5 Fascinating Stats About Modern Reading Habits, with Laura McGrath

Summary

Book Riot - The Podcast Episode: 5 Fascinating Stats About Modern Reading Habits, with Laura McGrath
Release Date: March 26, 2025

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Guest Introduction: Laura McGrath

In this episode, Book Riot welcomes Laura McGrath, an Assistant Professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. Laura specializes in contemporary American literature with a focus on the American publishing industry. She combines traditional literary analysis with digital humanities, utilizing big data to explore large-scale trends in book publishing. Laura is currently authoring a book on literary agents, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"I study contemporary American literature by looking at big data... I'm writing a book about literary agents."
[01:21] Laura McGrath

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1. Decline in Pleasure Reading

Rebecca opens the discussion by presenting a striking statistic from the American Time Use Survey and Public Participation in the Arts Survey (2023): only 16% of Americans over the age of 16 reported reading anything for personal interest on any given day. This figure excludes reading for work or school purposes.

"In 2023, only 16% of people in the United States over the age of 16 reported reading anything for personal interest yesterday."
[07:16] Rebecca Shinsky

Jeff expresses skepticism about this number, suggesting it might be inflated due to online reading habits.

"One out of seven ish, right?"
[09:01] Jeff O'Neill

Rebecca counters by highlighting the methodological nuances and suggests that the 16% likely includes various forms of reading beyond traditional book reading, such as magazines and ebooks. However, both hosts agree that this represents a significant decline in pleasure reading over the past two decades.

"The odds of reading yesterday were 46% lower in 2023 than they were in 2003."
[09:11] Rebecca Shinsky

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2. Library Usage Among Younger Generations

Laura introduces another compelling statistic from an updated study by Kathy Inman Barons and Rachel Norda at Portland State University: 54% of Gen Z and millennials have visited a public library within the past 12 months. This is notably higher than any other age demographic.

"54% of Gen Z and millennials have visited a public library within the past 12 months."
[33:47] Rebecca Shinsky

Jeff acknowledges the importance of libraries, emphasizing their role beyond just lending books, such as providing Wi-Fi access and various community services.

"The library has become a sort of junk drawer of social services in a way that's super helpful."
[34:56] Jeff O'Neill

Laura adds that public libraries serve as essential information infrastructures, especially for younger generations, underscoring the need to defend and preserve them.

"We are talking about potentially disenfranchising and destroying information infrastructure for younger readers."
[34:19] Rebecca Shinsky

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3. Reading in AP English Classes and Diversity Concerns

Laura shifts focus to the role of AP English classrooms in shaping reading habits. She cites a study by David Bamman and Jennifer Eberhardt examining the diversity of books included in AP English curricula from 1999 to 2021. The study reveals that 70% of these books feature white main characters, showing little change despite socio-cultural movements like Black Lives Matter.

"Overwhelmingly, these books feature white main characters... 70% of these books... are predominantly white."
[40:43] Rebecca Shinsky

Jeff reflects on the lag between cultural shifts and academic curricula, suggesting that while pop media may become more diverse, educational institutions take longer to reflect these changes.

"Academia tends to lead the way a little bit on this."
[43:52] Jeff O'Neill

Rebecca highlights the persistence of racial homogeneity in AP literature, pointing out that despite efforts in higher education to diversify, high school curricula remain predominantly white-centric.

"Books that are written by women are about 37% less likely to be reviewed than books written by men."
[55:30] Rebecca Shinsky

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4. Gender Disparities in Book Reviews

A pivotal part of the discussion revolves around the gender disparities in professional book reviews. Laura references a 2023 study investigating the likelihood of books by women receiving critical attention compared to those by men. The findings indicate that books written by women are 37% less likely to be reviewed than their male counterparts.

"Books that are written by women are about 37% less likely to be reviewed than books written by men."
[55:30] Rebecca Shinsky

Jeff speculates that reviewing genres traditionally dominated by men, such as nonfiction, may contribute to this disparity.

"Books written in frequently reviewed genres are paying a penalty paid by women who write in these genres."
[55:03] Rebecca Shinsky

Rebecca emphasizes that this is not a reflection of the quality or quantity of books by women but rather a systemic bias in the reviewing process.

"This is a demand reviewer effect... This research is related to the book 'Inside the Reviewer's Circle' by Felipa Chong."
[57:18] Rebecca Shinsky

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5. The Robustness of Romance Reading Communities

The conversation shifts to romance genres, where Laura notes a stark contrast between professional reviews and reader engagement. While only 2% of professionally reviewed books fall within romance genres, Goodreads data reveals that romance is the most frequently read and shelved genre among active users.

"Romance is as large of a category, as actively engaged as the idea of all fiction. There is no genre that is more frequently shelved among active users than romance."
[61:10] Rebecca Shinsky

Jeff attributes this to the active online communities and the structured discourse around romance tropes, which enhances reader engagement despite the lack of professional reviews.

"The mapping and taxonomic aspect of romance was built into the infrastructure and the architecture of the Frankfurt Book Fair."
[68:59] Jeff O'Neill

Laura observes that romance readers have created their own robust discourse and community spaces online, counteracting the neglect from traditional literary outlets.

"Romance readers have dominated the space... They were so hungry for it because they had just never had that experience reflected in book-related media before."
[63:01] Laura McGrath

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6. Implications and Future Directions

The episode concludes with a reflection on the disparities between professional reviews and reader communities. Laura and Rebecca discuss the potential for academic studies to explore the taxonomy and community-building within genres like romance, which thrive outside traditional critical frameworks.

"It is its own genre system that is more diffuse and more diverse than the way we’re thinking about fiction generally."
[62:38] Rebecca Shinsky

Jeff underscores the importance of understanding these dynamics to bridge the gap between mainstream literary criticism and vibrant reader-led communities.

"It's a fascinating case study in what can happen if something’s left to develop a discourse of its own."
[69:07] Jeff O'Neill

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Key Takeaways

1. Decline in Pleasure Reading: Only 16% of Americans engage in pleasure reading daily, reflecting a significant societal shift in reading habits.
2. Library Engagement: Over half of Gen Z and millennials visit public libraries annually, highlighting the continued relevance of these institutions.
3. Diversity in Education: AP English curricula remain predominantly white-centric, with minimal progress in diversifying main characters and authors.
4. Gender Bias in Reviews: Women authors face a 37% lower likelihood of receiving professional book reviews compared to men, indicating systemic biases in literary criticism.
5. Strength of Romance Communities: Despite minimal professional recognition, romance genres boast robust and diverse reader communities, driven by active online engagement and trope-based discourse.
6. Bridging Gaps: There is a crucial need for academic and industry stakeholders to address disparities in literary representation and critical attention to foster a more inclusive reading culture.

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Notable Quotes

• "I'm writing a book about literary agents."
  [01:21] Laura McGrath

• "The odds of reading anything for fun yesterday... was significantly lower in 2023 than they were in 2003."
  [09:11] Rebecca Shinsky

• "Books that are written by women are about 37% less likely to be reviewed than books written by men."
  [55:30] Rebecca Shinsky

• "Romance is its own genre system that is more diffuse and more diverse than the way we’re thinking about fiction generally."
  [62:38] Rebecca Shinsky

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Further Resources

• Laura McGrath's Work:

  • Substack: larabmcgrath.substack.com
  • Upcoming Book: Middlemen, Literary Agents and the Making of Contemporary American Literature (Spring Release)

• Recommended Reading:

  • Inside the Reviewer's Circle by Felipa Chong
  • Love in the Time of Self Publishing by Christine Larson

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Stay tuned for future episodes as Book Riot continues to explore the evolving landscape of books and reading habits with insightful guests and compelling discussions.

Transcript

[Jeff O'Neill]

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[Rebecca Shinsky]

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[Laura McGrath]

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[Jeff O'Neill]

Cash back on, where a spa day.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

With the girls becomes concert tickets.

[Laura McGrath]

Visit Venmo Me Debit to learn more.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

The Venmo MasterCard is issued by the Bancorp Bank N.A. pursuant to license by Mastercard International Incorporated. Term supply. Dosh Cashback.

[Laura McGrath]

Term supply. This is the Book Riot Podcast. I'm Rebecca Shinsky.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And I'm Jeff O'Neill. Let's go back to you, Rebecca. If you're gonna do it, it's back to you to enjoy the show.

[Laura McGrath]

We're messing it all around here. Jeff forgot his name on the first take.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay. See, I hear how it's going. All right, sure.

[Laura McGrath]

You threw me under the bus. You're coming under with me.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean, you were under the bus. I just said, look at Rebecca down there.

