Book Publishing Stats

In the end, what do numbers really mean? Well, if they’re related to book publishing, then the answer is IHNFC (I have no frigging clue). The stats are in, sort of, and the numbers are a little absurd. According to one recent NYT article, there were approximately 4.1 million books published in the United States in 2025, 3.5 million self-published and 600,000 through traditional publishers.

Now, because ISBN numbers are assigned to all “books” — which could range from a full-length novel published by Penguin Random House to a dinky little 50-page collection of crossword puzzles by some yahoo with a printing press in his garage — the aforementioned 4.1 million is clearly a little inflated. Add to that the fact that individual ISBN numbers are assigned to different formats of the same work (e.g., ebook, audiobook, physical copy), and that number shrinks yet again. Still, any way you cut it, there were most likely well more than a million literary works (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, textbooks, etc.) published in the U.S. alone last year.

So, where does that leave us as readers and writers? Somewhere up a very dark, forbidding creek. As writers, it means we’ll have slightly better odds at making a living as a writer than winning the lottery. Slightly. As readers, it means we have so many options to choose from that the sheer number of books available at our online fingertips is nothing short of daunting. This has led some people to ask a question nobody could have imagined even 20 years ago: Are we actually publishing too many books now?

My 2nd CCA Literary Grant

I’m proud to announce that I’ve just been awarded my second literary grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. I’ll write more about the submission that earned me the grant once I finish a draft and submit my final report with the Council. For now, I must start by thanking the Canada Council for this tremendous honour. I should also give a shout-out to the MP who represents my riding, The Honourable Evan Solomon, as the Canada Council is a federal Crown corporation (under the Department of Canadian Heritage) responsible for funding the arts across Canada. Funny enough, Mr. Solomon is not only a fellow McGill alum, but he just happens to have studied English literature back in his Labatt 50 days, which means he should definitely be pushing for more funding when it comes to the writing and publishing segments of the Council (wink wink, nudge nudge).

The Broken Reader

No, not the electronic device — the human being.

Former executive Hollywood editor of Vanity Fair and novelist Jeff Giles recently wrote a thought-provoking piece titled “How I Began to Love Reading Again.” In it, he described how, in 2022, “the reader in me snapped in half.” It was then that “suddenly, I couldn’t finish even half a book. Any book. Nothing held me. Everything annoyed me. Cilantro now tasted like soap.”

“It took weeks for me to realize that I was a broken reader. I assumed I’d just had a streak of bad luck in the Dept. of Picking,” Giles writes. Haven’t we all been the victim of bad luck with that most merciless of departments? A trusted friend recommends a book and it ends up stinking the joint out. Our book club chooses this year’s “IT!” novel, and instead of LOVING! it, we fantasize about getting our wisdom teeth pulled out (all four at once, obviously).

This (hopefully) temporary mental block that is not allowing us to enjoy reading, especially fiction, can have its roots in many things. Depression would certainly be at the top of the list. Withering attention span could also be a casus belli for said cerebral conflict. But Giles offers another possible reason for his own relatively brief time as a broken reader, saying that when it came to his own troubles, “They had more to do with the sense of entitlement I’d developed as a reader. It was as if I expected all authors to ask me personally what I wanted before they started typing.” Very insightful — nay, searingly honest — and something that I, for one, have been guilty of on more than one occasion in the past.

Fortunately for Jeff Giles, his broken reader slump passed after about 10 months. For one of his acquaintances, however, a bestselling author, no less, her own “dry spell as a reader” lasted five years. Yikes.

I suppose the moral of the story is this: the internet is to blame for all reading and book-related problems and we can’t trust recommendations from anyone. Alternatively, we could be optimistic about the whole matter and tell ourselves that we’ll come around at some point in the future if we fall into a broken reader funk. Or would that be asking too much in an era when words like stat and asap have left adages such as patience is a virtue and this too shall pass in the dust of a pre-wired world?

Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?

How I like to get my audiobook on

In a piece for The New York Times, Brian Bannon, chief librarian at the New York Public Library, answers a question I imagine many book club members worldwide have asked themselves at one time or another: “Do Audiobooks Count as Reading?”

In case you don’t have a digital subscription to the Times, I’ll highlight some of the more memorable points. Today, 41% of adults don’t believe audiobooks qualify as reading. Yet, as Bannon points out, “learning to read with the eyes starts with decoding, linking letters to sounds and meaning. But once those pathways are built, the brain draws on the same language network to make sense of words, whether they arrive through sight or sound.”

Audiobooks not only allow blind people to become “absorbed in the words, taking in their meaning,” but also assist people with dyslexia, like the author of the article, to “effortlessly absorb ideas and focus in a way I hadn’t before.”

Interestingly, listening to books is on the rise: “Audiobook sales reached about $2.2 billion in the United States last year. At the New York Public Library, audio circulation rose 65 percent in the past five years while circulation for print and e-books stayed flat — a pattern mirrored nationwide. Audio has overtaken e-books in driving growth.”

In my own book club, we 12 readers are never on the same page (groan) when it comes to how we “read” our shared literary journey every month. Although I don’t have any hard stats to back this up, I’d say we’re roughly 40% physical book, 30% e-book, and 30% audiobook. Personally, I’m around 50/50 with the physical copy and e-book (shout-out to the Toronto Public Library for having seemingly every book under the sun and free delivery of physical books to my home branch).

That being said, I do listen to the odd book now and again. In the case of Bono’s Surrender, that actually saved me. When I found myself not fully engrossed in the reading aspect of the story, I switched to the audiobook and ended up finishing it (all 845 hours . . . give or take) quite happily. In another instance, we read David Grann’s The Wager not long ago and a few of my fellow book club members swore by the audiobook, saying there was no chance they would have finished it without the euphonious voice of the man responsible for reading it to them.

On a final note, I liked loved the conclusion to the piece Brian Bannon wrote, as it essentially captures why I started a book club in the first place 16 years ago: “However we read — by eye, by ear or both — it all counts. What matters is that the words get in, the brain makes meaning and the identity of being a reader takes hold. We need more readers, however they get there.”

News Flash: Discussing Books Is Healthy

Per an article in the NYT, “Fewer People Are Reading for Fun, Study Finds“:

Researchers from University College London and the University of Florida examined national data from 2003 to 2023 and found that the share of people who reported reading for pleasure on a given day fell to 16 percent in 2023 from a peak of 28 percent in 2004 — a drop of about 40 percent. It declined around 3 percent each year over those two decades.

That’s the bad news. The good news? “People may draw particular benefits from thinking deeply about what they read and talking about it with others.” Translation: join a book club stat.

People may draw particular benefits from thinking deeply about what they read and talking about it with others.

It is not the case that “I can sit you down and give you a Jane Austen novel, you read it, and you come out with better mental health,” said James Carney, an associate professor at the London Interdisciplinary School and the lead author of a 2022 study on reading and mental health.

But discussing and reflecting on fiction — as opposed to just reading it — was linked to better mental health and social capabilities, including the ability to perceive nuances in interpersonal relationships, said Dr. Carney.