Lots of Books — But Poetry?
RR Bowker, essentially the official database agency of books (they assign ISBN numbers), has released this press release in which they herald the fact that the number of books published in 2004 was up 14% to some 195,000 titles, upending three years of flatness.
The obvious observation is that the spread of new media, Google highlighting scholarly titles and the like has not cut out the hunger for book publishing. But a figure that jumped out at me was that, while the number of adult fiction books led the trend (up 43%), the number of poetry and drama books was right behind at more than 40%. Poetry? Drama? Really? Why, I wonder? Do the sales justify the push?
They didn’t give a figure for celebrity-published children’s fiction, but I bet that Madonna, Jay Leno and Jason Alexander among others (why why why do celebs feel the need to write kids’ books?) have helped push that category up a notch, too.