I'm a software engineer at my day job. It's interesting to me that a lot of the guys at work "haven't read since college" and don't read for pleasure... UNTIL their family buys them an eReader as the latest tech toy and suddenly they're reading novels and loving it. It makes me happy to see that.
I think a lot of people are turned off of reading through education. I have a degree in literature, but I HATED "literature" in middle and high school because my teachers taught it so poorly. (I *was* an avid "reader", but what I was reading was what we'd now call genre lit instead of general lit.) It wasn't until I got to college and was lucky enough to have a stellar English teacher that I realized that fancy literature could be fun and thought-provoking.
'Course, I still read mostly genre lit now. I don't think of myself as being more educated just because I'm reading a delightfully crappy "Doom" novelization at the moment. But I do have a B.A. and a B.S., and that and a couple of bucks will buy you a cup of coffee.
