The best-selling books at La Central in Madrid.Álvaro García
There are second-hand bookstores that sell books by weight: it is a curious, indisputably scientific way of valuing volumes.
What is not so common is to value books, not by their weight, but by their length.
They could be considered by measuring their spine (for example, 1 millimeter / 50 cents) or, even easier, by counting the number of pages.
After all, one of the most characteristic physical variables of a copy, in addition to its volume or weight, is its thickness: if it has few pages it will be a small book, if it has thousands, we will say it is a
tochazo
.
That extension matters has been calculated by a report prepared by Wordsrated, an American non-profit organization dedicated to discovering relevant data about the world of books and publishing.
What he has found is the unbelievable case of the
dwindling
best seller .
In the last decade (from 2011 to 2021), the average length of the best-selling books in the United States, according to
The New York Times lists
and including the fiction and non-fiction categories, it has fallen 51.5 pages on average (from 437.5 to 386), which represents a book shrinkage of 11.8%.
The probability that a book of more than 400 pages will enter the best-seller list fell by 29.5% in those years: bad times for the too thick.
In another order of things, and giving an idea of the prevailing transience in the publishing market, those who became among the best sellers in 2021 spent half the time in that category compared to those chosen by the public 10 years earlier.
"Overall, reading is on the decline," says Dimitrije Curcic, director of research for Wordsrated.
"Our main hypothesis was that the attention span of readers (and people in general) is shorter today."
The cause of this scattered and diminished attention is the barrage of stimuli that we receive in the current technological environment, mainly through social networks, applications, emails and audiovisual platforms, multiple channels that compete for our attention.
What some have called
infoxication
.
“It's not that people's attention wanes, it's that they steal it from us,” Curcic says, “because of that, I think our average readers are less likely to commit to a longer book, but to choose something they consider more interesting. realistic to complete.
Audiobook sales were excluded from the research for precisely this reason: listening to a read text is compatible with other activities and does not monopolize attention.
In electronic books, the perception of the extension can be different: it is not appreciated
a priori,
a book in EPUB format is a digital entelechy that does not even weigh.
The healthy Spanish billet
In Spain there are no studies that relate the length of books with sales.
"My perception is that the best-selling books are quite extensive," says Álvaro Manso, spokesman for the Spanish Confederation of Guilds and Associations of Booksellers (Cegal).
Indeed, many of the best-selling books in 2021 are notoriously thick:
The Beast
(Planet), by Carmen Mola, 544 pages;
Sira
(Planet), by María Dueñas, 648 pages
;
The Swifts
(Tusquets), by Fernando Aramburu, 704 pages.
They are well above the average calculated in the aforementioned study (386 pages), although there are no data indicating trends in the Spanish market.
Buying a thick book, from the perspective of
homo economicus
, it is cheaper, just like buying five-liter bottles of olive oil: it offers more entertainment time for the same price.
Giving away a book with presence, volume, hard cover, and many pages, usually looks better (unless one intends to be seen as a truly special person).
In addition, the extension is not the only parameter that influences the purchase and reading of a book.
Another thing to take into account is promotion, and many of these extensive titles are usually editorial bets supported by large advertising campaigns, as is the case of the Planeta awards.
"An intuition I have is that, in addition, people are now more inclined to stop reading books when they are not interested, there is no longer that moral obligation to finish the books they have started," says the bookseller.
"What I also perceive is that there are certain readers, such as those of
best sellers
, more focused on the plot, who tend to prefer longer books," says Manso, "those who read more literary books do not require as much length: the work of these writers is often to polish the text as much as possible, which produces shorter books. ”.
There are readers who prefer a very long story, a wide world in which to immerse themselves, become familiar with the characters and not leave for months (as in audiovisual series), others prefer shorter copies that allow them to learn more stories, more authors, be more agile in their exploration of the literary landscape.
It has once been said that short story books don't sell very well because readers are too lazy mentally to immerse ourselves in ten different universes in a single book, one per story.
“The novel has an incredible advantage over other storytelling formats, and that is its incredible plasticity,” says bestselling author Juan Gómez Jurado.
“A day can last three words or three chapters.
Years can pass in a sentence, or we can spend 5,000 words counting a couple of seconds in which a bomb explodes, as I did in
Reina Roja
(Ediciones B).
The only thing that matters, really, is that it serves the story in the best possible way."
The author has thus traveled between different extensions, from 664 of
The legend of the thief
(Planet) to 320
of God's spy
(Rock).
By the way, in April a very small but very important paper was dedicated to another of the best-selling authors who has sold the most paper in Spain: Correos issued a stamp to Carlos Ruiz Zafón, who died in 2019.
The longest book in the world
It is difficult to say which is the shortest book in the world, the one that requires the least time and attention.
It is considered the shortest story
The dinosaur
("When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there") by Augusto Monterroso, but by itself it does not configure a book.
Regarding the longest book, there is some consensus in pointing out
In Search of Lost Time
, by Marcel Proust, which, although published in seven volumes, can be considered a single work of 9,609,000 characters (counting the spaces).
For this reason, it was awarded the Guinness World Records Prize for the longest novel: this year marks the centenary of its final point and the death of its author.
At the other extreme, in addition to fat books, many publishers opt for collections of small and fine books: Cliff, Siruela, Destino... For example, the New Notebooks of Anagram recover the idea of publishing rabidly topical little books that the publisher Jorge Herralde had in the surroundings of the Transition.
“Just like in that time of political boiling, we now live in times of crisis”, says Isabel Obiols, head of the collection, “our mission wants to be the same: to provide material for debate in society”.
Publishing short books allows the publisher to be more up to date, almost journalistic, and reach readers concerned about contemporary problems, which are not few: “We can be agile, improvise the programming a bit, like a guerrilla ”, Obiols points out, “although,
In times when attention is atomized, short and small artifacts are an alternative that, moreover, allow us to boast of having read many books using the minimum time of our lives, now devoted mainly to updating social networks, preferably with photos of
healthy
breakfasts
and sunny mornings on the beach.
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