Someone who is trying to get a book published, and has been reading those “get your book published now!” books, said that men prefer non-fiction and buy it in greater numbers.
I never thought that since so many of the great fiction writers are men, and they seemed to be historically popular with both men and women (Dickens? Scott?)
So is it true that men are significantly more likely to be buying non-fiction than fiction? Why? Is that a modern development or traditional?
Women are more likely to be buying books, period. And what they read is mostly fiction.
Summary: 66% of ebook “power buyers” (buy at least a book per week) are women, and they predominantly buy fiction.
Summary: 80% of fiction readers are women. No one really knows why. But one theory is that girls start out with better verbal and sitting-still skills as children, key elements in enjoying reading, and, statistically, boys never catch up.
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Interesting; I had no idea.
In one of the linked articles it said that reading as a whole is down. But, the article was written in 2007. I wonder what the numbers are now, if reading has gone up thanks to ebooks.
One factor may have to do with the possibility that dyslexia may be much more common in men than in women. (AFAICT, many more boys than girls are diagnosed with dyslexia, but some researchers think that the incidence might be more evenly distributed, with girls just being comparatively underdiagnosed.)
If this is true, then it alters the nature of recreational reading on average between the genders. Reading rates are slower for dyslexics (and tend to stay slower even in adulthood when full literacy has been achieved), and consequently they may prefer literary genres with a more deliberate pace than fictional narratives.
More simply and less speculatively, there seems to be some evidence that at least when it comes to memory, men are better at retaining visual cues and women at retaining verbal ones. It’s a cliche to say “men are visual, women are verbal” and it’s doubtful how true it is as a blanket statement, but it may have something to do with gender-aligned preferences for pictures versus stories when it comes to leisure entertainment.
ETA: The “women read more in general” thing mentioned by Hello Again might have something to do with this dyslexia-differential possibility. I’m definitely one of those (female) “power readers”, with a high book consumption rate and a fast reading speed, and it always startles me a bit to realize that for some people reading is a much slower process. I can see why you wouldn’t be as interested in storybooks if reading was more of a chore, or perhaps a somewhat strenuous art, than an addiction for you.
Perhaps it is because men are more likely to be heavy internet users. I used to easily be able to read novels when I was a kid, but now my brain is rewired to the point that I find it strenuous to read a book in perfect linear order. Instead I just skim around reading random interesting passages until I’ve read all of it, which is more suited to non-fiction reading. I’ve read that I’m not the only person to come down with this condition.
I remember this coming up in library school, and it seems to be pretty well accepted in the field that 1) girls/women read more books than boys/men, and 2) boys/men are more likely to read non-fiction than fiction. These differences are apparent as early as elementary school, but the reasons for them aren’t clear. I don’t work with kids, but I’d speculate that part of it might be that there are plenty of novels for kids dealing with stereotypically “girlish” interests like horseback riding and babysitting there aren’t many dealing with “boyish” interests like sports. Lots of young boys read non-fiction books about their favorite athletes and teams, but there’s not to my knowledge a lot of fiction about Little League teams, etc. I couldn’t say whether this is because it’s an untapped market or because most boys who read non-fiction sports books actually would not be interested in sports fiction.
I’d almost forgotten this, but I did a group project for one of my classes where we surveyed 7th graders at a local middle school about their reading habits. We asked about their favorite books/genres as well as how they obtained books, what factors they used to decide which books to read, and who they talked to about books. Since this was just a class project at one school and not a peer-reviewed study of a broader group our results shouldn’t carry too much weight, but we did find large differences in the ways these girls and boys approached reading. In general, the girls had broader tastes and were far more likely to learn about books from other people they knew. They also talked about books more with their friends/siblings/teachers, borrowed more books from their friends, and received more books as gifts from friends/relatives. The boys tended to look for things on their own and not talk about them with anyone but their parents (who presumably asked).
