Journal of Cultural Economics (2019) 43:517–526

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10824-019-09365-0

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Cultural economics, books and reading

Samuel Cameron1

Received: 8 September 2019 / Accepted: 14 September 2019 / Published online: 11 October 2019
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019

Abstract
The field of cultural economics is surprisingly short on research on the book market
and on the activity of reading compared with other more recently invented media
such as films and musical recordings. There are a number of traditional economic
propositions relevant to books and reading which could be further researched. In
addition, books and reading are strongly impacted by the disruptive innovations of
digital technology and the use of online distribution platforms that fuel much of the
research on the more recently invented cultural media. This paper gives an overview
of some key new papers collected in this special issue and identifies additional lacu-
nae in this general field of research.

Keywords  Reading · Books · Economics of literature · Libraries · Comic books

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading
them.”—Ray Bradbury

1 Introduction

If someone unfamiliar with the field of cultural economics was asked to speculate
on what it was about, then the activity of reading and the production, storage and
pricing of books might be some of the first things that would spring to mind. How-
ever, this has been a somewhat neglected area compared with other more recently
invented media although there are occasional recent papers, such as Asai (2016) and
Borowiecki and Navarrete (2018). A useful earlier study of the field can be found in
Canoy et al. (2006). Books and reading are the longest established field of cultural
production and consumption embedded in some form of media which can be repro-
duced and circulated. They are many centuries older than movies, computer/video

Samuel Cameron (Retired).

* Samuel Cameron
dantalianalysis@yahoo.co.uk
1
Bradford, UK

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 518 Journal of Cultural Economics (2019) 43:517–526

games and the various hardware formats of music output that preceded the rise of
digital platforms.
Books and reading have allowed the formation of cultural capital that has accu-
mulated over many centuries. Hence, we still have access to texts generated hun-
dreds of years ago. Thanks to investment and research, this capital expands beyond
its original source as we now have access to information that enhances the under-
standing of the prior stock of literary cultural capital such as letters and draft manu-
scripts from authors and participants in the original work. As such, many books are
related to other areas of cultural consumption such as music, visual art and films,
as they provide biographical information and critical and appreciative inquiry. At
present, we do not seem to be receiving research work in this crossover area, such
as a study of the market for books about music or, say, the symbiotic relationship
between book sales and a powerful movie franchise like Lord of the Rings or Harry
Potter.
In terms of reading per se, we could also note the symbiotic relationship between
comic books and franchise movies of the superhero type. This is touched on in the
paper by Hionis and Yong Ha (2019) in this issue who fail to find a statistically sig-
nificant relationship between comic-based movie releases and sales of comic books.
This is, of course, the first test of such a relationship and the finding that requires
scrutiny by further studies. There is a growing number of economic studies of the
comic book market which are reviewed by Crosby (2019) in this issue, but these
also tend to be about the internal market and such things as collecting habits, not the
crossover with other areas of culture.
It is not necessary to define reading, for present purposes; however, there is more
of an issue as to what we mean by a book given that we now have a growth in audio
books and e-books. Some surveys report a snobbery against audio books that they
are not proper books and are inferior. These divergences could be very important
in empirical work looking at sales of books or at time spent reading and volume
of books read. A book is not the same thing as a magazine or a journal, but they
may perform an identical function in terms of being delivery mechanisms for infor-
mation or enjoyment. In the pre-digital era, part of the distinction between printed
books and part-works relates to permanence and access. For example, an academic
might seek to collect their individual papers into a book collection or might write an
extended monograph which draws on these individual papers. Items which were not
consolidated in books might be less readily accessible via borrowing from libraries
and so on. Clearly, things have changed with a vast array of material of different
provenance swirling around in the googled digital soup to the point where readers
may not be entirely clear if they have just read a blog, a book, an academic article or
a newspaper piece. The act of reading like the act of listening to music can now be
more fragmented. It does not have to rely on books as the prime delivery mode for
large amount of it as an individual could actually read quite a lot on a regular basis
whilst rarely reading any of the sources in their entirety. The supply-side drivers
encourage this as online reading material relies on ‘click bait’ as its revenue source,
and thus, there is competition to get the viewer to another source of material from
the one they are consuming. We would expect this to be detrimental to the long-run
consumption of books in any delivery format.

