Quote:
Originally Posted by twowheels
On the Kobo "Reading Life" website, they say:
-- "The average person reads less than 100 books in their lifetime."
That's an amazing, and sad, statistic. While I admit that I've really picked up this pace since I purchased my K3, I still think that I've read far more than 100 books already!
I wonder where they got that number...
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[bold added]
Let's see if we can come up with a figure ourselves. Let's just look at USA, since that's where I can most easily find figures.
In 2010, Adult hardback sales were $1.57billion, trade paperback at $1.38billion, and mass market paperback at $673.5million.
There are wholesale prices, so let's say $12 for hardbacks, $8 for trade paperbacks and $4 for mass market paperbacks. Then the total adult market (fiction) in 2010 was 130million + 170million + 168 million = 468 million books sold.
US population is 300 million or so. So per-person, about 1.5 books were sold in 2010
So an estimate of 100 books per lifetime
on average might not be so unlikely.
Yes, I've ignored borrowing from libraries, and ebooks and non-fiction. But I've also ignored books bought and never read...
I think that anyone on Mobileread is going to be
much above average in number of books read in a lifetime.