Seems the Reverse

Now this is odd...

According to a recent report on Publisher's Weekly, the percentages for January book sales are the complete reverse of what you would think they would be. Adults rose and kids/young-adults dropped, substantially:

"Adult trade sales rose 8.4% in January compared to January 2012, but sales in the children’s/young adult category fell 23.5%"

Usually it's adult numbers that we see to be lower due to lack of time for reading, a lowered desire to spend free time in an 'intellectual' pursuit (hence the development of 'remote thumb' for several of the adult world), and any countless other reasons that keep the pages from turning in the adult world. I know that I read at a much slower rate now simply because the amount of hours I can dedicate to this pursuit have been curtailed in recent years. I no longer have the luxury of sitting around for 7+ hours a day when I feel like it, just for the sake of reading. Even my shorter bursts of 3-4 hours have been minimized to about 1-2, on a good day.

Yet again, the numbers are baffling:

"Sales of adult e-books rose 10.1% in the month, to $110.1 million, confirming the continuing slowdown in the growth of the e-book market. In January 2012, adult e-book sales rose 49.4% over January 2011. Sales of adult hardcovers and paperbacks this January rose 8.3%, and 10.6%, respectively, in the month.

In children’s/young adult, e-book sales fell 36.2%, while hardcovers dropped 29.3%; both reflect the strong showing made by The Hunger Games trilogy in January 2012." 

The slower plateau in adult e-books as opposed to children's e-books makes sense. Fads go out of style a lot quicker with the youth of an age. Adults are slower to follow suit in any direction either out of habit, tradition, or a simple lack of the energy required to chase after each new trend. But it's a disturbing thought to think that, even with the strong rise in reading due to The Hunger Games, there was still such a significant drop as to be a third less in reading than there was last year for young adults and children.

What's the cause of this? It's not that e-books are destroying the reading of the youth-- e-books dropped just as much as hard covers (if not more). Is there a smaller percentage of young adult/children's books being published in the last several years? Are libraries/schools lessening their incentive and grooming in the direction of reading? Or are the youth of the age reading at a higher level than expected, and thus no longer filling their own age margin (this would have made sense for me, as I was reading high school-level books in the 5th grade. Yes, I was that kid who carried around my father's leather-bound Complete Works of Jack London, which probably weighed just as much as I did)...

Either this is a good thing, and children/young adults are getting more advanced in their reading, or we have a problem for the literate world...