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In the field of poetry, there was a clear status hierarchy where having one’s poems
published in a book collection signifies artistic success and potentially greater long-
run revenue and earnings. The revenue factor derives from copyright as an individ-
ual is, in most fields, greater able to derive personal income from a book than from
an article in a collection where they have signed away a great deal of copyright. This
may be in the form of a lump-sum payment or in journalism has often been of a pay-
ment by results type such as a fee per word written.
In contrast to the collection in a magazine or journal, the book represents a cul-
tural artefact embodying the work of usually one or a selected group of people. As
with other media, the production of books faces problems of risk and uncertainty
in terms of sales forecasting; hence, there is an incentive for publishers to struc-
ture contracts in such a way that they do not end up losing money. For such things,
as literary or entertainment blockbuster novels or intense biographies, much of the
upfront cost burden is laid on the author in terms of sustained hours of effort. Such
effort cannot by itself result in payment unless the person is directly hired as an
employee to do the writing which only tends to occur with short form recurrent writ-
ing—typically journalism. This justifies the granting of advances by publishers, but
to date we have not seen any actual economic analysis of advances and how techno-
logical disruption impacts them (although Hionis and Yong Ha (2019) do touch on
the payment system for comic books which is return based not advance based).
One consequence of disruptive digital innovation is a change in the perception
of self-publishing as the upfront fixed and sunk costs of physical book output and
distribution can be bypassed by e-books. In the era before digital disruption, self-
publishing was generally looked down on as vanity publishing, which took place
because work was not good enough to be placed with ‘proper’ publishing outlets.
Format conversion software is needed to render the text into the format of an e-book
which can be read adequately on as many hosting devices and platforms as possible.
This is commonly referred to as ‘the meat grinder’ in the form of such packages as
Smashwords and Amazon KDP. As with music and film making, the presence of
new distribution platforms would seem to increase competitiveness in the book mar-
ket. New entrants may have fewer barriers to entry, but they can face an increased
supply from existing books and the incumbent publishers. For example, older books
can be republished in the e-book format when they might have been deemed not via-
ble in printed format. To date, the Journal of Cultural Economics has not received
analyses of entry and success from self-publishing via e-book formats as the focus
on these has been on the consumer side.

2 Two‑way trade from cultural economics to literature

The most traditionally cultural area of books is the literary text—novels, plays and
poetry. It may be noted we have had no papers on poetry whatsoever either directly or
on related phenomena such as poetry competitions and festivals. There have been occa-
sional forays into the relationship between economics and literary novels or dramatic
plays. This may not be surprising given that we have had works from Arthur Miller and
John Steinbeck which are memorably located in settings of economic depression in the

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USA. In modern terms, some of the works of David Mamet have very clear relation-
ships to both economic analysis and contemporary economic issues.
In contrast, Bohannon and Lee (2019) in this issue turn to the earlier works of Jane
Austen as a model of a more enlightened social economics, with altruistic and moral
content, as opposed to the selfish ‘economic man’ approach associated with the history
of mainstream economics. They also consider at various points the economic philoso-
phy embedded in the works of Charles Dickens who might be considered one of the
early English humanist critics of the socially detrimental effects of the industrial revo-
lution and the free market on the social economy. In this regard, they follow some ear-
lier work in economics education journals, such as Watts and Smith (1989), who look
to works in drama and literature as vehicles to help show how economic principles can
be found in unexpected places, thus rhetorically enhancing their claims to merit.
The pro-free-market approach is taken to more controversial extremes in the literary
work of Ayn Rand which has been inspected for similarity to Austrian economics [see
Boetke (2005)]. Rather than comparing Austen with a fellow fiction writer like Rand, at
such an opposite end of the spectrum, Bohannon and Cecil provide a comparison and
contrast of Austen with the writings of Adam Smith the founder of economics and not
a writer of fiction. The writings of Smith are extremely voluminous and diffused over
many areas. Thus, they provide the same risks of disputation as major religious texts.
Hence, we may expect that some might disagree with Bohannon and Cecil, which may
provide useful future discussion. For example, questions might be raised as to whether
Austen’s contiguity is rooted in Smith’s moral philosophy and not his economics if we
believe these can be separated, which is always a problem as instanced by the origins of
the notion of the ‘invisible hand’.
They propose, in Sect.  5 of their paper, the question ‘Did Jane Austen chan-
nel Smith?’ which presumably implies there is categorically no chance that she may
have read him or absorbed his ideas from some secondary source of exposition. Thus,
the implication is that she somehow produced similar ideas, in another form of writ-
ing, due to sharing some common starting position. It is admitted that no one has any
knowledge of whether she did, in fact, read any Adam Smith, but an authority is quoted
claiming that if she had read any book in such a topic area, then Wealth of Nations is
the most likely candidate.
The paper deals with one side of the matter, looking for economics in literary texts
as opposed to the other which is the analysis of literary texts through the application of
economics models. There are some examples of this in Cameron and Collins (2000)
where works by D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy are inspected in terms of game the-
ory applied to the strategies employed in selecting marital/relationship partners. Closer
to the concerns of Bohannon and Lee (2019), we also find in Cameron (2002) a discus-
sion of Mandeville’s poem ‘The Fable of the Bees’ first published in 1705 in terms of
the modern economics of prostitution literature.

