Impressive volume

In honor of Hebrew Book Week, the National Library releases some encouraging figures on our reading habits.

By BARRY DAVIS
Jewish boy reads 521 (photo credit: GIL COHEN MAGEN/REUTERS)
Jewish boy reads 521
(photo credit: GIL COHEN MAGEN/REUTERS)
Hot off the press… we still read books.
That’s the inescapable bottom line of a report that the National Library just issued on the state of our literary health in 2012.
The latest yearly overview was released ahead of this year’s Hebrew Book Week, which kicked off a couple of days ago and ends on June 15.
The statistics make for impressive and, for all bookworms out there, heartening reading. For starters, no fewer than 8,176 new publications, in all forms and formats, came into being in 2012 – that’s around 1,000 more than the previous year. Even more encouraging was the finding that the number of books for children and youth also rose – from 660 in 2011 to 836 last year. It also appears that we have a decent amount of spare time these days devoted to reading nonfiction, as there were 212 books on cookery, leisure and culture in the 2012 publication mix.
While pleased with the report findings, National Library Public Services Department head Orly Simon says she was not surprised by the upturn in reading and publication levels.
“You see people in bookstores all over the country, and new titles and lots of other new things,” she notes, adding that she does not believe that the allpervading presence of the Internet and its myriad potential distractions have an adverse effect on the scale of our reading exploits.
“I think you have to make a distinction between whether we read more, or we publish more,” she says.
“My impression is that people read just as much today.
It is more than means, and the formats, that keep on changing. The Internet is a medium of the written word.
Facebook is a medium of the written word. The formats are changing, but the texts are still there to be read.”
Then again, surely the apparatus we choose to use impacts our reading experience? Holding a real book, made with paper and ink, must evoke a different sensation than scrolling up and down a Kindle, for example. Not so, says the 40-something Simon.
“I had never used an electronic book format before, but one day, a friend of mine said she’d finished reading this great book, and I really wanted to borrow it, but she said she only had it on Kindle,” she says. “So I got into bed with the electronic book, and I must say, it felt no different from holding a book with pages in my hands. It was fine. You know, they said that video and then DVD would kill off the cinema, but they haven’t. I think it’s the same with the Internet, blogs and all that, as well as electronic books.
Reading will never die out.”
The bare statistics certainly back up Simon’s sunny viewpoint. In 2011, the National Library took in 6,876 items, including 6,302 new books across a range of categories – government publications, commercial and private releases, short stories, religious volumes and children’s books. For the sake of comparison, in 2004, the year Facebook was born, 6,436 new items entered the library’s portals. In 2012 that number rose to 7,487.
Naturally the vast majority of items published in this country are in Hebrew. Last year, there were 6,527 such releases, with English the next in line at 472 publications, followed by 220 in Russian and 181 in Arabic. Of the Hebrew-language offerings, 1,419 were translations, with English accounting for the majority of the source foreign languages. Last year’s Hebrew-language publications also included translations from no fewer than 38 languages, including German, French, Spanish, Yiddish, Persian, Amharic, Catalan and Albanian.
Simon attributes part of the growth in the library’s intake to legal obligations and greater public awareness.
“The Book Law states that two copies of any item published in 50 or more copies must be entrusted to the National Library, regardless of the subject matter – from the annual report of the state comptroller to best-seller 50 Shades of Grey,” says the public services department manager. “The library is much more efficient these days, and I think people who publish things are more aware of their obligation to send us copies of their publication.”
Of the literary works published in 2012, 1,224 belong to the realms of prose and poetry – 873 of them originally written in Hebrew, with 361 translated from other languages. Again, English rules the roost in this category, but there were quite a few Scandinavian tomes that were rendered into Hebrew, too.
The genre division of the volumes written in Hebrew last year indicates that 416 were works of fiction; of these, 43 were thrillers, 25 examined relationships between men and women, 21 were in the romantic category and 10 were based on fantasy themes.
The continuing popularity of the annual Poetry Festival, which takes place in Metulla on Shavuot, is evidently no quirk of consumerism. Releases of poetry volumes were steady at 364 last year – a marginal decrease from the 2011 figure of 369 – with 245 of them originally written in Hebrew.
One encouraging statistic in the 2012 report provides conclusive evidence that “the youth of today” do not always have their eyes glued to a computer or TV screen. Children’s and youth literary releases last year were up to 836, which represented a significant jump from the 2011 level of 660. Poetry publications accounted for 25 books in the 2012 junior literary output, 35 were on animal themes, and there were 57 new offerings in the increasingly popular fantasy and science fiction genre. There were only three new children’s books published about the Holocaust.
Not so long ago, teachers and parents alike were expressing grave concerns over the tendency of their pupils and offspring to eschew the pleasures of getting into a good book, compared with the far more instant thrills of the Internet and computer games.
Then the Harry Potter series arrived.
“Yes, I think you can ‘blame’ the Harry Potter series for children and youth becoming more interested in fantasy and science fiction books,” says Simon, “but I am sure we will never stop reading.”