Bookplanet: unlike movies, network TV and CDs, books are doing OK

From the NY Times:

Sales of general-interest books are thriving, in sharp contrast to recent downturns in other communications and media businesses, including Hollywood, where movie attendance is in its third straight year of decline; recorded music, in which sales have fallen for four of the last five years; and network television, which has steadily lost viewers.

In fact, for all the talk about the death of "old media" - that is, printed material like books - and the ascendancy of the new, digitally fueled media that rule the airwaves and cyberspace, Americans still spend more buying books than they do going to movies or buying recorded music, video games or DVD's.

Consumer spending on books rose 8 percent, to nearly $21 billion, in the three years that ended in December, according to a recent report by the Book Industry Study Group, a publishing trade group, pushing the industry's sales back above the levels reached before the stock market decline helped to lead the country into a recession in early 2001.

While the growth has been greatest in the retailing of books to consumers, sales by publishers to wholesalers and to bookstores have also risen by 7 percent over the last three years, to nearly $12 billion.

The rebound has been fueled largely by the expanding popularity of religious-themed books like "The Purpose-Driven Life" and the "Left Behind" series of novels, as well as a new breed of mega-best-selling novels, some with religious overtones, like "The Da Vinci Code" and "The Five People You Meet in Heaven."

NOTHING can kill the good old book. It happens to be the perfect form for reading. And it will last as long as humankind wants to take in information, and read a story.