[Laura McGrath]

Listen, it's nice under here. We are joined Today by Laura McGrath. We've been hyping up this episod a couple weeks. Laura, I'm going to let you introduce yourself because whenever I try to explain what you do, it turns into like 75 sentences.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

My job is really quite simple. At the top level, I'm an English professor. I'm a professor of English, or assistant professor of English at Temple University in Philadelphia. Where it gets weird is what I study, which is not exactly normal, not in the sort of, you know, studying Shakespeare sense. I study contemporary American literature and I focus on the American publishing industry. And so I do that in some different ways. I spend a lot of time teaching a very traditional English course where we do close reading and we talk about the way that text looks on a page and how writers make us feel and make us think through what they write. You're a very standard issue English class. But then I also study contemporary American literature by looking at big data. So I am a part of a kind of small contingent of scholars that we call ourselves digital humanists. And I study the large scale data that is produced by and about books in the contemporary publishing industry. So I'm writing a book about literary agents. My work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, which I will take every opportunity to promote as much as possible. We need to love and save the neh and so I'm really happy to be here nerding out with you all who are really my people.

[Laura McGrath]

We are so ready.

[Jeff O'Neill]

What you really make is for us. Cocaine. That's what you produce when, when, when you really need to describe it. I guess as a former academic, though I'm older than you are, Laura, I guess I'm curious, was it an uphill battle to make this your field of inquiry and you're doing your dissertation topics and everything? Because when I was back in grad school, no one was really doing this kind of stuff like that. The publishing industry existed was maybe something we acknowledged every now and again, but the, the realities of reading and there was some reader response theory stuff that wasn't very popular. But like, where did you find yourself in the, the tides and the currents of academia? Was it an upstream battle or not?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

You know, there were a lot of nascent conversations that were happening in a lot of different fields that managed to kind of coalesce for me at exactly the right moment. So there was digital humanities that was happening at places like the Stanford University Literary Lab where folks were thinking about how we might use machine learning or large scale data mining, natural language processing, to understand not just one book at a time, but a corpus of tens of thousands of hundreds of thousands of books. So that was really interesting. But of course the problem is, is copyright. All of those books had to have been in the public domain. So if you were someone like me who came in to study contemporary American literature, you hit an impasse of, I mean, at the time, 1923, which is when books enter into the public domain. 100 years after is when books enter into the public domain. But then there was all of this really wonderful work that was happening in literary sociology that was really interested in the processes by which literature is made. And so I had these sort of mind meld moments where I thought, well, I can't study contemporary literature. Like I can't, you know, crack open books and, and figure out what's happening in hundreds and thousands of millions of paragraphs. But I can also see that the publishing industry is producing massive amounts of data about books. There is a huge amount of metadata that's just waiting to be explored. And, and so those things kind of Worked in. In a moment that. That was a different moment, a different time. But it's. It's been really fun to kind of forge my own little path here.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. My past self is going, how did I not know literary sociology was a thing? And could I. Can I go back 30 years and do it again?

[Jeff O'Neill]

I don't know. It existed 30 years ago, Laura.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

It absolutely did. It really worked primarily in sociology departments and in American Studies. You'll think of scholars like Janice Radway. I don't know if you all are familiar with Radway's books about the origins of the Book of the Month Club. Radway embedded at the Book of the Month Club for a long period of time to write about how these lists and how they went about making the decisions about what sorts of books they wanted to include on their monthly list. And then she's written another book that's really wonderful about romance readers where she embedded in several different romance reading clubs at different bookstores to really challenge the notion. And Radway was a real pioneer of thinking about romance as a genre, but to really challenge the idea that reading romance was this anti feminist, regressive, political stance that one could take that actually readers of romance really understood gender identity politics through what they were reading in really transgressive ways. And so that kind of happened. And gradually we could do this more in English departments now, as English departments are becoming a little bit more computational in some places.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, that's. That's really interesting. So all of this means that the part that I care about is you've got interesting stuff we don't know. And this is. This is. This is how formal this is going to be. Laura has brought five to seven Easter eggs, nuggets, little, you know, to hold in the hollow of our hand and hold out for Rebecca and I to come sniff and see what we make of it. Can you talk a little about methodology? Where is this stuff coming from? Does it matter? Do you want to talk about it morsel by morsel? Is there something to say at the very top?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

So this is largely. I chose seven different statistics that come from five different research studies.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I did not author any of them. These are by a number of literary sociologists, a number of people in cultural sociology, book studies, et cetera, who are thinking about readership, what it to be a reader today. There are a million different ways I could have taken this. And I decided I really want to focus on readers because this is a group that we think we know a lot about. And I'm not sure that we do know a whole lot about readers, so I wanted to bring us here.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Okay.

[Laura McGrath]

We are so ready. What are you doing, Laura?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Whenever you want to start.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Okay. I want to start with the question of who is reading. And this is a bit of an assignment that I got from Rebecca and it was a lot of fun to dig into. And so the first statistic I want to present you with, likely one that you have heard before for, comes from the American Time Use survey and the Public Participation in the Arts survey that in 2023, only 16%. Only 16% of people in the United States over the age of 16 reported reading anything for personal interest yesterday. So this excludes things that you might have read for work. This excludes things that you might have read for school. A much larger group than 16% was certainly reading something yesterday for work or for school. But 16% a essentially reported pleasure reading yesterday.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And that's. Or is that could be a magazine or whatever.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

It could be a magazine as well. So it's, it's books, novels, plays. Is how that's partitioned out physical media.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Or could it be an ebook or. I mean, I'm trying to think, I'm thinking through the, the ramifications.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

It could also be an ebook. It was about time use. It was less about media use or anything specific about how they were engaging with books, but how you spent your time reading for naught but pleasure.

[Laura McGrath]

That's so interesting because I'm thinking about there are days where my answer to that question would be no, that I didn't read anything for pleasure.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Because yesterday is just yesterday. So is it On a rolling three day period? Say, would that go up to 50%? Right. Do 50% of people read yesterday, you know, or like over the last three days? That's a really interesting one. I guess. So that's one out of seven ish, right?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

16%. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. One out of seven ish.

[Laura McGrath]

Does it. How does it change if it's like this week or this month or in the last year?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Do we know anything about that?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I do not know that their question was very specifically like, what did you do yesterday? I do know that the odds of reading anything for fun yesterday, this was not a statistic I planned to bring. And I'm just making it up here on my notes now that the odds of reading yesterday were 46% lower in 2023 than they were in 2003. So there is a significant decline in the amount of pleasure reading that we see in the general American public I.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Have historically tagged that. I don't know those specific numbers, but I know the shape of that number pretty well. In the back of my head. It's like 2008 is iPhones.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Right.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And I really think that you can look at. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a difference in the number. Like, I'm sure it's going down before that as the Internet becomes more popular and more used, but I would expect a dog leg down there. And then the rise of social media that's attendant with it on your phones, with Facebook and the algorithm especially that kicks in 2012 is when the first Facebook algorithm kicks in. Twitter is becoming popular around that time. And then the last five years, of course, social video. I guess I would be curious, like Laura, I have. There is the, you know, probably as well as anyone, there is the npr, PBS effect of people responding to these things and lying about how much they do. Do you think, Rebecca, that people are going to lie on the low side or high side? Because is the way I'm getting this. Could this be people reading Vulture? Could this bepeoplereadingpeople.com?

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I mean, right.

[Laura McGrath]

If I'm understanding Laura's definition of it correctly, it's anything that you read that wasn't for work or school.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It wasn't for school. So that could be just an open Internet. You're reading the wire cutter. Sure.

[Laura McGrath]

My substack addiction qualify.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

