Average Books Read Over Lifetime

[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...

[cfrizz]

I'm sure I have surpassed that number by a few hundred.

[John Carroll]

I'm pretty sure I hit a hundred when I was 10. I didn't have a tv and spent all my time at the library, lol.

[jgaiser]

A pretty meaningless statement. Is this an average of every person in the world. Lots of illiterate people in third world countries. Lots of people with no real access to books even if they are literate. A quick google search seems to only find kobobooks and here that match that statement.

[ficbot]

I read about 100 a year, personally

[JeremyR]

I think reading pretty much has hit its nadir, but thanks to e-readers and smartphones, it's going back up.

I mean, a hundred years ago, everyone read. It was pretty much the popular form of entertainment. People also constantly wrote letters to each other, and so on. Then radio came, and started chipping it away. Then comics (which pretty much wiped out the Pulps) and TV and video games.

But now, thanks to smartphones, two teenagers sitting next to each other will text one another instead of talking. It's strange phenomenon, but it's a start...

[chrisanthropic]

100 books? I wonder where they got that number? It sounds completely made up to me, not that I disagree or would expect the numbers to be much higher than that though.

[Ron.]

I know many people who have not read other than when forced to in school, one friend of mine on her myspace under "reading" she has "I hate to read!" Than there is my mother who the library says has read over 700 books, that's just since they started keeping stats. I am sure then number is much greater. Myself I did not read much after school, only two or three books. Than I got a kindle, then a kobo and now a nook and I am reading every free moment I have. I will likely reach 100 books just this year, which should put me at 110 or so lifetime :P I won't count all the children's books I read.

[Pinecone]

When we moved into this house, our collection of paperbacks was over a 1000. And we had read virtually all of them. And that was a LONG time ago.

[pdurrant]

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...

[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.

[JoeD]

Originally Posted by chrisanthropic

100 books? I wonder where they got that number? It sounds completely made up to me, not that I disagree or would expect the numbers to be much higher than that though.

Most people I know that read, will read a lot more than 100 books in their lifetime if they continue at their current rates. A conservative estimate of those readers may be around 10 books a year (they're not heavy readers unlike I expect most of us on mobileread). However, the number of people I know that don't read at all or read very lightly (1-2 books a year) is significantly greater.

I don't think it's much of a stretch to see how most people may be non/light-readers and will drag the average down. Whether it's made up or based on the logic pdurrant suggests, it does at least feel like a reasonable number to me.

[lestatar]

@OP: Assuming this information is in any way actually accurate, all I can say is:
That's kinda sad.

And for sure I am delighted to be on the "right" side of the bell curve here - the very, very far right side.

[rdfry]

Easily have read well over a hundred books. I average that in a year.

[GraceKrispy]

I happen to know for a fact I read more than 100 books before I was 8, since I won a contest in 2nd grade for reading 100 books in one month. I've read 82 so far in 2011.

My husband, on the other hand, has read about 4 books in the 18 years we've been together. I only remember my father reading 1 book in all the time I knew him (19 years). My mother read hundreds.

I think it's a meaningless statement, because of all the variables involved in averaging out for an entire population (and I, too, question where that number came from), but I do think it highlights the fact that many people don't read for pleasure, and, in fact, find it a traumatizing or useless experience. Some people prefer to live life to its fullest and I have no problem with that. Some prefer to live life in front of a TV, and I find that even more disturbing.

[Frida Fantastic]

I think this is a very reasonable estimate. People are force fed books they don't like during their school years, and they think it's a problem with the medium rather than with the selection. Books can be as intelligent or as trashy as any other medium. I was an avid reader before the school system made me read books, and if my first books were the books from the school system, I doubt I'd enjoy reading as much as I do now.

My first books at school were the books assigned to the ESL (English as a second language) classes, which were for some reason, all about Asian girls dying tragic deaths. If that was my first introduction to the medium, I'd say "pass"!

(ESL and avid reader? I've been reading English books since I could read, but my spoken English needed work. I wish that allowed me to bypass the ESL book selection...)