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3 Data sources

There is no consolidated authoritative data source for this topic which permits
reliable attempts to do things like make international analytic comparisons of
determinants of the amount of reading. The NOP Worldwide Culture Index quan-
tifies hours per week spent reading in different countries. This has India at the top
with 10.42 according to the Examined Existence website with the USA (5.42 tied
with Germany) and UK (5.18) outside the world Top 20.
Inevitably much of the data are fragmentary and come from surveys of indi-
viduals on their reading habits (see, for example, Ringstad and Loyland (2006)
for an earlier example and Fernandez and Garcia (2019) in this issue), which are
typically done for other purposes. Such surveys also tend to be of a nature that
limits the application of panel methods even to reading habits within one country.
Hence, it is difficult to study dynamic factors such as rational addiction. Sources
which do recur frequently, such as the Omnibus YouGov study, in the UK lead to
a steady stream of interesting reports but probably are not suitable in their execu-
tion for detailed econometric analysis.
We have the usual problem of how much meaningful economic analysis can
be done with general surveys of individuals. One problem is that direct price and
income data are often absent and it is difficult to use the data to infer any more
expanded concepts, from allocation of time theory in the form of ‘price of time’
or ‘full income’. Hence, these are incorporated more indirectly in allocation of
time issues as Fernandez and Garcia (2019) within a recursive set-up where some
time is already preempted by mandatory prescription such as work time. Their
dataset is drawn from the last wave of the Cultural Habits and Practices Survey
(Encuesta de Hábitos y Prácticas Culturales) conducted by the Ministry of Edu-
cation and Culture of Spain in 2014–2015.
Further, the data do not distinguish between the source material read, and thus,
we can not completely look at the allocation of time between reading for ‘fun’ and
more serious reading. That is, assuming, say, reading an airport novel or biogra-
phy of a sportsperson is ‘fun’, but a biography of Winston Churchill or Donald
Trump is ‘serious’. The data in the paper are not on a fun/serious spectrum but in
terms of ‘intrinsic’ or ‘extrinsic’ reading based on whether the reading is neces-
sary for the person’s work or study.
The data used in the other papers, excluding that of Hionis and Yong Ha, are of
a more experimental nature. The evaluation of libraries by Fujiwara et al. (2019)
uses standard WTP-type measures typically used in consultancy work for policy
evaluation. Crosby (2019) examines digital disruption using elicitation of stated
preferences, and his aim is to estimate the monetary value (or hedonic price
increment) attached to characteristics of the digital reading product rather than
estimate a social benefit value of the sector as in the library study. This work uses
a survey on Australian readers, carried out by a market research company rather
than research assistants.
Hionis and Yong Ha (2019) resort to the use of industry data to profile the
American comic book market. It comes from Diamond Distributors, the market’s

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sole distributor and hence is not equivalent to sales data as items distributed to
retailers may remain unsold. The data come from the top 300 comic book titles
issued every month from 12/2005 until 12/2017.
These types of data sources are familiar in other areas of cultural economics. The
one type of increasingly common data usage, absent here, is epiphenomenal acci-
dental and user-generated data such as found on supplier websites (digital stream-
ing) and user community sites (such as TripAdvisor and Rotten Tomatoes). No data
set is perfect, and those used here have some problems of coverage and generalis-
ability but no more so than in other media areas like music, films and video games.