And I think given the way that we think about reading culture and reading identity, more likely there's a status association associated with readership. Right. So I think if you're going to lie, you're probably going to overestimate the amount.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Overestimate?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah, I think it's, oh, yes, of course, of course. I read vociferously yesterday.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. I mean, I think also if you, if the question had been worded specifically about books, I think you would have been much more likely to see inflation on the high side. Well, inflation is always on the high side. I guess that folks would be more likely to be like, oh, yes, just as you were saying, like, I am a big reader because there's this sort of halo of like nobility around it. But if it includes like you know, just your daily, you know, People magazine perusal, there's less incentive to do that. So I'm certain then that if it's 16% read anything for pleasure yesterday, if they narrowed it down to books, the real number would be lower, but the reported number might be higher.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Even one out of 20 people read a book for pleasure yesterday. Like the Book sales numbers just don't support that. That's 60 million people, 70 million people reading a book yesterday. I don't believe that. I can't believe that. I mean, if the other numbers we know, and Laurie, you probably have better ones than I, we kind of use on this show 12ish books is the average number of books an American read last year. You can't have read every day. You can't have read one out of seven days. Most people read nothing. So I think this is way inflated. On the upside, if you're going to try to make a book Bayesian prior about that, it just doesn't match up. I think this is a lot of Internet reading, is what I say, because 16%, that is like maybe the 1880s, you know, of literate Americans. Like, that's when you're talking about that many people reading an actual book. Again, they didn't have digital books back then. But one out of seven people reading a book for pleasure yesterday would be a completely different reading culture. Laura, does that make sense to you? Do you. Does that jive with what you think?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah, I think it does. I think you're also getting at something that is really hard about these statistics. Both this, that has been conducted by the time you survey, but then also this question. I mean, Jeff, you flagged book buying. Now, I think these are really different ways of thinking about reading and of thinking about book engagement. So there are two, two studies that I'm going to talk about next come from Portland State University by friends and colleagues of mine, Kathy Inman Barons and Rachel Noorda. And I know you've covered some of these on Book Riot before, but I think they're really important both for flagging how we think about readers, but then also for. For what they tell us about readers, which is to say that, that Inman, Barons and Norda are not thinking about book buyers and they're not thinking about book readers. They're talking about book engagers. So this is a really broad definition of what it means to think about or to take part of reading culture. So that's also including people who take books out of the library. That's including people who are. Here I have a list of all of the things that they have included. So people who are checking materials out from the library, that's not included in book buying surveys, whether or not they read them. Right. You might have simply checked a book out of the library, which is participating in reading culture. Right. People who give books as gifts, but again do not necessarily read a lot Right. Did not necessarily read the books themselves. We know that that gift book buying is a major reason why book buyers are buying books in the first place. That says nothing. Right. All we collect in that context, all that Nielsen's getting is point of sale data. We have no idea what a sale means about who that reader is and why they've come to a book, why they're engaging with it and what they're taking from it. Why are they gravitating toward it. This includes people who discover books via other media, such as video games or films or tv. And this I think is really important. This is a separate finding that I hadn't really planned to talk about. But one thing I think is so interesting from this reading is that we're not seeing books and media in competition with one another. But in fact what they're finding is that avid media engagers are avidly engaging all media. They're avidly engaging books in as much as they're avidly engaging with video games or as much as they're avidly engaging with film. A lot of that methodology is a bit confusing to me. So in this regard, I, I would highly recommend that you chat with them, but I think that's important. They talked about cross media discovery as really driving forms of book engagement as opposed to sort of this winner take all sort of competition.

[Laura McGrath]

So is this term is book engage or book engagement, is this the broad direction that like your field of study goes in? Or they. Is everyone specifically talking about the sort of catch all category if you can be a book engager, if you buy a book or if you read a book or if you check one out from the library or if you find it from a piece of media rather than the more specific things just about reading habits or is that just one of the ways that academia is looking at it right now?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah, it's just really one of the ways. But I have to say I don't think many academics are really thinking hard about readership statistics like Inman, Barron's and Norda are. I think that is a real fascinating considered part of academic research.

[Laura McGrath]

That cross media piece like both blew my mind a little bit and also felt really true. Like it feels intuitive when we think about like that books are competing with other kinds of media. Or at least that was the conversation. Especially like when Netflix was first blowing up. It was like, well, we got to compete with streaming books, have all this competition now. But it feels really true to me that people who are avidly into one form of media tend to be avidly into multiple forms of media. And like, it's anecdote for me. Like, that's my use case. But even like me and Jeff, like read a whole lot. We don't engage with TV and movies to the same degree that we engage with books, but we do engage with them, I think more seriously or consistently at a deeper level or something like that than like the average TV viewer. And when I think about, like the people in my life who are deeply into music, they're also deeply into some other form of media as well. Are there, I guess on the sociology tip of literary sociology, are there like theories about what that is? What's going on there with those people?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

That is a great question. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that.

[Laura McGrath]

This is going to become a literary sociology podcast.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I should have said I've got a red flag on this. And this is why, Laura, I'm trying to jive that sort of assumption or prior. Right. That media consumers, they're not competing with other media with the stat. We were just talking about the decline in pleasure reading over the last 22 years. So where's the time going? Right. So, so what do we talk about media? Because I assume that the. All these thumbs down from Rebecca, from the zoom AI are just hilarious to me.

[Laura McGrath]

It's like I'm not doing anything.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's like reading your mind or something. It's like the Dream Hotel is influence.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Influenced our zoom smile on your face.

[Laura McGrath]

I know. My zoom gestures are just popping.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I know. Like, it's like there's some other vibe that it's detecting anyway. But like, so where's the time going? Right? People aren't reading for pleasure as they much certainly as they weren't for 40 years ago. Because we say media that can be all kinds of things. Well, is it short form video? Is it.

[Laura McGrath]

Does it include social media?

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's what I'm saying, right? Because if you say all media, they're not out there fishing, right?

[Laura McGrath]

It doesn't. Are we talking about like, we're talking about like engagement with the arts basically, right? Like not social media, maybe.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Maybe scripted TV or scripted movies. I would believe that. But Fox News is also media. And I'm just going to go out on a limb and say there may be not direct correlations in ways these things may happen. So where is the. If pleasure reading is declined and people who go across media, it doesn't compute with their time, then where does all that. Where's that all that pleasure reading gone?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Well, I should also Say this is not just about people who move across media. This is about avid media engagers. Right. So this is a different sort of, this is different population than what we were thinking about before with the Time Use survey. With the Time Use survey, we're saying 16% of people read a book yesterday. This study is engaging with that 16% as a baseline. Right. So you had to say, yes, I read books for fun, I read a book for pleasure in order to participate in this one. That was an entry level screening.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Gotcha. Okay, okay.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

But then within this group.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So we're self selecting within that.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Self selecting, yes. And so within this group, there's also distinguishing between people who are, I guess your average engagers and then the avid engagers, which is four or more books. And so that is I think also a really important distinction. And here's what I think is massively surprising when you get into this group of really high engaged readers or book engagers, I should say, not necessarily readers, but for people who are really highly engaged, avidly engaged with books, which is four plus books a month, the group that you see that is has the most sort of engagement or engaging at the highest levels is men. Millennials and non white people of all generations have the highest and most avid engagement with books, which is at least.

[Jeff O'Neill]

For a month, surprising. One there is the dudes. Like that's I think the non standard read of like, if you were to ask, and I may have been a sales call yesterday when I was, you know, referencing the median American book engager, I think I was actually, I didn't use that term, but I was using that. I guess the dudes would have surprised me. Rebecca, what do you make of that? Rebecca? Yeah, because Laura just described me and I'm trying to like hide existentially.

[Laura McGrath]

Well, yeah, I don't know how to describe, like I'm feeling like I should crawl under my desk for the number of times that I've been like, middle aged white women drive the publishing industry. Like, we're the ones who buy enough books to keep it alive. If booking a.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's not buying. So remember, this is capturing some other.

[Laura McGrath]

Kind of activity, but it includes buying. To be a book engager includes buying. So Laura's saying that the people who meet one or more of the conditions of buys a book, reads a book, checks a book out from the library, gives a book as a gift, whatever. Are men, millennials and non white people of all generations. The millennial part, I believe, because we've just like our generation has aged into the place of like disposable income and free time now.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

So like I love that we're not killing books. Like we've killed everything. I'm really glad that I not respond.

[Jeff O'Neill]

To boomers or something.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. Down with fast casual restaurants, but up with books bookstores.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

That sounds great.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah, let's keep that. So I think we're just in that spot now. But the men thing, I mean, I don't know, this feels like dangerous waters, but maybe they're buying a lot of books as gifts.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Well, the only area actually where they are not engaging, where middle class baby boomer women are still dominating is gift gifting is okay. So that actually is purely a, you know, boomer mom, white mom space is book gifting. But in every other dimension. Yeah. Non white people of all generations, but then also men and millennials.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think maybe what we're seeing, Rebecca, there is so many of our book buying habits and stats does not include library use. And I think there's. This is the ghost in the sheen machine for me here is like, like there's less. I know about library use and we talk less about library use. So that's one that I'm super curious.

[Laura McGrath]

Like a lot of non fiction is marketed towards men.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Laura McGrath]

And I'm thinking about like, I mean also certain use cases. But when I travel on a weekday, I notice that the airports are full of men, middle aged, mostly white men. Like to the point that I will notice, oh, there's only three women sitting at this gate on a Wednesday and a lot of them are reading paperbacks of like James Patterson. And I don't know, like, I don't think that airport book buying could account for all of that. But I do think that there have to be like, clearly, because your numbers have it, there have to be like men's reading habits are in places that are not visible to us.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think audiobook use is an interesting one too where, you know, audiobook has been such a huge growth and we know nonfiction has been especially, especially big beneficiary of it. I wonder if some of that is being captured here of there. There's a lot of audiobooks that men are reading of this age that aren't getting that aren't showing up in like a lot of circana stuff necessarily or even some historical kinds of data stuff. Now I'm going to sit with that one. I'm very curious. That's. That that's going to be the big. There's nothing else you can say, Laura, that you brought today that's going to Surprise us more than that specific Laura.

[Laura McGrath]

Do you have secret nuances to.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah.

[Unknown]

What do you think Laura?

