Many Americans don’t read books, according to survey
Ever wonder why the publishing and bookselling industries are in a slump? Here’s one reason: according to an article published by Yahoo! news, one in four adults said they didn’t read any books during 2006. That’s a lot of people not reading and a lot of books not being read.
One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.
The survey doesn’t paint a very bright picture of those who do read:
The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year — half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn’t read any, the usual number read was seven.
Reading only four books in the last year is still bad. That’s not even a book every two months. I’m not a fast reader, in fact I read pretty slowly, but I still average at least a book a month – sometimes more when I read more than one book at a time.
This only furthers my arguments that young children need to hooked on reading at an early age. If not, then we can only expect these numbers to get worse.
As an unofficial follow-up to this story, I’ll be posting later in the week about the state of reading in China – where the popularity of both reading and writing novels has soared in recent years, thanks in large part to the internet.
How many books do you read, on average, per year?
Check out the Yahoo! article:
One in four read no books last year
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