4 Consumption and production

The most obvious approach to consumer interaction with books from an economic
point of view is simply to analyse price elasticity of demand as if books were
just like any other good (see, for example, Bittlingmayer (1992) and the literature
review in Hionis and Jong Ha (2019) for comic books). The trend has been to look
at hedonic pricing by inference from regressing observed price on characteristics
(Wyburn and Roach 2012) or by using hypothetical scenarios in the controlled
experiments as per Crosby (2019).
Some books may equate to luxuries for the consumer which may be reflected in
the price and impact the price responsiveness. Kochkina and Popova (2017) attempt
to establish, from regression results, whether books in Russia have been luxuries
using the common textbook notion of income elasticities greater than 1 as an index
of luxury. It needs to be borne in mind that this does not equate in an obvious way
with the lay conception of a luxury use as indulgences which the person may feel
they should not really have bought or as high quality brand variations (such as in
the chocolate market). The papers collected here do not deal with any such luxury
or gift issues as they focus on day-to-day aspects of reading and books. They do
involve instances where people are willing to pay additional amounts for characteris-
tics but these are not luxurious.
As with other media products, there is an important information good aspect to
the product of reading outputs which creates a role for reviews in creating demand.
Crosby incorporates this into his experimental study of demand for books resulting
in an imputed monetary value for favourable critical comment.
We would be inclined to the view that the volume of material is so great at any
given time that no specific individual will find themselves constrained by lack of
choice in reading material so there chief decision margin is how much time to
read. Fernandez and Garcia (2019) focus on self-reports of average minutes spent
reading with their chief focus being on substitution effects between required read-
ing and reading for pleasure. They look at the usual demographic factors found
in studies of cultural consumption, chiefly in this instance age and gender. Given
obvious gross differences in reading amount by employment status, they run sep-
arate regressions for students, employed and unemployed people. This makes an
interesting difference to gender effects which seem to evaporate when the disag-
gregated approach is used despite gross gender differences being evident in other

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descriptive data sources. As is common in studies of other media besides books,

the age impact is not clear and probably requires closer scrutiny.
Their overall findings on reading type substitution are interesting as reading
with extrinsic motivation increases the likelihood of intrinsic reading but reduces
the time allocated to it. This does highlight the obvious problem of lack of stand-
ardisation of a unit of time reading. An hour is an hour is an hour, but an hour on
a train is not the same as an hour in bed reading and so on, and some people may
be skim readers and others may like to wallow in the experience. It is not clear if
there is any mapping between these modalities and the amount of reading, e.g. we
do not know how an avid reader (the term used in general surveys and in two of
the papers here) reads as opposed to how much they read.
Besides substitution between reading by its underlying motivation, we also
have issues of substitution in the delivery method. The key prediction about
e-books was that they would displace traditional paper-based consumption. Ini-
tially, this was somewhat hampered by limited platforms, few items on the plat-
forms and slow take up on those platforms—e.g. it has been possible before
the rise of mobile phones to read on personal digital assistants (PDAs). Mobile
phones lightened some of the above restrictions, but the typical mobile phone
would still, in many circumstances, not be ideal for the book reading experience
in optical terms. Kindles and their spin-offs would be expected to hasten this as
one marvels at the vision of being able to go away for extensive study or leisure
reading with a veritable library of material in a tiny package.
Crosby explores how the apparent hiccup in adoption, given what we would
expected from the evolving market, may be due to format issues. He says the
reading experience has goods characteristics that do not translate well to digital
formats, more so for certain genres and groups of readers the fact that younger
readers are powering this transition means that one could still reasonably expect
to see the market shares of paperback and hardback books to be continually
eroded over the coming years. This conclusion on age transitions is similar to
what is found for the music CD, from looking at YouGov data in the UK [see
Cameron (2015), p.129].
Crosby identifies three distinct classes of book readers. The first class is ’techno-
logical adopters’ with similar willingness to read printed and e-books who are the
youngest of the three classes. Second is the ‘popular readers’, exhibiting price sen-
sitivity and a preference for paper-based book formats only. Then, we come to the
‘avid readers’ who exhibit the highest willingness to pay for books. In this instance,
they are said to exhibit cultural omnivorousness in terms of diversity of type of book
read. However, this does not automatically bundle into avidness as you could be an
avid consumer of a limited range of types of output.
One example of an avid univore could be the fanatical reader of comic books.
The American comic book is an everyday object as it was cheap and physically con-
stituted more of a magazine than a book. It is also a form of reading that requires
pictures but neither could exist without the other. As such, it again raises some
questions about measuring reading in minutes spent as the picture-based mode will
reduce the time required to absorb a given text but might lead to more repeat con-
sumption of the same item (for added enjoyment) compared with a literary novel.

