Books beat sex in satisfaction stakes

A recent poll in the US has confirmed what most book printers already knew – that a good read is hard to resist.

According to the online poll conducted by Harlequin Enterprises, three quarters of all Americans said that buying books was the number one temptation that they could not resist during the 2009 recession. In fact, they would prefer to sacrifice their vacations, shopping sprees, dining out and going to the movies rather than give up splurging on books.

In the same poll, 50 per cent of men said that their biggest temptation was sex while, for women, more than half (56 per cent) said that food was the number one thing they couldn’t resist.

The poll results are obviously good news for Harlequin Enterprises which owns the well-known Mills & Boon brand of romance novels and which sells more than 130 million books each year worldwide. In Australia, more than one in five paperbacks is published by Harlequin Mills & Boon and, annually, the company publishes over 800 volumes.

In the University of Melbourne’s recent Book Survey, statistics revealed that on average, Australians will buy 10 books a year. According to the survey, book sales have grown by 6.5 per cent since 2004.

Professor Mark Davis (pictured), from the university’s school of culture and communication, who was behind the study, told The Australian, that people have shown a preference for printed books despite the rise of the e-book.

“People have a strong book buying habit,” he said. “There is a ritual to reading that people like to go through and I think a lot of people will continue to be attached to that ritual.”