Seen via Boing Boing:
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.
If these statistics indeed represent the state of reading in this country, they go a ways to explaining why anti-evolutionism and ID have gotten a toe-hold.
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as the naacp states: a mind is a terrible thing to waste.
when i published my own book, i read a statistic that predicted that by 2025 or so there will be more authors writing books of various types than readers to consume them. you should get voting credits based on how much you read...
Oh, my goodness! To me the concern over these statistics appear similarly offbase as discussions of the "horse and buggy" (hardcopy publishing) industry during the transition to the "automobile" (online information transfer). Presumably "books" here refer to the traditional hardcopy print between two covers written in linear fashion from page one to page n with tedious footnotes, a way of writing soon to go the way of the dinosaurs, horse and buggies, LP records, etc. Oh, my goodness! The hardcopy shelves of libraries and bookstores are soon to be relics. As throughout the history of change, the controllers of the means of production (publishers, editors, authors) are lagging the demands and wisdom of the consumer and the market. Any valid survey should ask the question how many grads are wired and reading; what are they reading?; how many authors are writing solely for this media rather than hardcopy? If one is to influence young and aging minds, one must master and compete within the new three-dimensional and hopefully more democratic media. Polly [Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart--Anne Frank]
how fucking depressing.
at least NYCers aren't like that: many of them read voraciously. i mean, what else would you do on a crowded subway that won't get you punched in the nose?
I don't know where the numbers came from - the link is broken on the original page that Boing Boing is pointing too. HOWEVER, these results are not consistent with National Endowment for Arts research. A report of theirs from 2004 (http://www.nea.gov/pub/NEASurvey2004.pdf) shows that in 2002 56% of respondants (all 18 or older) had read a book. Obviously that would instantly destroy a number saying a majority of high school graduates had NEVER read a book after high school. Incidentally, they did find that college graduates were 1.8 times more likely to read than those with only high school diplomas.
All of this isn't of course to say the NEA study is the last word, but it provides plenty of reason to question numbers that came out of nowhere. This is of course a classic problem: We tend to accept numbers that confirm our beliefs about the universe.
As I noted in the original post if these statistics indeed represent the state of reading ...
The figure may be way off, but the NEA figure isn't exactly encouraging either.
Sorry - SOMEBODY had to be the snotty mathematician.
Wow, that still didn't come out right... Nevermind... :)