Why are books in Catalan getting longer and longer?

Barcelona"Don't you have a smaller or thinner one, so it doesn't weigh too much to read in bed?" Beyond literary quality, book format, or other publishing specifics, a book's length can push us towards or against buying it. A study of 2,500 bestsellers from the New York Times revealed a few years ago that the average number of pages had grown from 320 in 1999 to 400 in 2014. Is there a similar pattern with books originally written in Catalan? If we take a look at almost 5,000 narrative and essay books originally published in Catalan in recent decades, the trend is confirmed: books in Catalan (including those released simultaneously in another language) are getting longer.

Since the 80s of the last century, an average of almost 100 pages have been gained; about 60-70 if we compare it to the beginning of the 21st century. A pattern that fits well with that of other languages and is confirmed when the number of words can be analyzed. Today, the average number of pages is between 260 and 290, whereas twenty-five years ago it didn't reach 200.

Why this trend of publishing books with a larger page count? In the Anglo-Saxon world, it has been suggested that part of the explanation is due to the penetration of digital books. Given that the physical weight of a book is the same (that of the e-book reader), we would be more willing to tolerate long books. But if we consider that digital books in Catalan still have a very small weight (less than 10% of sales), the explanation would lie in other more structural and strategic factors.

One of these factors we observe in the influence of the audiovisual world. Although adaptations to the small or big screen of Catalan books are few, many of the new writers draw from the culture of images. For example, Gil Pratsobrerroca, the author of the successful book "The Silence Game, has explained in interviews that the novel was developed, in part, from a script he had written. Audiovisual culture has long penetrated literature and there are some genres that have noticed it especially. Science fiction narrative and, to a lesser extent, young adult or adolescent literature have also significantly increased in size.

Other reasons would point to the greater freedom that the publishing world gives to writers, who are no longer so tied to a strict word count. Likewise, more and more is being published, which means that, perhaps paradoxically, novels are getting longer. The first book published is usually shorter (especially if it is a bestseller), but its size grows as subsequent ones are published.

A complete experience

Finally, there is a factor based on the reading experience that the user must have when opening a book. Just as in cinema, the fact that the population reads rather little may have driven the sector to try to offer a special "complete" moment, associated with global and broad stories, which is usually associated with more pages.

However, not all genres observe an increase in the number of pages. For example, political essays tended and tend to be equally long. That's politics, I suppose.