Poll: 80 Percent of Californians Have Read a Book for Fun in the Last Month

[Ron.]

I believe it

[c861556]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

So, 83% had read a book in English the last 6 months. Jumping from that, to "80% of registered voters read a book [in any language] for fun in the last one month" is not such a big step.

Well, the title of the article claims "80 Percent of Californians", not "80 Percent of registered Californian voters", but okay. According to the 2011 California Voter Registration Report, 72.8% of eligible Californians are registered to vote in 2011. Which takes the actual percentage of book-reading Californians down to 58.24%. Which still seems a bit too high, considering that a number of polls like this one consistently show that about up to a quarter of American adults don't read books at all, or that the typical American only reads four books a year.

Also, considering 83% of Americans claim to belong to a religious denomination, it's worth pointing out that, in other surveys, of those who read, the Bible and other religious works are always the top choices, read by nearly two out of every three. The survey I linked claims that minorities (among other groups) are especially prone to reading religious literature, and 37.6% of California's overall population are Latinos.

The point is, let's not get overly optimistic here. Whatever the reason, the numbers in the poll still seem to be at least a little bit off.

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by thrawn_aj

Agreed. I take public transport every day (in Berkeley) and at wildly different times each day. In the year since I bought my nook (and the whole E-ink thing went mainstream), I have seen exactly ONE other ereader in public. Of course, it's more than likely that people are reading on their smart phones instead of getting dedicated ereaders, but still ...

Maybe we're just too poor for ereaders and our nieghbors across the bay have most of those 18% .

I never see ereaders in the wild. I think the last time I saw a Kindle in the wild was back when the first became popular.