IVP - Behind the Books - June 2007 Archives

All in Decline

Nathan Bierma, who writes the column "On Language" for the Chicago Tribune and serves as communications and research coordinator for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, recently addressed the decline of the "quotative" use of all, as in "She was all, 'Why don't you publish my book?' and I'm all 'Because it's too colloquial, yo!' "

In a 2005 survey of California high school and college students, . . . a team of researchers at Stanford University found that the quotative use of "all" had plummeted since the early 1990s. In their study, speakers used "all" less than 5 percent of the time they introduced quotations, down from 45 percent in 1994. "All" had even fallen behind the word "said," which was used 12 percent of the time.

So much for my dynamic equivalency translation of Genesis 1:

And God was all, "Let there be light!" And it got all bright for a while. And then God was all, "Get a sky up in here!" And so now there's, like, a sky and stuff. And God was all like, "Gimme some land, will ya?" And so we got land and seas and all that.

That's as far as I've gotten, so I didn't waste a lot of creative energy on the project, but I'm still all sad about it.

Serial Comma Killer

For all you scrappy editorial types who want to leap to the defense of the defenseless serial comma, our esteemed editorial director, Andy Le Peau, has thrown down the gauntlet. Here's a taste:

Read books from the 1700s or 1800s and you’ll likely see a comma infestation that puts the frogs of Egypt to shame, with every possible thought and phrase set off by punctuation. Writers tend not to do that anymore.

Read the whole argument here. Comment at your own risk!

Who's Buying Books?

According to a new survey conducted by consulting firm Content Connections, book buyers are typically middle-aged career women who are married, make an average of $88,000 a year and have at least a bachelor's degree. Of all nonfiction books sold, 66 percent are purchased by women (though fewer than 15 percent of bestselling authors are female). Last year, the average female book buyer was 45 years old and bought 28 books, spending $280 on nonfiction titles and $147 on fiction titles. This book buyer most likely lives in a large city and buys a third of her books online but prefers to visit the local bookstore where she spends an average of 40 minutes browsing.

Does this fit you, dear reader? Occasionally over the years InterVarsity Press has done studies of our readership, especially of our IVP Book Club members, and we have learned that the "typical" IVP reader tends to be a middle-aged male, often active in some form of ministry or church leadership. Of course, many of our books are geared directly for college students, and thus another segment of our readership is quite distinctly 18-25 of both genders (often more women, as more women are college students than men on campus in general as well as within InterVarsity circles).

I think the above study is interesting not only for the demographic snapshot but also for the buying habit pattern - two-thirds nonfiction, one-third fiction, a third online, two-thirds in physical stores. And 28 books a year is roughly one every two weeks. Of course, how one calculates this is inexact; I start far more books than I finish, since I casually browse and dip into dozens of books at a time, a chapter here, a chapter there. But I generally finish reading one or two books a week. I used to read as many as a hundred and fifty books in a calendar year, but that number has gone drastically down since having kids. (Unless you include kids' books, in which case I now read hundreds more!)

How about you? How many books do you read a year? And do you buy them online, in physical stores or a mix of both? Inquiring minds want to know.

Every Book Has a Story

I had lunch recently with a group from my church and a visiting missionary. He was excited to hear that I work with InterVarsity Press (IVP), as many people are, because let's face it: we're an exciting place. He was particularly excited, however, because he used to live not far from the old IVP offices. Back in those days he didn't have a faith in God; he was, you might say, "searching for God knows what."

The old office predates me; the Press was a storefront in a suburban downtown area, with black paper covering the windows so that the chemicals being mixed to set type on page wouldn't degrade upon exposure to light. Back in the day the Press also published His magazine, and advertised the magazine on the papered-over windows of the office building. Legend has it that many of the town's residents saw the dark windows and the name His magazine, and thought we were a publisher of pornography. Oops.

Anyway, one day my new friend, in the throes of his quest for God knows what, walked into the IVP offices from the sidewalk, where he was met by a delightful receptionist and a display of the IVP booklets. Our booklets, you should know, serve a specific purpose. They're narrowly focused on a single topic treated at length from a Christian perspective. Over the years we've had booklets that critiqued the Restorationist movement, the New Age movement and the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We've had booklets that addressed issues such as homosexuality and date rape and loneliness. We've had evangelistic booklets and apologetic booklets and highly theological booklets. And on this particular day, the one booklet that particularly caught this particular guy's eye was titled Transcendental Meditation.

"Oh. That looks interesting. I've been thinking of trying out transcendental meditation."

Our receptionist, my friend tells me, virtually leaped over the counter and steered him toward something more appropriate, which is to say, something more evangelistic.

