Last year, the release of the Hollywood adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 novel “Gone Girl” propelled the book onto best-seller lists in several countries around the world. Millions of people bought it, but how many of them actually read it from cover to cover?
The Toronto-based e-reading platform Kobo, which delivers digital books to 23 million people in 190 countries and is a competitor to Amazon Kindle, recently released statistics for 2014 that showed the best-selling books in the company’s major markets and how frequently readers finished the titles they bought.
In Britain, for instance, “Gone Girl” was Kobo’s third best-selling title, but only 46 percent of the readers who purchased the book made it to the end. Similar completion rates were reported for other best-sellers like E.L. James’s erotic romance novel “Fifty Shades of Grey” (48 percent) and Donna Tartt’s literary thriller “The Goldfinch” (44 percent). In France, Éric Zemmour’s provocative lament about that country’s cultural and geopolitical decline, “Le Suicide Français,” may have been a runaway hit in terms of sales, but just 7 percent of Kobo’s French readers made it through the book’s conclusion.
Completion rates varied widely depending on a book’s genre: romance and mystery were the most reliably completed types, while religion and nonfiction were some of the least.
In Italy, 74 percent of romance novels purchased via Kobo were finished — the best completion rate of any genre across Kobo’s markets — compared with 62 percent in North America and 60 percent in Australia and New Zealand. Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s president and chief content officer, noted that each genre is read differently, which might explain some of the disparities. “Different kinds of books have different reading patterns,” he said. “Novels are read cover-to-cover, but a work of nonfiction could be sampled for facts rather than read to completion.”
Understanding what books readers tend to finish, and why, might seem irrelevant from a business point of view. “An argument could be made that once a book is sold, who cares what readers thought of it?” the company said in a report timed to the release of this data. “But knowing what readers find engaging, and what they do not, can help publishers unlock previously hidden equity within their publishing lists and inform decisions on which authors and franchises to invest in.”
The company gave an example of books that, despite low sales, had very high completion rates. “Clearly those readers who have stumbled upon these books have loved them — so while the marketing team or editorial department may not have seen a winner among these titles, the reader did.”
But not everyone in the literary community sees the ability to track reader engagement as a good thing. Francine Prose, writing in the New York Review of Books, imagined a not-too-distant future in which “writers (and their editors) could soon be facing meetings in which the marketing department informs them that 82 percent of readers lost interest in their memoir on page 272. And if they want to be published in the future, whatever happens on that page should never be repeated.”
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