I can see how these differences in behavior might lead to boys focusing on non-fiction even if there were no pre-existing preference for non-fiction. It’s fairly easy to find a non-fiction book on a topic of personal interest, but more difficult to pick out a novel that fits your tastes. The library at this school (which was by far the #1 place these boys obtained books) did not split its fiction section up by genre, it was all alphabetical by author’s last name. So even if a boy knew he wanted to read, say, a science fiction novel, it wouldn’t necessarily be easy for him to find one there by browsing.
No matter how much hype ebooks get, they remain a small percentage of all book sales. Even when they get to a higher percentage, it’ll mostly be by replacing print books so the overall trend will be neutral. What really drives sales is the number of super bestsellers at any given time. There have been estimates that the books that make the NYTimes bestsellers lists outsell all other books combined (i.e. 200 or so titles outsell the other 50,000 mainstream books).
Women have always been the dominant readers. Even in the 19th century, books aimed toward women probably outsold the action books that are now remembered as dime novels. Pulp fiction was famously oriented towards men, but romance pulps were always good sellers and individual titles may have sold more than the action stuff. In the mystery field - which by far dominated fiction throughout most of the 20th century - men got more attention, Holmes and Spade and Mike Hammer - but women were always thought to buy more books overall after they started being published in novel form. Science fiction was overwhelmingly male - and never sold beans until the fantasy books took over, because those attracted female buyers.
Publishing is the least analytical of any field. Publishers never seem to do studies of readers in any scientific fashion. Nobody inside the field can explain this: it’s just the way things have always been done. So figures on who buys what tend to be estimates and educated guesses and sheer wish fulfillment. What I’m given is the received wisdom in the field.
It appears to be mostly accurate. This pdf of a slide show on a recent survey, not by a publisher, says that 58% of book buyers are female and they buy 64% of all books, so each female buys slightly more than each male. Romances have been the hot publishing category for adults for a decade or two. More than half of all mass market paperback sales are romance. Female-skewing YA - Twilight, Hunger Games - have made that a major category. The staggering numbers for the biggest bestsellers mean that no nonfiction title can conceivably compare (the closest are books on childbirth and parenting and guess who the buyers are for those). If the Hunger Games has sold 25,000,000, that’s equal to 250 nonfiction bestsellers. And there aren’t 250 nonfiction bestsellers in any year.
Why? I prefer an explanation based on culture over Kimstu’s. Boys have traditionally been told to get outdoors and do things and girls have been told to stay in and be ladylike. Boys traditionally have been rewarded for getting their hands dirty and taking things apart and seeing how they run, which is the basis for much nonfiction. Boys are interested in battles and guns and most history has traditionally been told in terms of battles and guns rather than personalities. Girls will read books with boy heroes; boys won’t read books with girl heroes: that gives girls twice as many books to read. These are giant glib generalizations and there’s a good chance they won’t survive because culture is changing to allow girls to be more active (girls are nuts about archery because of Katniss) and they are getting involved in traditionally male occupations and roles. But that just puts negative pressure on reading as a whole; nothing out there gives any indication that men will start reading proportionally more or that nonfiction isn’t slowly dying.
While I agree that “Just-So Story”-type explanations referring every gender difference back to some speculative biological basis are very suspect in general, I would tentatively (as befits a lady ;)) point out that one of your data points there might support my suggestion.
We can’t just handwave away all gender differences in cognitive phenomena by intoning the shibboleth “men are visual, women are verbal”, but it does seem to have significant application in pornography/erotica. And romance novels, even the not-so-explicit ones, are to some extent “girls’ porn”, as this article indicates:
So it could be that at least part of the difference in female and male fiction consumption is simply the counterpart to the difference in male and female (photographic) porn consumption. Men prefer to see it and women prefer to read about it: simple as that. (Well no, the complete explanation is almost certainly not as simple as that, but I can easily believe that that’s a major factor.)
Another possibility is that it’s related to the actual material boys have access to, YA and children’s literature tends to heavily focus on girls, so if a boy is forced to read a book he’s probably more likely to find something interesting in the non-fiction than he is to find it in fiction.
