Before the digital revolution, book buying was a business requiring thought and commitment. When you bought a book, you were serious about reading that book, because it had cost you a fair amount of money. In addition, it was a physical object that existed in your home as evidence of that investment of money. Few people could afford – or cope with – buying books which then lay unread on the shelf; doing so is wasteful, after all.

Now, however, the availability of ebooks has greatly changed the game:

1. 1. Ebooks are cheaper than physical books, and may even be free.
2. 2. Ebooks are very easy to forget – once downloaded, with a simple click you can archive or delete them; or you can simply ignore them in your ereader’s menu.

The result is that increasing numbers of readers are downloading books that they either don’t read or give up on before the end. Publishers and promoting authors are finding that download figures don’t necessarily equate to reader figures – many ‘readers’ aren’t reading the books they buy at all.

Ebook retailers are fairly tight-lipped about the completion figures for books, but last year a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison created the Hawking Index (HI) to hypothesise which books of that summer had been abandoned before completion. Towards the bottom of the list were classic reads like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald and, interestingly, Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James.

Back in 2013 Goodreads surveyed readers on ‘The Psychology of Abandonment’ and found that the most frequently unfinished classics were Moby Dick, Ulysses, Atlas Shrugged, The Lord of the Rings and Catch-22. The top five most abandoned books were JK Rowling’s A Casual Vacancy; Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love; Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Gregory Maguire’s Wicked; and EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey.

Setting aside the classics for now, which are likely abandoned because of their weightiness and writing style, it’s interesting to note that the books people most give up on are those that are part of ‘fads’. They buy the books because of clever marketing, because the media suggests that ‘everyone’s reading them’, but then are disappointed by the books.

As an author, I find the trend towards buying but not finishing worrying. I don’t write books for downloads or sales; I write books because I want to entertain readers – I very much want my readers to enjoy my books so much that they read on to the end. I am sure all authors feel this way.

Publishers, too, care about this growing phenomenon of buy/abandon. They want to satisfy readers so that they’ll come back for more!

Cynics may think that the only cog in the book publishing machine that doesn’t care about this consumer behavior is the ebook retailers. After all, they only need care about sales, surely? But in fact recently Amazon has made a big change to its Kindle Direct Publishing Select programme to try to encourage the reading, rather than abandoning, of books. It has switched from paying Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) royalties based on qualified borrows, to paying based on the number of pages read. Amazon offers this example:

If the fund was $10M and 100,000,000 total pages were read in the month:

The author of a 100 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages).

What does this mean in effect? Nothing for the reader, but a lot for the author. It’s Amazon’s way of trying to encourage good content. The onus is on the author (and publisher) to create a book that the reader will not download and forget, or give up on by page two. The idea is that Amazon will reward those authors who are writing good-quality books.

It’s a start, perhaps, but could more be done? Are ebooks in general priced too low? Should readers, rather than authors, be incentivised to read what they buy? Ultimately, should the ‘easy come, easy go’ mentality be driven out of book publishing entirely?