Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
But telephones stopped being a niche long long ago.
Book reading, in all forms, is a niche. 
Sounds like you'd be surprised at how many people go through life without doing any recreational reading. Steve Jobs was only slightly exagerating when he said nobody reads. |
A bit more than slightly exaggerating. The '07 NEA study said 1 in 4 Americans didn't read a book in the past year, which is what the news focuses on for 'nobody is reading!' headlines. But that means 75% of Americans did read! 68% of Americans have a library card, and library use has been increasing. A 'typical' American might only read four books in a year but 'readers' tend to read a lot more than four books! Bowker's 2009 figures showed 288,355 titles printed in one year. Publishing is an over $20 billion dollar industry. Sure there are a lot of people that don't read but there are far more that do.