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Hionis and Yong Ha (2019) show that the comic book industry has grown slowly
since it suffered a decline in the 1990s.
An interesting feature of this paper is how it highlights that proactive labour
market stances by the creative workers has come relatively late compared to some
other cultural sectors such as acting and musicianship. This is likely due to it being,
like stand-up comedy, a somewhat solitary occupation where intrinsic competition
between the creative workers is detrimental to collective action. Proactive worker
defence finally comes from the rise of Image Comics, who, from 1992, exclusively
publish creator-owned material, against the industry norm of somewhat gig econ-
omy employment. Their profit-sharing model offers a rate of 25 times that paid by
the duopolistic giants of DC and Marvel.
All of the empirical work discussed so far concerns items which are sold in the
market at a price. One key feature of books and reading, which inspired some early
works in cultural economics, is the phenomenon of free-to-borrow lending libraries
which are subsidised by governments due to belief in some public goods properties
that generate positive externalities that cannot be captured by alternate provision.
Some of the evidence and claims in Fernandez and Garcia (2019) lend weight to this
traditional view. However, this carries very little weight with policy makers nowa-
days and, in the UK, there have been numerous library cutbacks and closures often
only partly forestalled by pressure to use voluntary labour.
Thus, some extra quantification of further externalities would seem to be required
by those campaigning for strong support to the library sector. This is found in the
paper by Fujiwara et al. (2019) which looks at the value of libraries via contingent
valuation methods and also assesses their contribution to subjective well-being in
the UK.
The library sector is a clearly polarised one with a small number of prestige
national (and specialist) cultural institutions which also provide heritage functions
such as archiving significant historical documents and, at the other end of the spec-
trum, local libraries serving communities often in poor areas. The latter, in the UK,
have, as mentioned, been subject to funding problems and closures, and a case might
be made for their total elimination given changes in digital technology which allow
public access to the sort of material that previously required a visit to a library.
Granted, public libraries tend to actually provide these digital access methods to
lower-income clients who may have poor digital cultural capital. By itself this does
not establish the merits of more funding to libraries as it may still be potentially
more efficient to subsidise its digital reading users instead.
The use of WTP from a contingent valuation method faces similar problems to
other areas of cultural economics if it were to be taken seriously in determining
an optimal policy. Chiefly, this concerns the problem of income effects. The low-
est WTP is found among library non-users who are unwaged and among non-users
with dependent children. It is difficult to disentangle the relations between library
non-use, low relative economic status and WTP. Some quite large monetary gains
are estimated. One needs to be cautious about the neglected fallacy of composition
problem in all such studies of subsidising something because it is a ‘good thing’.
That is, if we aggregated the gains from more funding for all the different ‘good
things’, the aggregate gain might be a ludicrously implausible number.

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5 Conclusion

It can be seen from the papers in this issue, and the additional items cited in this
article, that the area of books and reading has had contributions in historically estab-
lished areas of cultural economics and those currently exciting attention—chiefly
with respect to digital disruption. It is clear that there are many neglected areas
which could usefully be explored in the future. This includes some lacunae identi-
fied in the papers in this collection and some further topics that seem to have been
totally neglected thus far. One example of this is the application of rational addic-
tion. To check this, I googled ‘Rational Addiction and the Demand for Books’ (it
was actually on DuckDuckGo instead on 22 July, 2019), and what came up were
entries for cocaine, alcohol, caffeine, NFL attendance and tobacco but nothing about
books and reading.
I then consulted repec.org and found one paper on Colombian newspaper reading
which claimed to be based on rational addiction (Aguado et al. 2018). For what it’s
worth, the only rational addiction paper cited in this work is the original Becker and
Murphy paper; hence, it does not cite any prior cultural or media economics work
on rational addiction on non-reading topics. Plus, the paper seems to be just based
on the addition of past behaviour as habit formation rather than a fully developed
rational addiction model.
Clearly, this special is not the last word on books and reading. The next chapter
in economics scholarship on books and reading remains to be written (and published
here)!

Compliance with ethical standards 

Conflict of interest  I declare that there are no conflicts of interest involved in this paper.

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