Yesterday I went into the nearby Newsstand at the Mall. I looked to see what magazines were left. The last time I looked, there was a single solitary rack.
Now, even that one rack is gone. I asked the nice Indian woman running the stand, and she confirmed it – no magazines at all. It wasn’t worth the trouble and expense of stocking it – nobody bought any of them.
I know that we’re in the Decline of magazines, with the rise of the internet and the decline of reading in general, but this amazed me. no Sports Illustrated. No porno, even. The only concession that justified the named “Newsstand” was that a wire rack at the front of the store sold a couple of newspapers.
This particular newsstand is descended from one in the next mall over, which was huge by comparison. It sold cards and gifts, and had one entire long wall with rack upon rack of magazines of all kinds. IOt moved over into the newly refurbished indoor mall next door, into a greatly reduced space, but it still had multiple racks of magazines of all kinds, catering to various interests. Sports, News, Women’s magazines, men’s magazines. Model builders. Writers. Playboy and P{enthouse and smaller porn. Now, it’s all gone.
They sell candy and snacks and beverages, smoking paraphernalia, cigars, and the odd gift. Lottery tickets might be their single biggest mainstay. But, aside from a few newspapers, nothing to read.
You can still buy magazines at the supermarket, the drug store (although I notice that their magazine rack right now is full of inflatable rafts – a temporary summer thing, I hope), and our one remaining Barnes and Noble, which has a selection like the Newsstand used to. If B&N goes down the tubes, we’re gonna be stuck with the meager offeriungs at Target and Stop and Shop.
I know what the OP’s talking about. I’ve seen a few “newsstands” that don’t sell magazines. And I agree - if you’re not selling magazines, you should stop calling your business a newsstand.
Sorry, it’s close to impossible to quantify the percentage of people who “read” and if it’s going up or down because every study covers a different type of reading (novels versus books versus magazines versus fiction versus the newspaper versus etc.) and almost all of them ignore reading that is done online, including this message board.
Because it’s true. I just can’t prove it with a convenient cite. But this is one time where the conventional wisdom is true. The Internet is mostly text-based and the vast majority of people spend a lot of time online every day. So they’re reading quite a bit.
But there are studies. I’ll try and scare up a few, but let’s start with this one for now:
I wonder who’s buying from that extensive magazine rack and Barnes and Nobles. There are a ton of magazines, and a lot of them seem like they are for very niche audiences. I can’t believe they are moving a big percentage of the magazines on that rack.
That’s because paper is magic and looking at written matter not written on paper is Just Different in some unquantifiable way related to the person complaining about it being middle-aged or older.
In short, literacy was killed off when the last rubricator put down his tools and yielded the floor to Gutenberg’s … things.
This. The only place I still see large racks of magazines is at the airport, and most of them are aimed at (what I consider) small groups of people. General Interest magazines have gone the way of the variety show.
Sometimes I look at the magazine racks in the supermarket and they are nearly all either People type or weight loss. If this is literacy, count me out. I do much of my reading on e-books. Although I do subscribe to several magazines too.
Just people being on the internet (like here) I wouldn’t call reading, but most special interest mags now offer a digital version; in the last year I’ve migrated all my periodicals to the iPad. They tend to be cheaper (especially my UK mags like Evo and Octane), don’t take up shelf space, and often include bells and whistles print can’t match (Evo’s really clever about this). So people could be reading periodicals as much without print. However, given print media’s obsession with circulation numbers, they have to know how many readers are doing this.
This is not a scholarly study itself, but tends to support Justin Bailey’s contention:
“Book sales are up, way up, from twenty years ago. Young adult readership is far wider and deeper than ever before. Library membership and circulation is at all-time high.”
So… what’s the cutoff for you? Individual pieces longer than 500 words? Longer than 1000 words? Pieces written in a specific linguistic register, or on specific topics? Or is the epistolary form itself “not reading” as far as you’re concerned?
…and thereby you at least half make my point. If people are getting things from the internet, they don’t need the newsstand. The fact that the newsstand is failed, though, strongly suggests that they aren’t reading magazines anymore (As doers the precipitous decline in magazines. There are websites devoted to magazine deathewatches).
Whether people are taking up the slack by reading a lot more on the internet to make up for not reading books or hard copy magazines (The cites I give show that they aren’t taking up all the slack reading e-books) is irrelevant to my point in this thread. But I doubt it.
I’d put the line at works written for pay. That covers the New York Times web site, Evo magazine’s digital edition, and leaves room for special interest sites like Gizmodo and Jalopnik that are sort of semi-pro, but cuts off tweets, internet postings, fanfic and such