The Watchtower of Destruction: The Ferrett's Journal - Kinda Sad, But Not Surprising
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Kinda Sad, But Not Surprising
From this article at Para Publishing, which sounds about right to me:
58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
42% of college graduates never read another book.
80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57% of new books are not read to completion.
The only really surprising part is the percentage of books that aren't read to completion - I thought it was lower. Lemme check a bookshelf at random... thirty-one books, and I haven't finished read eight of them, but that's a little skewed because three of them are books I took from my Grandmother's house when she went into the nursing home on the off-hand chance that I might get around to reading "The Making of the African Queen" and "My (Volkswagon) Bug" some day. So for me, the percentage is more like 26%. Still, that's fairly high.
Alas. I love books. And I do know, objectively at least, that not everyone does. I wonder whether the currently text-based nature of the Internet is causing our literacy rate to rise or fall, and whether the non-reading folk are getting more content from blogs and new sites? Oh well.
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I wonder whether the currently text-based nature of the Internet is causing our literacy rate to rise or fall, and whether the non-reading folk are getting more content from blogs and new sites? Oh well.
I doubt that. I wish it were the case, but I suspect it is far more likely that they just don't read, whether it be book, weblog, web site, or even newspaper.
Yeah! Why read when you have TV, right?
How awful!
I am SO glad I come from a reading household, and am doing the best I can to pass my love of reading on to my kids.
I find those statistics hard to believe. If so few americans step foot in book stores, how come we have so many and how do they stay in business? If it is true my family is doing more than their fair share of reading. :-)
Bookstores as a whole have always been a teeny business. And those customers who purchase regularly tend to be power customers.
By that standard, you might well ask why tanning booths are around. I don't use 'em, nobody else I know does, but by God they're everywhere.
Those statistics do not surprise me one bit. :(
80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
I reckoned Harry Potter alone would have done more than that....
Another case of "popular among geeks != popular among people"
The latest Harry Potter book sold 6.9 million copies in the first twenty-four hours.
United States has 296 million people in it.
Even accounting for families with multiple people, that still leaves a lot of wiggle room. It's a big country.
I wonder whether the currently text-based nature of the Internet is causing our literacy rate to rise or fall
I am of the belief that the text-based nature of the Internet is probably going to cause a shift in what is considered "correct grammar" (and if you'd like, you can translate that as "OMG the standards are falling!"). By my reckoning, most of what people used to read was books and newspapers; things with style guides and copy editors. But with blogs and Livejournal and Myspace and text messaging, people are spending their formative years reading more typos and eccentric capitalization rules. So I figure that's probably going to have some effect in a few years.
That's horribly upsetting. I wouldn't be able to not read at least 20 books a year.
| From: | (Anonymous) |
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| Date: | July 8th, 2006 04:31 pm (UTC) |
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Pearl before swine, I guess. I can't imagine an educated human being "never <-- (never? What, not once in their life?) buying a book after high school"... I don't even want to think about it.
Also, people who don't read at all are automatically sorted into the "stupid" category by my brain. That's probably not fair, but it's definitely the way I feel -- and hey, it's not like the non-readers are going to read this comment anyway, hehe.
- JR Henderson
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/61912977/810751) | | From: | ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) jfargo |
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| Date: | July 8th, 2006 08:21 pm (UTC) |
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I feel the same way about non-readers. Unfortunately that places many of my family members into that catagory so I try to shift my brain out of that mode now and then in order to not see them that way.
See, to me a non-reader reads maybe one or two books a year for pleasure. I mean, they read, but to never read at all? I find that extremely difficult to grok.
It HURTS us! I went to a meeting at HarperCollins where they analyzed statistics like this, and it was reassuring to see that publishers are looking for way to market their product just as hard as another industry...
I only manage to read maybe five books in a year. Its kind of embarassing.
--m4
Which puts you solidly in the top 20%, according to the survey.
I used to think non readers were morons. Not so much any more.
I love books.
I also work two jobs.
Now here's the catch, do they count books in electronic format as "books."
I have several sites online, where I can get full text of books in various formats. I know I didn't buy an actual physical book last year. I read several though.
So how would I fit into the statistics.
Well, this is just some unmeasured observation, but when I sub at the local highschool and get a computer lab class, the kids mostly don't go to sites with signifigant amounts of text. Sports pictures, videos, music sites, flash games, nothing that you'd have to be able or willing to read to use. They use the internet for video clips. There might be half a dozen words attached to a clip, but there is almost always a picture that identifies it.
While I don't give a fig what other people do with their books, I don't leave a page unturned. Anything that's on my bookshelf, I've read every page. (Except the academic texts, where I usually skip over the citations, footnotes, and index.)
I wish I could honestly say that this is true. But actually looking at my shelves...and desk...and tables...and dresser, and the other shelf, and the bed, and the floor, and the night stand, I'm getting about a 60:40 Read:To Be Read percentage. And maybe half of the 'To Be Read' books, I've at least started. Then again, same quick count gives me about 500 books or so in a 14x12 foot room. I cheat, and get boxes of them sent to me by publishers.
