We're a Minority
From Para Publishing (search for "Who is Reading Books (and who is not)" on the page):
More reading and publishing statistics there as well.
One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.
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.
More reading and publishing statistics there as well.
posted by The Sublibrarian at 15:39
4 Comments:
In one of the graduate education classes I took, which was a class entitled Effective Strategies for Teaching Remedial Reading, a tenured elementary school teacher proudly stated, "I hate reading. I can't remember the last book I bought that wasn't a gift."
Yikes.
I'm not completely surprised by the statistics, actually. In the mid-eighties I was teaching programming to a class of high school students. These were all college-bound, AP kids. Not a one of them read for pleasure.
I always wanted to try an experiment of taking two to three weeks and doing expository writing, then coming back to the programming and seeing if it made a difference.
Thank God! Otherwise, I'd never get a seat at our independent bookstore's cafe. Already have to wrestle grey-haired, retired divas for the last stool as it is.
"Well, to be fair, some books suck. One can hardly be expected to read the sucky ones in their entirety."
You know, maybe it is that 57%+ of new books suck. That's certainly the impression I get from the shelves at the local B&N. Some sections' vacuum quotient being higher than others.
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