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This paper examines the repetition of prophecies on the end of the book, and changes in book production and reading demographics. The paper hypothesizes that in Western societies perceptions of the death of the book have been influenced by the greater mental demands of consuming textual media in comparison with their audiovisual counterparts. In order to understand how these different mental demands have influenced debates on the death of the book, the paper shows that the 20th century witnessed significant changes in book-reading demographics and book distribution which rather paradoxically correlated not only with the growth of audiovisual media and changes in educational demographics but also with the explosion of book consumption and production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the repetition of prophecies on the end of the book, and changes in book production and reading demographics. The paper hypothesizes that in Western societies perceptions of the death of the book have been influenced by the greater mental demands of consuming textual media in comparison with their audiovisual counterparts. In order to understand how these different mental demands have influenced debates on the death of the book, the paper shows that the 20th century witnessed significant changes in book-reading demographics and book distribution which rather paradoxically correlated not only with the growth of audiovisual media and changes in educational demographics but also with the explosion of book consumption and production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how changes in the social environment of print media have affected the history of the Japanese publishing industry in the postwar period. Data on the circulation of books, magazines, and newspapers are analysed on a population basis. The results of these analyses show that per-capita circulation of these media increased almost monotonically until the 1980s, but then began to decrease after peaking in the 1990s. After conducting statistical correlation analyses, we conclude that per-capita circulation was affected by economic trends indicated by the GDP growth rate. Our analyses also show a positive correlation between the pace of change in per-capita book and magazine circulation, and this reciprocal relationship is investigated in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]