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01-20-2010, 02:41 PM | #1 |
Sir Penguin of Edinburgh
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Steve Jobs was wrong - People still read as much as they always have
The Kaiser Family Foundation has been conducting a national survey on the media used by children from 8 to 18 y.o. The findings were just announced today. You can find the full details here (press release, prsentation, summary, and more).
Here's the good news: book reading has actually increased in the last 5 years, both in the number of kids reading and the amount of time spent (p30). Unfortunately, newspaper and magazine reading decreased. I'm not surprised; we all know Old Media is in trouble. press release report |
01-20-2010, 02:53 PM | #2 |
Grand Sorcerer
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I believe it. Over the past five years there's been some universally big releases that have gotten people into reading again. Teens have a huge amount of options now so they are starting younger. And now that we're heading into a recession, reading is a cheap alternative entertainment.
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01-20-2010, 03:01 PM | #3 |
Wizard
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Me too. Nowdays, there are always a few people reading in the train. More than what it use to be it seam.
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01-20-2010, 03:08 PM | #4 | |
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01-20-2010, 03:09 PM | #5 |
Wizard
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This is a relief. My husband and I are voracious readers - my 11 year-old hates to read. And I was nervous seeing all the people on the train who AREN'T reading (I am a glass half-full person). I haven't noticed a change, because my head is always in a book (as my mother used to say, thinking that was an insult!)
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01-20-2010, 03:26 PM | #6 | |
Kate
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01-20-2010, 03:32 PM | #7 |
Loving life
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I read a lot too and I believe it has been mainly due to the fact that I am hard of hearing and I have trouble understanding what is said on TV or the movies.
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01-20-2010, 03:49 PM | #8 |
Wizard
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My mom used to get phone calls from the neighbors warning her that I was going to get killed on day because I would walk down the street while reading
We try to encourage both of our kids to read as much as possible, the 17 yr old though thinks texting counts, but the 7 year old will often (after a bit of prodding) pick up a book and read for a half hour or so at times. In fact we've gone so far as to let him "buy" game time (wii, xbox) by reading - he can get 10 minutes of game time for 1 hour of reading. The beauty of it is that he ends up reading and forgetting about the games altogether !! |
01-20-2010, 04:01 PM | #9 |
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My son has been a voracious reader for several years. He was a non-reader for the first few years of school, but I got him into Harry Potter by telling him over and over to just read until Hagrid showed up, then it would get interesting. He read the first, like it and read the second. He still wasn't as excited about reading as I would have liked, but he was reading. He saw me reading #4 and claimed he would never read a book that thick. Well, he did, and others to boot. He has read the HP series more than once, the Inheritance series (Eragon), and the Jacques series about the animals? I forget what it is called. He even reads some of my books now, and I don't read the cleanest stuff out there. He loves Sherilyn Kenyon's Dark Hunter series (I know, it's marketed in the romance section, but there is a lot of action), and others I've never read. He's 18 so the smut factor doesn't bother me.
My daughter, on the other hand, only started to read for fun last spring, about the time the "Twilight" movie came out because she wanted to read the book first. Imagine my surprise when I would go in her room at 2am to find her either reading, or asleep with the book on top of her? She still struggles (the reason she hated to read), but at least she is doing it. She takes after her father in that regard. I got her her first ebook when she needed the fourth Twilight book, but we couldn't get to town to buy it, and she didn't want to wait to buy from Amazon. She actually owned one before I did.LOL |
01-20-2010, 04:20 PM | #10 |
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That quote always struck me as funny. Jobs is a bright guy and part of me wonders if he was tossing that out there to make competitors think that Apple wasn't working on a tablet/ereader device. Could he be that sneaky?
Then again, I recently went back to university as a mature student to finish a physics degree, and I was appalled by how few of my 20-something classmates bothered to read for pleasure ... and not because they had a lot of physics texts to read either - the ones I asked about it said that they hardly ever read books - even over summer vacations, winter holidays, etc. --- Dr. Tablet - tablet computing news, info, opinions and review |
01-20-2010, 04:41 PM | #11 |
Wizard
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In my opinion, the rise of ebooks could be a renaissance for reading. People have been staring into TVs for 40 years but that has been largely replaced (for young people) by the Internet and mobile phones.
Using a mobile phone or the Internet requires some kind of interaction. Interacting with a discussion forum or texting someone requires a LOT more thinking and cognition than watching most TV shows. So many people are emerging from this braindead state of watching TV in their spare time to reading/writing/interacting. Now on top of that (people getting used to online interaction and reading more) we have mobile computing technologies and highly portable e-readers making it easier to take books and the Internet with us. People are reading more than ever largely thanks to the Internet and that flows onto books/articles. It's a great thing for literature and for the human race. Television has it's place, but the Internet as a large repository of knowledge and books are much more interesting imo. |
01-20-2010, 05:23 PM | #12 | |
The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠
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01-20-2010, 05:26 PM | #13 | |
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01-20-2010, 05:33 PM | #14 | |
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01-20-2010, 05:37 PM | #15 |
Wizard
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Well. That's good to know. It actually makes me happy. I was always a bit of a nerd with my nose in a book when I was younger. Kind of made me the black sheep in school when I spent more time in the library than the playground.
Then again, I also was the outcast with country music before the Taylor Swifts and Carrie Underwoods. Now look where the most new talent is |
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