Those statistics make me very sad, but then again, looking at my own immediate family, I really shouldn't be surprised. My dad absolutely HATES reading, and cannot understand how a person could possibly sit in one place with a book for more than 5 minutes at a time. There are rumors that my mother used to like to read once upon a time, but I've seen no evidence of this, outside of the occasional magazine. Fashion magazine, that is.
I feel like a fish swimming upstream.
| | From: | jfargo |
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| Date: | July 8th, 2006 08:29 pm (UTC) |
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Your dad and mine sound amazingly similar. I remember he was always proud that he had such a smart son (me, yay!) but would grumble any time I told him I'd rather spend an hour or two reading than doing whatever it was that he thought a real man/boy should be doing.
Maybe, just maybe, reading and smarts are linked, dad? Maybe a little?
I don't know. I do know that I am a weirdo that can only read if there are absolutely no distractions. No music or anything. So that leaves the only time to crack a book as... well, bedtime. And then I have to be an adult and remember to put the book down so I can get up and function at my normal time.
I also know that books are expensive. As such, they are a luxury. And even if I have $100 to spend on something I want, and there's the option of a new printer to replace my broken one or new books, the printer wins. If it's a choice between books or clothes, the clothes win, too, as I've only two pair of jeans to my name, and one only fits on my rare skinny days.
As such, since books are a luxury, every year for my birthday I end up getting the newest Forgotten Realms book written by RA Salvatore as I've yet to get bored by him and his characters are old friends to me.
I do like to read. As a teenager I chewed through Gore Vidal's Messiah like it was a prime cut of steak, savoring every word. So it's not a literacy problem for me. But I do think that somehow I got burned out on reading to some degree for a while.
I've read more recently than I have in the past several years. I'm rereading Cleric's Quintet and am about a third of the way through the third book. I know it's not much, but at least I am moving back toward reading at a more frequent pace than one or two books a year.
I also know that books are expensive. As such, they are a luxury.
That's why you either:
A) Go to the local library.
B) Trade with other people who share your similar taste in books.
C) Find someone with a large home library to bum books off of.
These three are the only way I get a chance to read as much as I do. I can't afford new books (even paperbacks), but between A & B all it takes is a bit of time and determination. I'm lucky though. My friend's mom has a HUGE personal library filled mainly with sci-fi and fantasy books. I'm constantly over there bumming books. :D
holy cow. i'm...stunned. how do they LIVE?
That really is a shame. I feel like going out and buying 3 books right now.
I literally cannot imagine going an entire year without reading ONE book. Wow.
My reading and purchasing of books has shifted radically in the last decade. My budget is really tight, so buying new books is out of the question. I either borrow from friends or libraries, or buy second hand books from Amazon. I'd buy second hand locally, if we had a used bookstore around here.
Here's an interesting thing: I do not read as many books as I did BW (before web), but I read quite a lot more online- probably a book or two a day's worth of articles, essays, and posts. I spend more of my time reading today than I ever did.
I own tons of books. And I'll probably get more as budget and space permits. But the vast majority of my reading is done online now. I read more from screens than I do from paper.
I could not imagine life without the Internet. Or books. I've known people who actually brag about having not picked up a book since high school or college. They scare me.
Well, this just means we need to buy more books. :-)
58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
Sadly, I have a couple of friends that are like this. It boggles my mind that people would not want to read a book. I feel bad when I only read three to four books a month.
I find it weirder that 42% of college graduates never read another book. I mean, to have enough interest and aptitude to finish college, and then never read another book, EVER? It boggles my mind.
I think a small part of my heart just died. :(
Yet 1/3 of all booksales wordwide (from the same link) are in the USA;
63% say they've bought a book in the last three months; and so on. These, along with the amount of money reportedly spent on books, don't fit. In fact if one could be bothered to compare the stats quoted there it looks like (from an initial look) very few of them show any form of agreement at all.
Personally I've not bought a book in the last few years (I've not even been into town in about seven, nevermind into a bookshop), yet I've read about a hundred per year (estimated average) and reffered to more. Some of them I've been given, some I've re-read of the thousands I own, and quite a few came from the library services (where Sarah, my partner, works). I'm sure that's not typical, but certainly covers circumstances other than are likely to be shown in those statistics. Which is probably much more typical.
None of those are contradictory, though. One-third of all sales from the USA means that even a small percentage of 296 million people can buy a lot of shit, and 63% of people buying a book doesn't necessarily mean that the first study is wrong - as it says right up-front, people are expected to lie about such things, and even so I've bought books for my grandmother as a gift.
The stats are from different sources, and some of them are going to clash a bit. But the overall picture - most people don't read books regularly for pleasure - is spot-on.
I don't believe those statistics, and it's made all the more unbelievable by the dead link to http://www.jenkinsgroup.com/ which is supposedly the site where the page linked on this livejournal got the stats.
Feel free to deny it, of course, but that's about what I got told when I worked for Borders Books HQ a few years ago, and miripanda who is working for Harper-Collins has said that she's also seen similar numbers in recent presentations. A 404 is not an automatic sign of nonexistence. |
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