[Jeff O'Neill]

What do you make of that? What do you make of that?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I think a couple things. I think that I mean so also included another way that they think about book engagement is piracy. That's included here. That is certainly not included in point of sale data because there is no sale. I mean now what the author.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's another POS point of data but it just means not point of sale.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Some of what the authors are talking about though is you might buy a book in one format and pirate it in another. So there might still be a purchase that's happening but there's still other ways of being active with books.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So this is just collecting Laura.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Do you know it does. It does people who buy books for purposes other than reading such as collecting or displaying.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Talking to Rebecca Romney for first edition we were talking about there's not that many high profile women rare book dealers but even there's not that many women who make book collecting part of like people have like a shelf of books but like a collecting is a different kind of idea and she even runs like a women's book collecting prize expressly to engender literally more interest there. And I'm guessing at that level you're doing because you're doing used book buying, you could be doing it scale in a different kinds of way like you know Cormac McCarthy or Larry McMurtry's hundred thousand book collection. You could start skewing data really weird.

[Laura McGrath]

If you got like that requires enough wealth or financial resources to engage.

[Jeff O'Neill]

If you collect all the back issues of Louis Lamour you can get them pretty cheap. Right? Like in used book data.

[Laura McGrath]

I was thinking like there can't be enough men collecting books to be that. That that's like the reason this is high.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Brought us a dead bird and I'm trying to figure out how it got shot and you're saying it can't be that way. Well if you've got a better idea, I'm all ears Rebecca.

[Laura McGrath]

I just want Laura to give us the reason.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, all right. We better move on from there I guess. No, let's. Before we move on. I think we've talked about this before Rebecca. If remember remind me if I've got this wrong. We once did a game of like book data we wish we could have even if we knew it couldn't come in from like there's no sources of it and the one for me has always been the percent of pages read per Book acquired either as a gift, as a library, checked out the library or bought themselves. And I wonder if we're maybe seeing a little disjunction here that people are engaging around books in a way that we don't think about as being standard ways of doing it.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And I don't think, I wonder how much that be a possible explanation here.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah, I don't think it's like a completionist mode of engagement. It's not reading a book from COVID to cover. It's not even necessarily reading a book. So it's trying to take what we know from publishing the sort of conventional wisdom that we have about who's buying books, which is largely conventional and is trying to broaden out the way that people are participating with books, what thinking about and being a part of a reading culture might mean.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I better move along to the next one here. We could spend all day on this one. And I'm very tempted to. But this isn't all you brought for us.

[Laura McGrath]

I'm going to be getting textbooks from Jeff on the beach next week. Like I've had three pink drinks and I have ideas.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's what we call it.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Well, I think this is also. Sorry, this is my last thing to say about this and then I'll happy to move on. I think that a lot of this has got to be a business sort of self fulfilling problem, which is to say it is more efficient from sort of, you know, McKinsey consultant space. It is more efficient to get your existing customers to buy more than it is to convert or cater to new customers. Right. And so I think it makes a whole lot more sense to say we know that white women, white middle aged women are buying a whole lot of books. Let's really continue getting them to buy more of them. Right. Instead of buy one book, buy three books. That's much easier than wow. And more efficient. That's more financially efficient than saying, you know, millennial Latinx men are this real growing population. Let's really devote all of our time and all of our energy to learning everything we can about this population that we have ignored for the history of our and really shift, shift priorities here and really shift. Course that costs a lot of upfront labor. That takes a lot of cost. It takes a lot of energy. So I think there's a whole lot of momentum and interest into maintaining the connection to the middle aged white women audience.

[Laura McGrath]

And is the DNC going to hire you and all of your colleagues based on that analysis now?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, I know we said the last one But I do hope so. I do want to throw some insider. Not insider but some of our own experience on the back end on the advertising, advertising sales side. Laura, to be honest with you that we know a little bit more about the way that publishing works and this is something that we've been talking with clients about for a long time is like we know that 80% of sales are backlist and yet most of the energy in the publishing industry goes towards front list because you need front list to become backlist. But that's if we're looking at bestseller lists or best books of the year or like Reese's book pick sort of situations. Those all tend to be more front listy. Right. And I wonder if the sort of ideal. Not ideal, the representative buyer that we have in our mind of like the 41. Rebecca. I'm sorry Rebecca, I'm pointing.

[Laura McGrath]

It's fine. I am. I look great for my age.

[Jeff O'Neill]

If we're looking at those people, maybe they're more inclined to engage with a new title right on the front list side. But who's buying all those backlist titles? Because if you look at the best selling backlist every year it's going to surprise some people and it's often like the seven habits of highly effective people. It's how to win friends and influence people. And those are business slash professional development slash dude books. All kinds of people read those. But I would guess those if we're looking at where are these big dark matter chunks of dude buying activity that would be one I would look at is like backlist titles that are more non fiction. I'd be curious to see how that shook out too because front list attention belies the actual activity and then libraries and used books are even more so on that regard.

[Laura McGrath]

I have one more nuance y question related to that. Does receiving a book as a gift make you a book engager?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Well, I don't know. I would imagine, I mean if you then read that book. Yes. You now own a book for collecting or displaying or I don't know, I'll have. This is, I mean I feel like really wonderful that I could bring to your attention the work of these really wonderful scholars and I.

[Laura McGrath]

That's fascinating.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Really hope that you spend some time with. With Kathy and Rachel because yeah, we'll.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Put our links in the show notes. Laura will give us some links where people can find out.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We're not expecting you to defend and know every ins and out. Okay, let's move on to something else. Laura.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

So the next thing that I have.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That one's a stumper.

[Unknown]

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[Laura McGrath]

This episode is sponsored by Lethal Prey by John Sanford. Stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition provided by our sponsors at Penguin Random House Audio. Lucas Davenport is the top troubleshooter at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. In Lethal Prey, he teams up with Virgil Flowers to join forces and track down a ruthless killer who will do whatever it takes to keep the past buried. This is the latest thriller from number one New York Times best selling author John Sanford. Doris Grandfeld, an employee at an accounting firm, was brutally stabbed to death, but nobody knew exactly where the crime took place. Despite her twin sister Lara's persistent calls to the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the killer was never found. But 20 years later, Laura has been diagnosed with breast cancer and confronted with the possibility of her own death. She is determined to find Doris's killer once and for all, even if that means taking matters into her own hands again. Stick around after the show to hear an excerpt from the audiobook edition of Lethal Prey by John Sanford. Narrated by Robert Petkoff, Lethal Pray is available everywhere. Audiobooks are sold.

[Unknown]

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[Rebecca Shinsky]

It is fascinating. So the next thing I have also comes from an updated version of this study. So this is a 2002 or a 22 version of the same study from Kathy Barons and Rachel Norda. And I'm really interested in this question of where people are reading. So we've talked about how much and who to the point of where people are reading. Here is another thing that millennials have not killed and that is the public library. 54% of Gen Z and millennials have visited a public library within the past 12 months. 54%, which is much higher than any other age demographic. And so I think that's amazing. I think that's wonderful. I especially wanted to call that out as we're seeing the imls being dismantled, which is the Institute for Museum and Library Services, which funds public libraries nationwide.

[Jeff O'Neill]

For now.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

For now. Yep. Has historically contributed to the Libby app, for instance, is often funded by the IMLs at different public libraries. So as we think about what's at stake with public libraries, as we think about how to defend public libraries in our communities, I think it's also important to remember that we're talking about potentially disenfranchising and destroying information infrastructure for younger readers for Gen Z and millennials. Not that we're not millennials or younger readers. I'm not a younger reader anymore, but.

[Laura McGrath]

Gen Z 84% is. That's higher than I would have guessed. A majority of folks in those generations using their libraries.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That doesn't surprise me at all. Like the library has the, I mean we've said this before, the library has the highest Q rating of anything in the book related industry. Like independent bookstores. You know, people, people, rightly so, want to champion them. But in terms of what people love, who like books, who care about books, the library is way up there. I've done, you know, dozens of reading lives, episode and I'd say 95% of the origin stories talk about. I went to the library. I went to the library. I went to. I mean it's just, it's just so much more there.

[Laura McGrath]

But like if we were just talking about the 16% of people from Laura's first stat who like did read something for pleasure yesterday, if we were just inside that group, I wouldn't be surprised about this. More than half used their library. But like we're talking about what, less than, less than 20 of Americans.

[Jeff O'Neill]

What's the age on this one, Laura?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Remind me again on this Gen Z, they've got.

