My guess is that children’s book sales are recovering before adult sales, just because people will buy for their children before they’ll buy for themselves.

On the other hand, libraries are busier than ever. Our circulation is going through the roof. As usual.

As Mark Twain put it, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Here are the links to the reports:
http://www.publishers.org/documents/S12008Final.pdf
http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2009_August/StatsJune2009.htm

As for the YA, of course the border is hazy, except in the minds of the publishers, who can consult the little labels in case of doubt. Heinlein observed that the “juveniles” he wrote for Scribner’s were for the older juvenile reader–what was sometimes called “cadet” novels in his overseas sales. Our category of “young adult” doesn’t seem to have been around at the time. Most famously, when Scribner’s rejected one, he took STARSHIP TROOPERS across the street to Putnam, and sold it as an adult without changing a word. Heinlein’s description of how to write juvenile SF was “write the best SF you know how, then leave out all the sex.” But of course he wasn’t noted for explicit gore in his adult works, and he was more likely to have an unusual idea than an unusual vocabulary. (Though the first time I read the word “ecology” it was in a Heinlein novel.)

I’m not convinced of the omniscient narrator. Yes, I DO have YA novels in the Bookcase of Exile. But TUNNEL IN THE SKY is “close third person.” We never see or know anything Rod doesn’t. “Deacon” is described as old, because he’s old to Rod–he may, in fact, be past 40. STARSHIP TROOPER–the Juvenile/adult changeling–is first person. Sutcliff’s excellent EAGLE OF THE NINTH is another close third person. I once saw her RIDER ON A WHITE HORSE described as YA, and it’s close third multiple viewpoints. Conan Doyle’s “Brigadier Gerard” stories are first person. Only THE WHITE COMPANY and SIR NIGEL have omniscient. Sabatini would qualify if one counts him as YA. It is true, as Grossman pointed out, that the story is usually told in a straightforward manner, and that if things are from a particular viewpoint, we generally know whose it is.

[I'd have to agree that there has been a decline in adult reading ability across the century, by the way. But this cuts both ways. Books written for relatively young readers of WWI vintage have longer sentences and a higher vocabulary than at least much adult genre fiction today. If JOHN CARTER OF MARS is a YA, it's a YA with a vocabulary and sentence structure more demanding than Chabon's latest "adult" novel.]

I don’t know that I would say readers are going to YA for morality, but I may be making a fine distinction. I would say many “adult” novels are deliberately picking a quarrel with the morality of the reader, and that the YA novel does not.

But there is no reason one cannot write an adult novel–genre or otherwise–with a straightforward narative format and accessible vocabulary. Surely one need not ALWAYS disagree with the morality of the readership? And adult novels were written for three centuries without generally carrying sex and gore to excess.

Perhaps the great relative strength of the YA is simply that the conventions of the category preclude many of writers’ and editors’ more common mistakes?