they might have been deemed not via- ble in printed format. To date, the Journal of Cultural Economics has not received analyses of entry and success from self-publishing via e-book formats as the focus on these has been on the consumer side. 2 T wo‑way trade from cultural economics to literature The most traditionally cultural area of books is the literary text—novels, plays and poetry. It may be noted we have had no papers on poetry whatsoever either directly or on related phenomena such as poetry competitions and festivals. There have been occa- sional forays into the relationship between economics and literary novels or dramatic plays. This may not be surprising given that we have had works from Arthur Miller and John Steinbeck which are memorably located in settings of economic depression in the 1 3 3 Reprinted from the journal S. Cameron USA. In modern terms, some of the works of David Mamet have very clear relation- ships to both economic analysis and contemporary economic issues. In contrast, Bohannon and Lee (2019) in this issue turn to the earlier works of Jane Austen as a model of a more enlightened social economics, with altruistic and moral content, as opposed to the selfish ‘economic man’ approach associated with the history of mainstream economics. They also consider at various points the economic philoso- phy embedded in the works of Charles Dickens who might be considered one of the early English humanist critics of the socially detrimental effects of the industrial revo- lution and the free market on the social economy. In this regard, they follow some ear- lier work in economics education journals, such as Watts and Smith (1989), who look to works in drama and literature as vehicles to help show how economic principles can be found in unexpected places, thus rhetorically enhancing their claims to merit. The pro-free-market approach is taken to more controversial extremes in the literary work of Ayn Rand which has been inspected for similarity to Austrian economics [see Boetke (2005)]. Rather than comparing Austen with a fellow fiction writer like Rand, at such an opposite end of the spectrum, Bohannon and Cecil provide a comparison and contrast of Austen with the writings of Adam Smith the founder of economics and not a writer of fiction. The writings of Smith are extremely voluminous and diffused over many areas. Thus, they provide the same risks of disputation as major religious texts. Hence, we may expect that some might disagree with Bohannon and Cecil, which may provide useful future discussion. For example, questions might be raised as to whether Austen’s contiguity is rooted in Smith’s moral philosophy and not his economics if we believe these can be separated, which is always a problem as instanced by the origins of the notion of the ‘invisible hand’. They propose, in Sect. 5 of their paper, the question ‘Did Jane Austen chan- nel Smith?’ which presumably implies there is categorically no chance that she may have read him or absorbed his ideas from some secondary source of exposition. Thus, the implication is that she somehow produced similar ideas, in another form of writ- ing, due to sharing some common starting position. It is admitted that no one has any knowledge of whether she did, in fact, read any Adam Smith, but an authority is quoted claiming that if she had read any book in such a topic area, then Wealth of Nations is the most likely candidate. The paper deals with one side of the matter, looking for economics in literary texts as opposed to the other which is the analysis of literary texts through the application of economics models. There are some examples of this in Cameron and Collins (2000) where works by D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy are inspected in terms of game the- ory applied to the strategies employed in selecting marital/relationship partners. Closer to the concerns of Bohannon and Lee (2019), we also find in Cameron (2002) a discus- sion of Mandeville’s poem ‘The Fable of the Bees’ first published in 1705 in terms of the modern economics of prostitution literature. Reprinted from the journal 4 1 3 Cultural economics, books and reading 3 Data sources There is no consolidated authoritative data source for this topic which permits reliable attempts to do things like make international analytic comparisons of determinants of the amount of reading. The NOP Worldwide Culture Index quan- tifies hours per week spent reading in different countries. This has India at the top with 10.42 according to the Examined Existence website with the USA (5.42 tied with Germany) and UK (5.18) outside the world Top 20. Inevitably much of the data are fragmentary and come from surveys of indi- viduals on their reading habits (see, for example, Ringstad and Loyland (2006) for an earlier example and Fernandez and Garcia (2019) in this issue), which are typically done for other purposes. Such surveys also tend to be of a nature that limits the application of panel methods even to reading habits within one country. Hence, it is difficult to study dynamic factors such as rational addiction. Sources which do recur frequently, such as the Omnibus YouGov study, in the UK lead to a steady stream of interesting reports but probably are not suitable in their execu- tion for detailed econometric analysis. We have the usual problem of how much meaningful economic analysis can be done with general surveys of individuals. One problem is that direct price and income data are often absent and it is difficult to use the data to infer any more expanded concepts, from allocation of time theory in the form of ‘price of time’ or ‘full income’. Hence, these are incorporated more indirectly in allocation of time issues as Fernandez and Garcia (2019) within a recursive set-up where some time is already preempted by mandatory prescription such as work time. Their dataset is drawn from the last wave of the Cultural Habits and Practices Survey (Encuesta de Hábitos y Prácticas Culturales) conducted by the Ministry of Edu- cation and Culture of Spain in 2014–2015. Further, the data do not distinguish between the source material read, and thus, we can not completely look at the allocation of time between reading for ‘fun’ and more serious reading. That is, assuming, say, reading an airport novel or biogra- phy of a sportsperson is ‘fun’, but a biography of Winston Churchill or Donald Trump is ‘serious’. The data in the paper are not on a fun/serious spectrum but in terms of ‘intrinsic’ or ‘extrinsic’ reading based on whether the reading is neces- sary for the person’s work or study. The data used in the other papers, excluding that of Hionis and Yong Ha, are of a more experimental nature. The evaluation of libraries by Fujiwara et al. (2019) uses standard WTP-type measures typically used in consultancy work for policy evaluation. Crosby (2019) examines digital disruption using elicitation of stated preferences, and his aim is to estimate the monetary value (or hedonic price increment) attached to characteristics of the digital reading product rather than estimate a social benefit value of the sector as in the library study. This work uses a survey on Australian readers, carried out by a market research company rather than research assistants. Hionis and Yong Ha (2019) resort to the use of industry data to profile the American comic book market. It comes from Diamond Distributors, the market’s 1 3 5 Reprinted from the journal