Better Dead Than Read: New AP poll on reading
Yesterday the AP reported on a new Associated Press-Ipsos Poll about American reading habits. The results were not good. For instance, the study showed that “one in four adults read no books at all in the past year.†While this is of course depressing in and of itself (four books in a year? I just read three during a 10-day vacation), what’s even worse is that this is part of an overall downward trend. According to the AP: “When the Gallup Poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started — a similar but not directly comparable question — the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999, but close to the 1990 response of six.†So while it’s pretty pathetic that a quarter of the American population didn’t read a book last year, what’s really sad is that — three or four years from now — someone who reads just one or two books a year will be instantly nicknamed “Shakespeare.†And a decade from now Bradbury’s world of Fahrenheit 451, where people didn’t care about books before they were banned, might actually arrive.
This mounting apathy is also felt in book sales. According to the AP, sales of books “have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way indefinitely. Analysts attribute the listlessness to competition from the Internet and other media, the unsteady economy and a well-established industry with limited opportunities for expansion.†Of course, statistics and trends like these go far beyond the “print is dead†debate, and have nothing to do with electronic reading versus traditional reading. Instead, these facts show that Americans are increasingly bypassing any kind of reading, choosing to do something else instead. Whether it’s watching a film in place of picking up a book (a construction worker is quoted in the AP story as saying “Fiction just doesn’t interest me. If I’m going to get a story, I’ll get a movieâ€), more and more people are bypassing a literary experience altogether. So, with conditions this dire, it’s ridiculous for booklovers or publishers to care about readers “curling up†with eBooks versus printed books; the real battle is to get present and future generations interested in words in the first place.
As a just-published-for-the-first-time author, I find this report disturbing but to be honest, not at all a surprise. In my efforts to promote my novel “The Secret Ever Keeps”, it is invariably the people who say “I just love to read”, or “I read all the time”, who end up buying the book and having me sign it. It’s really a numbers game, and with 300 million Americans out there if even a meager 1 in 10 are avid readers, that still amounts to 30 million readers.
The trick is in finding a way to introduce yourself to them in such a vast and widely dispersed market.
Americans’ reading habits are just more evidence of our laziness, which seems to grow boundlessly. We prefer the simple, passive processes of information consumption, and are willing to sacrifice a little bit of imagination for the convenience. Our much-vaunted American obesity isn’t just physical, but it’s apparently intellectual and spiritual, too. I blogged on this one, too.
I agree with your general assessment and I wrote about this on my own blog yesterday:
http://www.bradsreader.com/brads_reader/2007/08/many-americans-.html
(pardon the blatant self-promotion)
While I’m always interested in new technology that makes it easier, cheaper and more convenient to get literature into the hands of readers, the US still has a more fundamental problem of just getting people to read to begin with.
My solution tends to be start kids reading at a young age. Granted, that’s easier said than done, but if our younger generations are growing up on the internet, games, movies and everything else except books - the publishing industry is in big trouble. I don’t know what other long-term solutions that would bring more readers into the market.
Great post!
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