[Jeff O'Neill]

A lot of them have kids and a lot of them have younger kids.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

One thing I know about having kids and kids, you go to the library a lot. Like a lot. When my kids were young, younger, we would be there three times a week.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay, that makes sense to me. But I couldn't square it just based on like what small percentages of people are reading for fun and that the library is not just, but primarily a source of reading material with more than half of folks in those generations, I think that they're in the ages of having kids. That's an interesting and important point. And to Laura, to your point about the IMLs, our colleague Kelly Jensen has written a great piece about all of the attempts and the stuff that's going on with defunding there. And we'll put that link back in the show. Notes for folks who want to learn more about what the imls does and why we need to preserve it and also the actions that the Trump administration is taking to try to get rid of it.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think people might be surprised too. I mean, I think I've seen studies and maybe Laura, you know, them even, even sort of qualitatively off the in your head versus quantitatively that a lot of people use the library for things that are not books, you know, wi fi access, getting their tax forms, checking out movies from the library, you know, all kinds of things that the library has become a sort of a junk drawer of social services in a way that's super helpful and super unfair to libraries and emergency rooms. Like those are the two places that are really on the front line. But I think also when people start thinking about not just going to check out a physical book from the library as being a locus of activity, a lot of other stuff happens there in those libraries too.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I mean, just amazing community resources. Really amazing. You know, to your point, Jeff, I've got a five year old and a one year old, but he doesn't care about the library yet. But my, My five year old, I mean, we'll go for craft time. Right. But we're not engaging books in that context. We're just visiting the library and we're there to. To make a little Ewok or something on May 4th or, or whatever. It happens to be. Whatever sort of happen. And, you know, that was when she was younger. That was the only way during COVID that I got to interact with other parents. You know, they had Outdoor Story Hour, and that was it, you know, and so the library provides such amazing community services beyond reading books.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. The kids are all right. Maybe that's good to hear. Okay. That's a good stat. Encouraging.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Anecdotally, I love. I love my students at Temple University. I always leave feeling like, you know what? The kids are all right.

[Laura McGrath]

We're doing good.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All right, Laura, where should we go next?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

All right, so we're going to go back to school. Another place where reading takes place is the public school, and in particular in AP classrooms. So there are several books about AP English that are out. One that is coming out by a very dear friend of mine, Alexander Manshel. And, and, and Manshell was the person who really kind of keyed me into thinking about the AP English classroom as a major site of reading. So in 2022, there were 389,000 student test takers of the AP exam for English Language Arts. That's a huge group of people.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I would have missed that if you would have asked me blind how many I would have by an order of magnitude.

[Laura McGrath]

If not, I would have had no idea.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah. So these are people who are currently reading not for not but pleasure. Right. Keep that in mind. That's not included in that statistic of reading for something other than school. And also, these are high schoolers, so they work, but they do read a lot. Right. These are future readers. This is everyone that I hope to get into my classroom to continue to drive up numbers for enrollment for English majors. This is everyone that, you know, we're hoping will engage with libraries later on that we're hoping will buy books. Right. These are the people.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah. That's so interesting. 389,000. We just did a Patreon recording yesterday about classics you need to read to be well read. And we were both talking about our high school English experience is quite a bit like, I'm thinking about all the books I read in apartment English, and it was not a few there.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

No, they're meaningful. Okay. But here's. That was the Background statistics that I actually wanted to talk about, which is what is getting read in AP English classes. There's a study that just came out this month. This is hot off the presses by David Bamon, who's a professor of information sciences at UC Berkeley, and Jennifer Eberhardt, who's a professor of social psych, Social psychology at Stanford, as well as a number of researchers that they've been working with. And they looked at all of the suggested books, books that were a part of AP exams. So as you know, or you might know, AP doesn't provide book lists of like the necessary books that you have to read for an AP course. But in their questions, they might say, you know, compare and contrast the American Dream in one of the following novels and they'll give a list of things that most students who have taken AP English can be. You can be relatively certain that they've read. The Great Gatsby will be on that list. For instance, Of Mice and Men will be on that list. Trying to think of everything I read in AP English, the Bluest Eye or probably everything by Toni Morrison will be somewhere on this test, Right?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yep.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

So Eberhardt and Bamman and their research group looked at all of those books because they wanted to know if, in fact, as is the prevailing narrative, those books are becoming more diverse. Yeah, they wanted to know if these books are becoming more diverse in terms of the people who are writing them. And they wanted to know if they are representing diverse experiences. So. Experiences that aren't the kind of old white man. I mentioned both the Great Gatsby and John Steinbeck. So things other than, you know, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck. And they found. Well, I'm curious, what do you think they found? Do you think it has become more or less.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think it has become more, but less than we might hope.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah, that's what I am. That's what I was going to say as well, that more, but not nearly as much more as maybe media narratives would or our own political leanings would have us think.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah, yeah. So you guys sound like you've been around the block before. No, no, no, it. It is, it is. It has remained relatively consistent with a few, with some changes here and there. So it has wavered with inconsistent ranges over a 20 year span. So 1999 to 2021. So that part. Okay. It depends where we started with. So that. That's kind of the sad part. Overwhelmingly, these books feature white main characters. 70% of these books that are. That are consistently there feature white main characters. And A few things about this one that is not changing in response to any US socio cultural phenomena. So it's not like after Black Lives Matter all of a sudden there were a lot more books featuring African Americans as main characters. That is not true. It's remained relatively consistent within a margin. And that 70% is not consistent with the U.S. population. And importantly, it is not consistent with takers of the AP exam, which is to say the. The AP book lists are wider than AP students. Interesting, right? These books are much wider than the students who are enrolled in AP students.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Wider or less white than the US population on the whole. Do you know?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Oh, that's. I do have a graph. Let me find out.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'll vamp while you're looking up. No, I can Van so I'm curious about that 1999 start date, Laura, for this reason. So I graduated from high school in 1996, so this is a little bit before me. I think if you do, if you go back another 15 years, you may see more of a difference from 85 to 99 than 99 to 2013. And that is Harlem Renaissance becoming part. More part of the AP curriculum. Especially their eyes were watching post Bob Henways and Alice Walker, but also post Toni Morrison's 1989 Nobel win because Morrison was in my AP literature curriculum. But it was new. It was new to have Morrison in that curriculum. So I wonder if now I could be completely wrong, but I would expect the 1985 AP titles to look a lot different than the 1996 AP titles. I could be wrong, but I'm wondering if we kind of ramped up in that because the culture wars in academia were happening now. Like this was a lot was going on and that trick that trickles down to the kinds of people teaching AP exams pretty quickly. And I wouldn't be, I guess I'm not surprised to hear that there may be. Again, this is not data we have, but my working theory would be 1985-99 may have a lot more change than 99 to today.

[Laura McGrath]

It's really interesting though, just because that goes against our feeling about how culture is changing. The feeling is that culture has changed and become more inclusive, especially like pop media has become more diverse. But how much more diverse?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Academy though tends to lead the way a little bit on this. Like I think what your things you tend to see in academia, academic studies tend to lag sort of cultural uptake by quite some time. Anyway, Laura so you were looking well.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

And I think this is showing us really. Yeah, I was. Yeah. But I Think that also shows us really nicely the gap between the college curriculum, where I think things are incredibly inclusive. I mean, when you think about the. The Cannon wars like you were talking about, Jeff, I mean, that has led to the real establishment of African American studies, of Asian American studies, of Latinx studies, as being really, you know, deeply entrenched in universities. And I think that the difference of what we see between high school and college is at least something I know a number of people are researching, and hopefully we'll learn more about that.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Fascinating.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

The population of white students who are enrolled in AP is very consistent with the US Population. Okay, that helps a bit.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All right, where do you want to go next? How many have we done? 50. We've done two. I. I'm so. I'm so, like, in the. In the. I'm so in it right now. I have no idea where I am.

[Laura McGrath]

Dopamine is.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm, like, in the ball pit. Like, there's this. I don't know which way's up or which way's down.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Oh, part of some. Well, yeah, okay.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No, do it. Come on.

[Laura McGrath]

Let's.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We're. We're here.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I was. It was one about ap, but I'm trying to. I'm trying to decide if I actually want to do this.

[Laura McGrath]

You decide if we just sit here and play stat roulette with you for another hour.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Okay. I mean, one other thing I think is really interesting about AP is, you know, about the books that are. That are there in this recommended set is not only are we seeing a relative match between the authors and the characters that they're writing, we're seeing largely white male authors, predominantly white characters, but they. They studied Bamon and Eberhardt in their group, studied what's called homophily within this group. So the racial homogeneity. So there are characters who are people of color, but by and large, how diverse of a cast of characters do we have?

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, I see.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yes. And they found that 74.8% of books in the AP literature classroom are racially and ethnically homophilic or homophilic. Meaning there is not much diversity within these texts either.

[Laura McGrath]

Books by white authors have white casts.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

And not just white main characters, but predominantly fully white cast.

[Laura McGrath]

White cast. Okay.

