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Old 01-07-2012, 07:29 PM   #29
SteveEisenberg
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Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase View Post
If humans are hard wired to read, why do so few people read after/outside of school?
I wondered about your phrase "so few," so I googled for statistics on the percentage of book readers. And what I found is that the statistics are all over the place.

According to one link, 27 percent of Americans "did not read a single book for pleasure in 2007." This of course implies that 63 percent read at least one book for pleasure, with others presumably reading books for business reasons, and others doing a lot of newspaper reading. Looks to me like a nation of readers.

At the other extreme is the claim that 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college (raising the question of why the author thinks they read books when in college).

As for the trend, I can't find anything long term. According to this link, reading of fiction and poetry declined about twenty percent from 1982 to 2002. Before then? After then? Who knows? And was there a compensating change in non-fiction reading?

My personal gut feeling, which I know counts for nothing, is that the big trend is shift from newspaper to book reading. In as much as most newspapers try to be objective in news columns and to present a broad range of views on the editorial pages, and in as much as a lot of non-fiction bestsellers have an ax to grind, this isn't so good.
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