There's a good article over at
teleread blog that thrashes this out. A choice quote:
Quote:
Just for fun, let’s compare this to a rough approximation of dog owners in the U.S. (stay with me…there’s a point to this!). Based on a completely unscientific Google search, it looks like the number of dog owners in the U.S. is around 60 million to 80 million. Additional rough estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show that the approximately 300 million Americans represent about 110 million households. So there are about 70 million dogs in approximately 110 million households, or roughly a 64% penetration rate, right in the middle of that book readership rate range cited in the previous paragraph).
Even though the percentages are about the same, nobody is running around saying the dog food/toy/care industry is in trouble. And while literacy rates are obviously more important to an economy than dog ownership rates, I think it’s interesting to study the similarities. The most important aspect of all this isn’t so much the number of readers or dog owners as it is the number of truly passionate readers and owners. Quite a few dog owners spend enough on their pets to more than make up for all of those families who don’t have a dog. The same is true for books. If you were to plot it out you wouldn’t wind up with a bell curve, you’d have a double-hump curve where the left side represents all those people who don’t read any books and the right side with all those who read lots and lots of books.
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