[Image from this page .]

As this article in the Guardian posits .

Interestingly, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion has sold 500,000*** copies in the U.S. and 300,000 copies in the U.K.

When I read of the popularity of Dawkins’ book, first I said: YAY! Because Dawkins’ is my man. Then I said: Wait a minute. The U.S. has a population of roughly 300 million and the U.K. has roughly 60.1 million. That’s one book per 600 people in the U.S. whereas in the U.K. it’s one book per 200 people. One must take into account overall reading habits from both populations–one quarter of British adults don’t read* in comparison to 38 percent in the U.S.** So the British will buy more books as a matter of course.

Still and all, they could be buying rubbish and they choose Dawkins. Either because they’re nontheists or because they’re willing to listen to what someone without their beliefs has to say. [And before anyone says that atheists need to listen to what theists have to say–I assure you, we have. We’ve been listening for the length of our conscious lives. Once you’ve listened to atheists, or really anyone with religious views utterly apposed to yours, for a couple or five decades then we’ll listen to you again. Deal?]

That the U.S. is the only truly free country still worshiping a fictional being is not news, but the numbers to show it are interesting. Most countries still ruled by religion try to control their people right down to their thought processes, what they can do with their bodies and who they date. Oh, wait…

Anyway, that’s the news and some thoughts from this heathen. And now here’s Jim–how’s the weather in the ninth circle of hell there, Jimbo?!

Another article about Dawkins here .

Dawkins’ Foundation for Reason and Science

Dawkins’ Twitter Feed

*2002 ONS Omnibus survey
**2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy
[*** as of January 2010, the English version had sold 2.5 million copes. (via Wikipedia )]

[This is a repost from a previous blog. Original post date: 15 August, 2007]

Check out this article in the NYT about the state of book selling in Germany

I found this bit particularly of interest: “Last year 94,716 new titles were published in German. In the United States, with a population nearly four times bigger, there were 172,000 titles published in 2005.”

Books can’t be discounted (it’s illegal) and their best-seller lists are filled with literary fiction instead of pop crap.

For the writers out there: they have 14,000 publishers.

How difficult is it to learn German?

[This post is from a previous blog. Original post date: 30 October 2007]

[This is a post from a previous blog, with a 2012 update. Original date: 21 January, 2008.]

Novels composed on mobile phones top best-seller lists.

Those kooky Japanese. Not only do they top the world charts for cuteness, but they compose novels on mobile phone text pads. Some novels are then published in hard copy form and some of those reach the best seller lists. Amazing.

2012 Update: I wanted to re-post this one partially because of this bit in the article: ““Will cellphone novels kill ‘the author’?” a famous literary journal, Bungaku-kai, asked…” Clearly, they didn’t.

Whenever something new comes along in publishing, doom-sayers declare it the end of literature. They were saying that when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1440s. Making books widely available would lessen the ‘specialness’ of books and of reading them. Because everyone would be able to do it, no one would.

This is similar to the people that say ebooks will be the end of publishing. There seems to be an assumption that people won’t publish if they’re not going to be paid well. Being a writer means writing whether anyone is going to see your work or not. Very few authors write for a living–they have jobs to pay the bills and anything they receive for writing is a bonus–and so simply having their work published by a legitimate press is worth it. Hell, some people are happy to have their name on the front of a book they paid to have printed and then have to market themselves.

You can’t kill the drive to write and you can’t kill the will of real readers, who will read anything that’s worth reading. I know it’s fun to pronounce the ‘end’ of things since nothing new really happens, but you’re just wasting time you could be spending reading.