How many South Africans read books?
It might not be as bad as you think.
I wanted to know how many South Africans actually read books. It should be a fairly simple question to answer. It turns out it isn’t.
The All Media and Products Survey (AMPS) is a biannual survey of South Africans aged fifteen and older, with a sample size of about 25,000 that inquires about market and media activity in both urban and rural areas. It’s the authoritative source for businesses trying to determine the potential market size for new products. If it is to be trusted, this barometer of capitalism, then the state of the reading in South Africa isn’t nearly as dire as hysterical thought pieces in the Mail & Guardian would have one believe.
Look, I even made a graph.
Number of South Africans aged 15+ who report reading a book (excluding text books) by frequency and household income group
The most gratifying part of this graph is what happens when you add up the top two blocks of the bars, adults who read at least once a month, moving left to right. You see:
- 4,9-million reading adults who earn more than R11,000 a month
- 7-million reading adults who earn less than R11,000 a month
So far so good: hooray! Stop the hand wringing, middle class panickers! South Africans are reading. A full 32% of adults, at least once a month. 12-million potential readers of any book you might decide to write.
But here’s a funny thing: the number of South Africans who read, and the number of South Africans who buy books, seems to be a dramatically different number. The other source of information about such matters is the annual Publisher’s Association of South Africa (PASA) survey. While AMPS looks at the consumer side, people reading books, the PASA survey estimates the sales volumes of the people selling them.
PASA estimates that about 14-million books were sold in 2013, the most recent year the survey data is available. About 24% of these were children’s books, which would bring the volume figure for adults down to around 10,6-million. This gets you to about 0.7 of a new book per reader, per year, on average. Or, to see it the other way around: if we assume that book buyers buy an average of four books a year (there’s no good reason for suggesting four) then we have a publishing industry that provides for 3.5-million readers.
The numbers get much smaller when you look at PASA’s statistics about the number of new book titles published in South Africa every year:
So, a mystery is presented to us, a gap in the data. South Africans are reading, but where are their books coming from?
We can account for 5-million people immediately. AMPS tells us they’re visiting a library at least once a month (libraries!). And the remaining 3.5-million? I like to imagine this is made up for by clandestine book clubs in the townships, books lent to friends with whispers about where you’ll find the racy section, and dusty second-hand bookstores run by cranky old ladies. A whole second life of books, passed from hand to hand, little worlds pressed between cardboard sheets.
It’s what the tech entrepreneur-types I work with would call a market gap. For most readers, the value proposition of new books is unappealing, the product-market fit is misaligned, the pricing exceeds discretionary income. There are so many people trying to fix this problem: The brilliant Arthur Attwell, who started a well-intentioned but doomed attempt to get printing shops to print local books on demand (and learned some fascinating lessons in the process). The nice people from FunDza, a non-profit designed to get teenagers reading a local Sweet Valley High equivalent. The team of digital agency types who made Bookly, a book writing and sharing platform on Mxit. All of these projects are important. None of them have really changed the book culture.
There’s no doubt that South Africans love stories. Take the enduring appeal of radio serials at 3pm on SABC radio shows as evidence. And the fact that more homes in our country have a TV than a fridge.
So, there’s a lot to be depressed about when looking at the tiny number of people buying books. But maybe we’re just seeing things the wrong way.
My ex-boyfriend’s aunt is a media researcher. She makes the best baked Salmon in the world, so good that I forget I’m a vegetarian whenever I visit her. She’s a tiny woman in her mid-sixties who wears bright purple sack dresses and her reading glasses hanging on a beaded chain around her neck. She’s exactly the kind of woman I want to be when I’m old.
She told me a story about the founding of South Africa’s first major tabloid. She’d been brought in to support the team with her research into the viability of the idea. It didn’t matter that Deon du Plessis, the founder, was a veteran journalist, managing editor of the country’s most venerable newspapers. It was going to be a hard sell to the traditional publishers.
This tabloid could be unlike anything they’d ever made before, he said. But it would have to abandon the middle-class stiffness of other South African publications, he argued, to appeal to a wider base. The language would need to be looser, the stories less rigid in their subjects. They’d need to think about a new distribution network. And it would need to be cheap, cheaper than a can of coke.
The board wasn’t convinced. That wasn’t their market, and they didn’t believe that people who didn’t buy newspapers would suddenly start doing so. There were some titterings about “lowering the standards of journalism.”
A few months later, Deon had left that publisher to join a smaller one, where he started the Daily Sun, now the largest paper in the country with over 5-million readers. It carries stories of Tokoloshes and adultery, but also some deeply insightful pieces about life in South Africa.
“Maybe what we’re seeing today in books is the same,” she muses. “Maybe it’s not that people won’t buy books. Maybe it’s our own failure of imagination, about what books can be.”