[Unknown]

Yes.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I mean, that's still pretty. It's still pretty rare to get a book that has multiple races kind of have. With. With interesting roles to play. And some of that is marketing, and some of that's just how we imagine in the American racial imagination. I also think there's some stuff about writing across race and ethnicity that people are still thinking about. Like we're still not sure who can do it and when. What's representation really look like? So. So that one doesn't surprise. That one really doesn't surprise me. I'm not saying it's good, but that one doesn't surprise me.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

But if you think about it, the books that are on an AP curriculum, I mean, this is largely the canon. So this is a. This is a political climate for writers and for marketing and book production that really lags behind the contemporary conversation. Right. So something like To Kill a Mockingbird is here.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

You know, and that. That's, you know, a relatively not diverse cast of characters. It's predominantly white, with the exception of Jim, you know, but that. That would be something. Be here even. That is kind of an outlier in this sense.

[Jeff O'Neill]

To me, that makes sense.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Now, that's not to say that it is exclusively white. Right. There might also be. So a book that has been added fairly recently to the AP recommended list is the Hate U Give, which also is a relatively not diverse cast of characters, with the exception, I think, of. Of Starr's boyfriend. Right. It is an entirely black cast. And then her friends. And the cops, of course.

[Laura McGrath]

And the cops.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Right. Yeah.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

And a couple of her friends. Yeah. So I'm not entirely sure how they're kind of thinking about main and secondary charact. I know that that's using machine learning and we don't need to get into how that works. But, you know, It's. It's not 74.8% are racially homophilic and also white. But what you're seeing is not really a lot of interaction between characters of diverse races or ethnicities.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Well, even, you know, think of the two, probably, I would guess amongst black writers, especially, like you think of the Morrison corpus or Their Eyes Were Watching God by Hurston. There's not a lot of white characters in there. There might be a touchstone. There might be no kind of one of those characters. But when Morrison wrote home much later and as a white protagonist, that was a big deal. Right. That there was a white protagonist in a Morrison novel. So there is some. I don't know where the reinforcement comes from, but this does tend to happen where people are writing about a cohort of people and they tend to be racially homogenous for reasons that I think probably are explicable and maybe lamentable. Yeah.

[Laura McGrath]

And I think this is a place where we see maybe the lag between contemporary book releases and how long it takes something to end up on an AP list. It's still not super common, but I don't really notice it anymore when I'm reading a novel and the cast is diverse, the main character is black and their best friend is Latino and someone queer shows up. That's just the shape of the world now. And it's the shape of the world in a lot of contemporary fiction. I imagine some of those novels end up up as AP books in 25 years, but 25 years ago we didn't have that happening for books that are.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think I would take a bet with you, Rebecca, if, if the, if the bet was it's not as different as you might think, I think I would take that. It's not as different as you might think. Now that's just our own sensibility. Yeah, I mean, I think it's less different than you might think. You look at the Zadie Smiths, the Colson Whiteheads, the Sally Rooneys. I think the mixes kind of look like the books we're talking about.

[Laura McGrath]

I don't think it's a huge difference. But I do think there are more contenders today that could end up on an AP list in 25 years than there were 25 years ago that ended up on the list now or 50 years ago that are now on the AP list.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's a really interesting one, Laura.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

And I mean, part of what we know about at least how anthologies work is that once something makes its way into an anthology, it very rarely leaves. Or once an author is in an anthology, her work very rarely leaves. Some of that has to do the way that writes work. But you know, once, once a writer is there, there might be a reduction of the space that she gets in an anthology. There might be, you know, only five Emily Dickinson poems instead of 20. But Emily Dickinson's not leaving once she's there. And so I think that is probably also at least one factor to consider when we're thinking about the lag between the contemporary book production space and the.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Way that we're thinking about our also wonder short stories. They have a narrower focus, right. So a smaller cast of characters. So if they're a short story like the Lottery or the Gilded Six Bits is getting thrown into these machine learning things it may spit out. I mean, there's just fewer characters. Those are even more likely to be. Be homophilic. Was that the right term?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So that, that could be a confounding factor too. There's just less room in those kinds of Very easy to anthologize. They're often easy to teach and score easy to teach. So those may have some weird reinforcing principles there.

[Laura McGrath]

It makes me really want a list of like the last 20 writers to get pulled from anthologies and like, how bad of a thing you have to do to get pulled out of anthology.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I can totally get you that list of, at least for the Norton Anthology of American Literature. I know who has it. I don't know what, what would make you get pulled, though. Like, I, I don't. I think it might just be a reduction of space. I. I don't think it's probably a much more angry answer than I wanted to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So. And this is, I think two, the last kind of two points here go together. We're kind of moving from the space of where reading is happening and who is reading to now a rarefied group of professional readers. And this is where I am really interested in hearing from you two as two professional readers. I want to talk about a really fantastic 2023 study about book reviews, about who is being reviewed and what review attention looks like. And you all have your finger on the pulse more than probably anyone else that I know. So this is a guessing game. How many books would you say if you had to put a percentage point on it? How many books, books would you say in a given year receive any critical attention in a professional review outlet? So not Goodreads, not, not. Not user generated reviews, but receive a review in a traditional journalistic book review outlet.

[Jeff O'Neill]

This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios. The Amateur when his wife is murdered, Charlie Heller, the CIA's most brilliant computer analyst, must trek across the globe and use his only weapon, his intelligence, to hunt down her killers and enact revenge. Starring Academy Award winner Rami Malek and Academy Award nominee Laurence Fishburne. The Amateur. Rated PG13. Only in theaters April 11th. We're so done with New Year, New.

[Laura McGrath]

You this year it's More youe on Bumble.

[Jeff O'Neill]

More of you Shameless, seamlessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Geminis because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want and you know what? We love that for you.

[Laura McGrath]

Someone else will too be more you.

[Jeff O'Neill]

This year and find them on Bumble.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

What percentage of books published annually are.

[Jeff O'Neill]

We talking traditionally published books?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

We can be. Yes, yes. We're talking not self published, not self.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Published, not self published published. And we're talking. So this could be library Journal, Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles, like in terms of the traditional review, New York Times, all those times, all those kinds of.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Places in the study coming up, they eventually they narrow down to think about New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times. And so we're down, we're thinking like big. Yeah, I'm like a tenth of a percent.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm gonna go 4%.

[Laura McGrath]

I'm going lower prices. Right. Rules. I'll take the under, but I'm going to take like 1% or less.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Okay, well, Jeff is closer. It is 5%.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

More than 5% of books published in a given year receive any critical attention.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think 4% is lower than 5%. So I am correct. Thank you very much. Your presence here is most welcome at any time.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

You're welcome. You're welcome. So this study though is looking at. So that's kind of our baseline statistic. This is kind of where we're coming at this. Our prior. This study is looking at, at that 5% and asking about books by women and books about and for women and how likely they are to be reviewed in comparison to books by men. And so they took look at two different things. They talk about what they call the women's fiction penalty, which is a penalty paid by writers of women's fiction or who are working in other feminized genres like romance dance, where the writers or the readers are presumed to be and largely are mostly women. And then they also talk about the woman writers penalty, which refers to the penalty paid by women who write in frequently reviewed genres. So who might write in literary fiction but are still reviewed at a lower percentage than men. So we've got on the one hand the Emily Henry's right, you're writing in a genre that's for women, or you've got all of your romantasy writers. And then on the other hand you've got your Sally Martin attorneys who are writing in genres that are not gender specific, but especially literary fiction. That's a high prestige genre that's reviewed much more often than something like romance would be anyway. So that's important to really draw the distinction between these two sets.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Are we guessing?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I've told you, I'm trying to frame this as a guess. So I've told you it is a penalty. So obviously women writers are reviewed less often than their male counterparts are. And also, so books that are by and for women are reviewed less than genres that are considered to be genre neutral or gender neutral. Excuse me. So what percent less likely do you think books that are written by women are X percent less likely to be reviewed than books by male authors.

[Jeff O'Neill]

It's not as bad as it used to be because, Rebecca, we used to cover the Vita stats all the time.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah, the Vita stats saw that change.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And they imploded like all these sort of NGOs in the book space tend to do over time. Time.

[Laura McGrath]

This is. I, I'm really fighting recency bias here. What are the years that the study looked at, Laura?

[Jeff O'Neill]

2023.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

This was looking. What's so. Yeah, so 2023. When it was. When it was published.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

But what's so great about this study is that they looked at every single book published in a given year to try to get a sense of actually how likely it was for any book to receive critical attention. And that's where that 5% number comes from.

[Laura McGrath]

I see.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

So they weren't simply looking at the, the population of reviews. They were looking at all the books published in that, that year. So the year that they look at was 2007. And they chose 2007 because that gets us pre online reviews. That gets us pre Kindle.

[Jeff O'Neill]

That's pre. Us talking about this, Rebecca.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

That's pre via. Yep. So like purely a selection criteria from major review.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You want to go first, Rebecca, or let me do my guess.

[Laura McGrath]

I'm going to guess that the split was something like 70. 30 or 65. 35 toward for men.