I’m, relatively, a man, and I can tell you that I went many years without reading fiction. I’ve always read a lot, but found myself reading non-fiction almost exclusively for years. I think the main reason was I reached a point where almost all my reading was done in bed. When I read fiction, I would become so engrossed in the story, I’d stay up far too late reading. Non-fiction would hold my interest but not keep me up all night.
This is outside my area, but to the extent that this is true it’s my impression that it’s a pretty recent phenomenon and due in large part to the success of the Twilight books (first one published in 2005) and the Hunger Games books (first one published in 2008). Lots of very popular children’s/YA books are focused on boys, from classics like Treasure Island and Tom Sawyer to fairly recent bestsellers like the Harry Potter series, the Inheritance series, the Percy Jackson series, and the Artemis Fowl series.
Because men like cold, hard, facts. Women would rather fantasize.
:dubious: Cite? This thread (male and female posters alike) was actually doing pretty well sticking to responsible inferences from “cold, hard facts” to explain a documented factual phenomenon, until you showed up with nothing but a sexist wild-ass guess.
I prefer non-fiction because it’s typically real stories told with real outcomes. I feel like I learn something about human nature and the world when I read non-fiction.
I dislike reading fiction because I can feel the author shaping the world to fit the needs of the story. I feel like it’s useless to try to figure out what will happen since the author can just tweak the plot however they want. Everything feels so contrived. Most of the time it seems fiction writers are writing the same stories but just changing the names of the characters and the settings.
I can’t refute your suggestion, and biology has presented some interesting answers recently. Constitutionally, though, I prefer cultural explanations because I’ve done the cultural research and not the biological research. There’s a lot of hand-waving in academic cultural circles - just try reading through an academic text on anything - and none of the answers are truly satisfactory. Besides, it’s always true that the answer to anything is never simple and always has multiple components.
But again you can use cultural changes as a partial explanation to this. Culturally, female pornography was completely forbidden, while male pornography was merely under-the-table. That has changed greatly in just a few years. Really, a decade ago the first few erotic romances had a terrible time breaking into the market and were disparaged even by other romance writers. That’s changed overnight. I can’t accept a biological explanation for overnight cultural change.
But it’s probably true that the overwhelming amount of visual porn on the Internet has reduced the need for the vast amount of print porn (mostly softcore until the late 60s-early 70s, paralleling the hardening of movies) that once was ubiquitous if you knew where to look. I collect digest novels, paperbacks from the 1940s and 1950s that were printed in a format about the size of a Reader’s Digest magazine, hence the name. Of the 3000 or so published, the half that wasn’t western, sf, mystery, and a few high-brow treats were so-called sleaze paperbacks, softcore prose but lurid titles and eye-catching covers. Many were written by women under pseudonyms but all sold to males. The successors to those books are gone, but I know of ten of thousands of very hardcore stories, some short, many novel-length, available for free download. Lots of males continue to desire print and a large number of ebooks offered from small presses garner sales. Those are parallel to the women’s erotica publishers. It’s hard to get any sense of how many copies of each kind is sold or downloaded or just read online. Nor do I have a feel of whether the readers mainly read or read as an adjunct to the visual. With fan fiction and slash fiction and 'shipping fandom, writing the visual creates huge overlaps, by women who fee perfectly free to do so without opposition from society. 50 Shades of Gray came from fan fiction, and it will be read by women who have fewer qualms because of the awfulness of prose. Not what steams my blood.
Socialization. We grow up being told exactly this:
And why do women read more? Women’s activities = quiet, solitary activities. Men’s activities = loud, group activities.
None of this stuff is biologically determined, it’s just what we deem acceptable socially.
I was thinking possibly women have more leisure time than men, allowing more time to read.
Then I thought maybe men watch more TV instead of reading.
Both of these were counter-intuitive. Both are false, based on cursory web searches.
Doesn’t seem that men are online much more than women, either, although the articles I turned up were more mixed.
Oh, spare me. :rolleyes:
It’s because men have to work for a living!
::d&r::