Publishing and retail group Alma littera commissioned an opinion poll which has revealed that 52 percent of adults and 35 percent of minors do not read at all. Grown-ups usually prefer watching TV instead, while kids also play computer games.
Even though 96 percent of parents with kids between 3 and 10 claim they do have children's books at home, about one fourth of all kids failed to read a single book in six months. And reading – as well as other habits and skills – are formed in childhood. A positive example from one's parents is crucial.
Moreover, one in five of the polled admitted they do not entirely comprehend the texts they read.
The process of reading, of course, has not disappeared from people's lives – what has changed is the setting of reading, the form and content. While previously, one used to read newspapers, magazines, and books, now it is more often mobile texts, online news, blogs, facebook posts, and tweets.
At one time, book was a gateway to the world – whether real or fictional. Reading books helped form one's personality, develop cognitive faculties, imagination, broaden one's horizons, or so the argument went. Now, these functions are usually covered by television and the Internet.
How are publishers responding to this?
Ambitious vision of a leader
Alma littera CEO Gintautas Mažeika admits that results about Lithuanians' reading habits came as little surprise. However, the publisher, as a market leader in Lithuania, feels like it must take responsibility. The goal is ambitious – to make Lithuania into the most reading country in Europe.
The first step was an initiative called “I grow up reading” – various events involving famous people reading books for kids; a record-size book written by children; book trees, etc.
Feedback has been very positive, Mažeika says. The project was joined by schools, libraries, politicians, businesspeople, individuals, and the society at large. There is also a long-term programme under preparation, which will seek to include as many people in Lithuania as possible into reading activities. This should boost book sales, too.
“The more people read, the better it will be for them and for the state. In Europe, the most enthusiastic readers are Finns, Englishmen, Germans. Look at the economies of these countries and their standards of living. There must be a connection,” Alma littera CEO notes.
Price influences readership?
Mažeika stresses that book prices in Lithuania are among lowest in Europe, therefore talks that people do not read because they cannot afford books are unfounded.
“The market is very small, we've got a peculiar language that hardly anyone understands, so publishing a book costs much. If someone claims he doesn't read because prices are too high, he is simply looking for excuses. Perhaps a person cannot afford a recently published hardcover, but after several months, the prices drop by tens of percent,” Mažeika says.
Gintaras Bleizgys, co-owner of the company House of Books, begs to differ. He follows closely markets in Lithuania's small towns and claims that, despite what the recent polls claim, people still read books. Not everyone, though, can spare money to own them.
“When people received their heating bills last January, book sales plummeted instantly, even though until mid-January we'd seen a steep increase, compared to last year. People first pay their utilities, buy food and gas, while books are goods of a different sort,” Bleizgys says.
This summer, though, was more profitable for publishers than a year before – sales of both fiction and non-fiction grew. Sales, however, are not indicators of how much people read, since some borrow books, others subscribe to libraries; some people buy books for themselves, while others give them as presents. It is unclear, moreover, if all purchased books get read at all and if they do, by how many people.
Advent of e-books
A new alternative for publishers to consider – e-books. Outside the US, the market is still quite underdeveloped, even though the demand is slowly growing.
Lithuania, too, is embracing the e-book format. This autumn, Alma littera is opening an e-book store. At first, it will be offering 300 titles from the publisher's catalogue. After the project launches, other houses will be offered to sell their titles on the platform, too.
By the end of the year, the e-book store expects to have between 400 and 500 titles and over 5,000 by 2015.
Prices of e-books are still to be determined, but they must be well below those for print editions.
Mažeika admits that the market for e-books in Lithuania is very modest, so he does not expect big profits. “There is a certain group of people, mainly youths, who demand e-books – we cannot ignore it.”
Vytas Vincas Petrošius, CEO of bookshop chain Vaga, concurs: “A time will come when printed book will be a luxury item, since e-books will win because they are more comfortable and cheaper. But they are not very popular yet, so we'll be choosing and reading paper books for still quite some time. However, we take the future of e-books quite seriously. There has already emerged a group, albeit small, of buyers who are interested in new technologies and electronic books.”
Petrošius says that e-book sales have been less than gratifying throughout Europe: In 2011, e-book sales in Poland, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands made up mere 1 percent; slightly more in France – 1.8 percent. Only in the UK did e-books make up 6 percent of total book sales.
Marketing director at Baltos lankos publishing house, Ieva Bluvštein, also underscores how changing reading habits influence publishers' offerings: “Baltos lankos is reputed as a publisher of good, serious, and interesting literature, so we will continue to offer books of that sort. However, in order to meet demands of various readers, we are expanding our catalogue: we're beefing up our children's literature section, we are looking for high-quality light literature titles. By the end of the year, we will be offering e-books by Lithuanian authors.”
Bookshop like home with wine
In order to expand, bookshops are offering more than just books. The House of Books is a small company, so in order to survive, it must expand its network from 12 to at least 20 bookshops. The target is to be achieved by 2014.
Co-owner of the network Bleizgys claims that his aim is to get no more than half of the total revenue from book sales: “The book market is well-explored and it will not expand. It can only contract, since the population is getting smaller – people are leaving, birth rates are falling, and if more people come from abroad, they will not necessarily read Lithuanian books. So if you want to expand your business, books are not the way to go. Bookshops are points of attraction with constant flows of people – you can offer them a wider range of products.”
The House of Books intends to sell entertainment and leisure goods, also interior decorations like vases. It will also revamp its bookshops – change their spatial layouts, interior design.
“The concept of the House of Books can accommodate a wider range of products. When you read at home, you also need certain lighting, a comfortable chair, we like to sip tea, coffee, or juice while reading, have a snack. In every home, there is a nursery, a workroom, a sitting room, so we will also try and diversify spaces within our bookshops. Say, if we design a shop after a workroom, there will be a wider range of office supplies, encyclopaedias,” Bleizgys says.
He would also like to offer wine and other types of beverages to visitors at his bookshops: “After all, some bigger houses have cellars stocked with wines and beers – so we could cooperate with wine-bars.”
Books, coffee, and pleasant environment
Vaga, meanwhile, has already modified the image of its bookshops. Its bigger outlets have adopted the “three in one” concept: a book, a cup of coffee, and a pleasant environment to talk. The chain has built modern reading rooms and cosy cafés, where people can flip through new books, have a cup of coffee, meet friends.
The concept is hardly new – it has long been tried and adopted in other countries.
Lithuanian bookshop chains cooperate with Coffee Inn, Šviežia kava, and other coffeeshops, offering cold and hot beverages, snacks, confectionary.
However, the new-type bookshops have so far been confined to Lithuania's major cities. The House of Books, on the other hand, intends to be offering coffee alongside books in smaller provincial towns, too.
Reading habits in the Soviet times
Even though recent polls might seem to send a pessimistic message, book readership has not dropped so significantly over the last 20-30 years as it might seem. In his essay “Snobs, Debtors, and Rippers of Lenin's Works (Reading Habits in Late Soviet Period),” journalist and historian Tomas Vaiseta discusses what and how much Lithuanians used to read under Brezhnev.
He refers to a survey of people in Panevėžys by two sociologists, Sergejus Rapoportas and Vladas Gaydys. They conclude that only about 30 percent of Lithuanians read regularly in the late Soviet period, while others lied in answering survey questions, since reading books was thought to lend social prestige.
Library subscriptions from 1979 paints a similar picture. For instance, only one third of all workers borrowed books from libraries in Šiauliai. The remaining two thirds claimed they had read a book less than a week before, but could not name its title.