Now I should say that our booklet on transcendental meditation was not a how-to book but rather a Christian critique of the phenomenon, so it's probably fair to say that the IVP-TM booklet would have done my new friend some good. But if he had simply kept his thoughts to himself and bought the IVP-TM booklet from our receptionist without comment, you and I wouldn't be able to share a laugh over this story today.

They say that miscommunication makes for some of the best humor, and I think they're right--especially when the miscommunication takes place in the communication business. But beyond that, I think that this story characterizes what is true about most book buying--and religious book buying in particular. Every book has a story, as does every reader, and the mere transaction of reader and book can't capture all the complexity of either story. Behind the book is an author whose life has led him or her to write, and in particular to write that book. Behind the counter is a receptionist or a bookseller whose journey has led him or her to be the last personal encounter a reader has before entering into a particular book. And within a reader is an internal debate begging to be settled, an internal confusion longing to be cleared.

Not every book settles a debate or clears up confusion, of course, but every book has some circuit of relationships that it has ridden. It makes the communication business that much more personal, which makes it that much more meaningful.

Publish/Perish, Kiss Me/Kill Me

Dieter Roelstraete, in issue 12 of the journal Dot Dot Dot, extends Martin Heidegger's description of books as "letters to friends": 

Anyone who has ever "made" a book will immediately grasp the depth of feeling communicated in this admittedly romantic view of the book publishing business. No matter how strained the relationship between writer, editor, translator, designer, publisher, printer and book-seller can become, there is no denying the intimacy that is engendered by poring over the book as a labor of love that has required the "befriending," however formal and economically dictated, of so many different parties. By their very nature, books are collaborative efforts in a cultural space that continues to be dominated by individualism, conflated egos, and conflicts of solitary interests.

I should say lest you think Is Dave taking a class or something? that I didn't find this quotation by myself, nor did I deduce by myself that Heidegger (whoever that is) had anything to do with it. No, this quotation was forwarded to me by my colleague Matt Smith, a designer here at InterVarsity Press. It's a nice lived example of how things work around here, and how things in publishing work in general: insights come from all corners and contribute to the final product. And though there are days when the corners inhabited by designers, marketers, editors and authors seem like the four corners of a boxing ring, on our best days we all kiss and make up something uniquely collaborative, truly insightful, a conversation really worth joining.

Guess I'm feeling sappy today. I heart InterVarsity Press.

Body Image and Artificial Beauty

In our book Wanting to Be Her, Michelle Graham talks about an actress who didn't recognize herself in a magazine because of how different she had been made up. Well, More Than Serving Tea coeditor Nikki Toyama blogged about this link:

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca/flat2.asp?id=7134

It has an amazing one-minute video of how women are made up and photoshopped to look entirely different from how they normally appear in real life. Even supermodels don't look like supermodels. Check it out.

Book News Is No News

It seems sometimes as though the only news that books make is the news of their impending demise. In his article The New Book Burning Art Winslow draws attention to the steady dissolution of book sections in national newspapers. Coast to coast, papers such as the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the LA Times and the Dallas Morning News are making radical changes (read "substantial cutbacks") to their reporting on the book publishing industry.

Some journalists are blaming the trend on the book publishers themselves, who have redistributed advertising dollars from newspapers to in-store promotions and other publicity options. I'm sure that's a part of it--although as my friend Al notes, "It's not like newspapers don't carry sports because sports teams don't advertise, or they don't carry the weather because the Weather Channel doesn't run ads." But then again, there's a Weather Channel at all because people want to know the weather, and ESPN exists because someone somewhere anticipated a steady audience. Books, it seems, attract a more refined (read "smaller") audience, and thus niche (read "fewer") advertisers.

Of course, it's not as though you can't find people writing about books. Online stores such as Amazon have made reader reviews one of their most popular features; type "book reviews" into a search engine such as Google and you have 118 million sites to choose from. Not to mention all the bloggers effusively extolling the virtues of their favorite writers and writings.

It's not just online where people can find ways of learning about books, either. Professional journals and popular magazines alike still devote ample space to discussing what's new in print. Even People magazine has a book reviews section, for heaven's sake.

I think it's fair to suggest that part of the reason newspapers are retreating from the book review business is simple economics: fewer people are turning to newspapers for all their information, and so newspapers are having to cut their losses and rethink their business. I'm not so worried about the demise of book review sections in newspapers across the country; to be honest, I'm more worried about the impending demise of the newspapers themselves.

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In other news, someone has left a camping lantern in the men's bathroom here at IVP. I have no idea why; there's probably an entire post contained in that one observation though. I welcome your speculation and/or insights.