[Jeff O'Neill]

So a 50 penalty. Depends how we're thinking about percentage.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

You're half as likely to get reviewed as an equivalent male author. Is kind of what you're saying?

[Laura McGrath]

I think so. Yeah.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think I'm. That was, that's what I was gonna say. I was thinking as a 50 penalty.

[Laura McGrath]

But especially in 2007, I could be.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Way different than that, honestly. Because like, I mean it could be a lot worse. It could be a lot. It could be a lot worse. You know, I don't have a good fire, honestly.

[Laura McGrath]

I don't have a good pause for a second because now we do have Emily Henry gets New York Times feature or I don't know that she can review.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Does she get reviewed?

[Laura McGrath]

I don't, I don't know. But like Sally Rooney is getting a lot of attention. There were a couple of those a year in like 2007, 2008.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Marilyn Robbins. I mean there were people out there.

[Laura McGrath]

But like a couple. It might be even worse.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I think the stealth problem. There's all kinds of stealth problems, but I think even back then it's still bad. Bad non fiction books tend to get reviewed more often than fiction Books just because there's more of them and there's more review space for non fiction, and that tends to be dude heavy, writ large. And then I'm guessing that there's like a double penalty going on. So I. I might even go worse. I don't know, Laura. We're kind of thinking around this. Let's see, we're thinking There's a 50% penalty, but that's kind of where we are.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

So you are. If you are a woman writing a book, books written by women are about 37% less likely to be reviewed than books written by men. And this is strictly in 2007. And this is strictly in the fiction space. I should say strictly in fiction. Strictly in fiction.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. I wonder if it does get worse if you throw fic nonfiction into that.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yep, Yep. So only 2% of those books that were reviewed were of. Were in these genres, like romance that were characterized as the, like, highly feminized genres.

[Jeff O'Neill]

No one. No one. I mean, book riot got started because no one was reviewing YA or Rome. I mean, honestly, like, no one was doing it. That was 2011. That was 14.

[Laura McGrath]

Well, even in, like, 2014, the times started having a few reviews of romance, but it was like this old white guy reviewing romance novels and being like, I'm here to review these because someone told me it would be good to remember this.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah, they're never going to live that down. That was a tough one.

[Laura McGrath]

I want to turn a big nose at it. It was terrible and very unforgettable.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I, like, want to choose to believe that that guy was the one who created the spicy scales. Like, very obviously he did not create the spicy scales, but I would love to have seen kind of his engagement with spice levels, relative spice levels.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I would not like to see that, Laura. I would very much not like to see that.

[Laura McGrath]

Too snobby to acknowledge that spice levels are a thing. That man was never gonna go there.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Just me next time.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay, so a 37% penalty.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

37% less likely being a woman who writes fiction.

[Laura McGrath]

Okay.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yep. So you see penalties across all categories. So books that are written by women. So that would be. So women's writing. And then you also see genres that are traditionally considered to be feminized, such as romance, are penalized as well. So even. Yeah. Women that are writing in literary fiction, women that are writing in women's fiction, regardless, one way or another, no matter what you're writing, you are less likely to be reviewed than the men that you are competing with.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Yeah. Interesting.

[Laura McGrath]

I wish that we had had the links to these studies 10 years ago when there were people in our comments being like, maybe men just write better books.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

And what's so useful about looking at the entirety of the books that were published in that given year year is that it addresses that supply side question. Not about quality, but, well, maybe men are just publishing more. They're not. There's actually gender parity in terms of the number of books by men and women that are being published in any given year. So this is not a supply effect. This is a demand reviewer effect, which I think is a really important distinction to make. This research is related to this really fantastic book that I hope you all read. It came out a few years ago called Inside the Reviewer's Circle by Felipa Chong. No, it is so fantastic. It came out from Princeton University Press. It is a really fantastic bright yellow cover. And Philippa did amazing interviews, all anonymous ethnographic interviews with major book reviewers in the United States to talk about the decisions that they make, the way that they're socialized into reviewing culture, the way that they decide which books it is that they want to write. Reviews about how they think about what their audience might like to read. It is a fantastic, fantastic, fantastic book. So would highly recommend you check that out.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah, that's going on the list. This is so interesting.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Okay, this is my last thing to say, so keep this in mind, right? 2% of the reviewed books are coming from romance genres. So the last statistic I have is not looking at these professional reviewers who are making selections from big picture down to small, but it is about the mass of people who are actually reading books.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, we were in these trenches. Okay, I'm ready.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Okay, go Laura, I'm sure you were. And this is research that's been done at the University of Pennsylvania by JD Porter, Angelina Imonsberger and James F. English on Goodreads and among active Goodreads users. Romance is as large of a category, as actively engaged as the idea of all fiction. There is no genre that is more exciting, that is more frequently read, that is more frequently shelved among active users users than romance. I am fascinated by this massive gulf between the professional reviewing class and the professional reviews on the one hand, and then the average readers on Goodreads on the other.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

What's especially interesting about what they find, they do some really fascinating network analysis on Goodreads users shelves. The way that you can kind of tag books and put things on certain shelves. They not only found that romance is really this juggernaut genre that is really structuring how most users are engaging with Goodreads. But it's also the most internally diverse in terms of the different types and categories of sub genres that exist within romance relative to any other genre category that you see on Goodreads. So it really is in effect its own genre system that is, that is more diffuse and more diverse than the way that we're thinking about even fiction generally. And that I think is amazing and, and so worth more critical and scholarly attention.

[Laura McGrath]

Yeah, I totally believe that. And I wonder if some of how robust the online community and online activity around romance is. Is it directly in response to the fact that romance only gets 2% of the professional book reviewing space and like, has basically been the redheaded stepchild of the publishing industry forever. But when I when I first started writing online in 2008 and like book blogs for literary things were still sort of new. Like there were a coup established ones from earlier in the 2000s, but there were really well established and prolific romance. Not just blogs like community, whole communities. Like as soon as web 2.0 popped up and people started being able to connect with each other, the romance people found each other. And I think they were so hungry for it because they had just never had that experience. They never got to see their reading preferences reflected in book related media before and through. So they, they've dominated the space. But how validating, especially to see that they're leading the way on internal diversity within their genre. Cause that's certainly something that romance readers I've heard anecdotally say that they feel about the community and that the community is progressive and sort of leading the way on the changes that folks want to see in the industry. So that's awesome to hear that there's numbers about it. But that, yeah, that space between 2% and then being like the most dominant, that it accounts for all the rest of fiction.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

All mind boggling. To your point, Rebecca, about the online readership and engagement. I just snuck off camera because I wanted to grab this book. This is a really fantastic book by Christine Larson called Love in the Time of Self Publishing.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Oh, I've seen this. I haven't read it, but I've seen this book before.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah, it is excellent. How romance writers Change the rules of writing and success. And it looks at essentially the online communities that have always existed or since. We've had online communities for romance readers and writers and how that really was the engine driving what we're now seeing downstream as this moment in writing. So it's really wonderful. She does some really Great. Again, some really great ethnographic work. Spending time with romance writers and readers. Highly recommend to kind of begin to wrap our minds around not only this boom, but this gulf.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I have a little. I find this completely fascinating as well. I think there's a couple things at play. I think Rebecca, you're right. There was a gap in mainstream coverage. So there was a lot more, you know, homebrew thinking about reviewing and networking and how to get the right readers in the right people's hands. I think another feature of romance is the trope. And you know, that has become a, you know, a really dominant discourse. But the, the desire, interest and utility of mapping those tropes for readers has given the taxonomic engine a lot of fodder to go with because like, you know, you take a literary fiction reader for example, example, tend not to be as interested in tropes in those things. And so the mapping them, reviewing them, metadating them within an inch of their life doesn't have as much utility as it does for a serious romance reader who is really looking for the kind of information about what that book does in a very granular way that so many other genres heretofore have not has been as interested in. I'm not sure that they wouldn't be a science fiction fantasy or a mystery of like some other genre readers. But for romance that is really a feature for a lot of people's experience to navigate tropes. And if you're going to navigate those waters, you need really detailed maps. So it really makes a lot of sense to me. I think what's interesting to me is why that hasn't. We haven't seen that much of that kind of taxonomic intensity be translated into other genres even as online platforms for them have. Have exploded. I. I find that endlessly fascinating.

[Laura McGrath]

I don't know. I just don't know that it does. Like the example that I'm just an example I'm thinking of while you're talking about tropes like I want to read a Grumpy Grumpy and Sunshine Enemies to lovers romance, you could do a fantasy.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Dragons non spicy, you know, like science fiction fantasies as many possible tropes as romance does, but they're just not as interested heretofore I should say. And it's not a value judge judgment has not been interested in like cataloging them with like super granular specificity lore. I mean that's. I just don't think it shows up.

