• by June 1, 2005

READING, WRITING AND SOME STARTLING ARITHMETIC -- It's no surprise that new consumer-generated media technologies like blogs and self- publishing software are fragmenting media like never before, giving the potential for every man, woman and child to become not just media consumers, but media purveyors. The big question is, who's consuming all this micro media content? According to some new research, not nearly enough people. At least not enough people to support all the new content being published. Take book publishing, as an example. There was a time when the economics of printing, marketing and distributing books made it impossible for all but a few lucky authors to become, well, authors.

Now new Web-based print-on-demand services like iPublish of Lulu make it possible for anyone - make that everyone - to publish the next great American novel, bio, or reference book. Still, there's no guaranteeing that any of them will ever make it to the best-sellers list. In fact, the very definition of a best-seller could be radically altered. According to projections compiled by Lulu, the number of Americans who write and publish books is on track to exceed the number who actually read them.

"It may sound ridiculous," concedes Lulu CEO Bob Young, "but the latest industry figures show yet another steep rise in the number of Americans publishing a book each year, alongside a continuing fall in the numbers reading them. All we've done is to extrapolate these two, well-documented trends."

The Lulu findings come as the country's book industry gathers in New York for BookExpo America (June 2-5), the trade's largest annual gathering.

So here's Lulu's arithmetic. According to estimates released last week by R.R. Bowker, North America's leading source of bibliographic data, the number of books published in America last year hit a record 195,000 - a 14 percent increase on the previous high of nearly 175,000, recorded the year earlier. The average annual rise over the last three years has been 14.6 percent.

Those figures follow a survey published last year by the National Endowment for the Arts, which showed that the percentage of Americans who read books has steadily declined over the last 20 years. Only 57 percent - 164 million Americans - of the U.S. population now read even one book a year. That's a decline of 4 percent in a decade.

Based on those trajectories, Lulu calculates that by the 2052, 148.4 million books will be published in the U.S., but only 129.4 million Americans will actually read one. In other words, 19 million new books in 2052 will not find a single reader, including, presumably, their own authors.

Now that may seem like a lulu, but Lulu's chief says its just simple math, noting that "the human race as a whole now publishes a book every 30-seconds.

And what term has Lulu coined to describe this publishing industry tipping point? Aptly, they call it "Authorgeddon."

"What these figures really show," says Young, "is that the publishing industry as we know it is unraveling - like the music industry before it - as new, more efficient ways of publishing, involving print-on-demand and Internet distribution, emerge in its place."