[Laura McGrath]

I mean now we're just like truly in the space where we're hypothesizing, but I would. I'm just wondering, like you can, right? You can be like, I like dragons. Give me a sci fi book with dragons. But it doesn't tell you anything about the emotional valence of the book. Where most of the tropes of romance give you some information about what it is going to feel like to read that book, what the emotional arc of the characters or their interaction is going to be.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And I think that only feels that way because we don't have language for it yet. I think if you really someone wanted to do it, they could be like. Because even the cozy fantasy, this is a new thing under the sun. We didn't have a word for this ten years ago, but now we do and people are interested in. We're seeing new things and meditating around cozy fantasy because of legends and locks.

[Laura McGrath]

I mean, we've kind of troped our own stuff here. Like, we talk about old men waiting to die and the gang gets back together. And you're right. Like. Like that just has not made its way into broader book discourse. Anyway.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

One of my favorite things this year I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair in the fall. And one of my favorite parts of the fair was they had a new adult hall where this is one of the parts of the fair that is really set aside for the members of the public to come and engage. That has kind of a comic con element of things. And in the new adult hall, they had all of these panels, these whiteboard walls set up in the. In. It was all primarily in German, but it was essentially asking like favorite trope and had all of these markers where just people who were visiting the fair could come and write their favorite trope on these boards. Favorite book boyfriend, and you could come and write. And I was there. I was only there for the business part of the fair. And it was already fully covered. And so people were not only writing, you know, their favorite book boyfriend, but for everyone else who wanted to say Mr. Darcy, you know, it had gotten all of these tallies marks. So you could just see. I was just thinking about that, Jeff, as you were talking about the mapping and the taxonomic aspect of things like that was built into the infrastructure and the architecture of the way the Frankfurt Book Fair was thinking about romance novels.

[Jeff O'Neill]

And I think it structures a lot of romance discourse, frankly, like the trope navigation, identification and evaluation is a principle, perhaps the principal way of discussing. I mean, you look at TikTok, you look at Instagram reels.

[Laura McGrath]

I mean, our own coverage in our.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Own Coverage like that is the way of engaging with it that I think it's so fascinating that it's developed it almost kind of like an octopus, like independently evolved an eye. Like they, they evolved their own way of understanding their genre because of neglect by the wider literary community. It's a fascinating case study in what can happen if something's left to its own, rightly or wrong, wrongly, to develop a discourse of its own. Ooh, that would be a great academic study title, Laura. For someone who's looking at taxonomic habits and romance.

[Laura McGrath]

We can do this all day.

[Jeff O'Neill]

All day, Laura. Where can. So we talked about that's an episode that's going up on Monday. We talked about your slush pile analysis on text Crunch. People can find you there. You have a book coming out. It's going to be a while in terms of not, you know, it's nothing on you. It's just how publishing works. Like a year from now is not that long. But it doesn't help us to do a plug for it right now.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

I'll have you come back.

[Jeff O'Neill]

Where else can people keep up with you?

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yeah, sure. So you can find me on substack larabmcgrath.substack.com My newsletter is called TextCrunch and I am doing this sort of work which is talking about the really amazing data driven work that's happening in book studies and literary sociology and publishing and trying to make this useful to other people who care and think about books a lot. I'm on Blue sky and I will have a book coming out next spring that is currently right now and I don't know if it will be staying this way, but it's currently called Middlemen, Literary Agents and the Making of Contemporary American Literature.

[Jeff O'Neill]

The agents.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Yes.

[Laura McGrath]

We're so ready.

[Jeff O'Neill]

I'm so interested. Laura's going to stick around with us for a Patreon episode. We're going to turn the bat signal of data and attention onto this fantasy league idea we've been kicking around for a decade. And we're going to see if having a pro who knows what the hell's going on on makes any difference in making this into a wieldy kind of subject. Laura, it's been terrific to have you. Thank you.

[Laura McGrath]

Thanks so much.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Laura McGrath]

All the titles and things we referred to in the show notes as well. Thanks, folks. Thanks so much for listening today. We hope you'll enjoy this audiobook excerpt from Lethal Prey by John Sanford, provided by our sponsors at Penguin Random House Audio.

[Unknown]

The Auburn haired woman talking to Henderson took a final sip of cranberry juice and tapped the empty glass with a spoon to make it ring. Everybody, we're all here. Time to work. She introduced herself and the blonde. I'm Tricia Boone of Mason, Tano, Whitehead and Boone. And Michelle Cornell is an associate with our firm. We represent Lara. Grandfather felt. She reached out and touched the diamond studded woman. We're here to help Lara launch a long delayed quest. I will let Lara tell you about it and say only that our firm is firmly behind her whenever our legal services may be needed. Grandfelt smiled, turned to look at everyone in the group, and said, what we're going to do is we're going to find the monster who killed my twin sister. Sister? That was more than 20 years ago now, and that's long enough to know he's roaming free. Lucas scratched his forehead, an unconscious gesture of skepticism, and Grandfelt caught it. Marshall Davenport doesn't think we'll get anywhere, but he doesn't know what we're going to do, she said. Boone jumped back in. Why don't we all sit down? I believe there are enough chairs. They all did, and Grandfelt said to Boone, you were going to fill in some background? Boone nodded yes. She opened a file folder on her lap, cleared her throat, and said, lara Grandfelt and her sister Doris both graduated from Minnesota colleges. Actually, Lara was at the university just before the turn of the century. Lara studied finance and economics and Doris studied accounting at Manifold College in Northfield. After graduation, she said, the sisters found jobs in the Twin Cities, Lara with US bank in their wealth management department, and Doris with a local accounting firm. Three years after graduation, Doris was brutally murdered, a murder that was never solved. In the years between the murder and the present, Boone said, said, Lara left the bank to begin her own wealth management firm. She has done very well with it. Lara's not ridiculously rich, but she's done very, very well. Is that correct, Lara? Grandfelt nodded and said, yes. Boone said, I'm reviewing all of this so that we're all on the same page. And so we know that the money involved in this project I'm coming to this, that was legitimately sourced. So Lara has asked Mason, Tano, Whitehead, and Boone to set up a project designed to investigate and find the perpetrator of the rape and murder of her sister, Doris. Neither Virgil nor I worked that case, lucas began. We know. We've done the research. You were starting your own company, Davenport Simulations. And Virgil was in the army. Army? The State Bureau of Criminal Apprehension handled the investigation, boone said. When you, Lucas later went to the bca, Lara told me she spoke to you once about the lack of progress in the investigation. She got you to review the files with no result. Yes, I remember it now. Lucas shrugged. The BCA ran a good investigation, but there was nothing to go on. They never got to first base, boone said. I understand. Lara, however, has been unable to escape the gravity of the murder. She can't escape the injustice of it. That's true, grandfelt said, looking around at the crowd again. So she wants Virgil and me to reinvestigate, and Elmer and Edie and John are here to strong arm us into it if we need strong arming, lucas said. I wouldn't have chosen that precise phrase, but that captures the substance of it, boone agreed. What are you going to do? Virgil asked Grandfelt. Before she could answer, Boone stepped in again. Lara has directed our firm to post a $5 million reward for information leading to the identification of the killer. Killer? The reward is to be made as a gift of gratitude to the person or persons who provide the information. If that passes muster with our tax people, and I'm told that it should, the gift will be tax free. If somebody wins it, they'll get to keep the whole amount later today, and we've already prepared this. The reward will be posted on all the major true crime sites on the Internet. Internet, virgil said.

[Rebecca Shinsky]

Wow.

[Unknown]

Boone laid out the details. She expected a lot of people would be digging into the case, and Michelle Cornell would be in charge of reviewing submissions by what Boone called the true crime researchers. Anything that seemed even slightly relevant would be forwarded to Lucas and Virgil. Lucas, as a deputy federal marshal and Virgil as a BCA agent, would have the legal authority together to get almost anything that needed to be gotten to kick down any doors that needed to be kicked. We have the complete investigative files from the BCA and Woodbury, every piece of paper they have already in house. We didn't steal them. That's absolutely legal under Minnesota law. If we find that they've held anything back back, we will sue them, boone told Lucas. Lucas and you'll post them the files? Yes, including the crime scene photos. Lara has seen them and wants them on the sites, grandfeld said. I can't tell you how painful that was, seeing those photographs. Her lip trembled, trembled, but she kept her chin up. I'm set on this. If you need anything from me, anything, day or night, you call. If for some reason I can't answer, my personal assistant will. She reached out and touched the woman in the gray suit. Marcia Wise. She'll find me wherever I am. You will have personal numbers for both of us will be stirring up a storm, and you will have no control over it. We will be complying with Lara's wishes. Which are perfectly legal, boone said, her voice gone sharp. Frankly, we tried to talk her out of this, but she insisted. She is the client. The client does not have to accept our recommendation. So it's a done deal, lucas said. Grandfelt nodded, and Boone said, yes, it is.