In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte provides some mildly hopeful numbers for both readers and writers:
I was having coffee this week with a former star journalist who now (like so many) works in a journalist-adjacent industry. “Who reads books?” she wondered.
It’s a question I’m often asked by journalists who these days get a lot of their information from Twitter. The chore of keeping up with their feed leaves little time for anything else. My guest still read books and belongs to a book club, but she asked the question all the same.
According to the authorities at the PEW Institute, 77% of Americans read books in 2021 (or, to be more precise, read one or more books in one or more format—print, audiobook, ebook). That’s not bad considering only 86% of American adults can read.
Only 21% of women read no books, and 26% of men. Eighty per cent of white people read books (as compared to 62% of Hispanics).
Good news for the future of book reading: 81% of adults under the age of fifty read books compared to 72% of adults over the age of fifty.
More on the demographics: 69% of those earning less than $30,000 a year read books, while 85% of those earning over $75,000 read books; 61% of those with a high-school (or less) education read books; 89% of college graduates read books.
According to PEW, the average reader manages twelve a year.
There is some evidence that reading is a declining habit: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average time spent reading for pleasure declined from twenty-three minutes a day to seventeen minutes a day from 2005 to 2017. But the least decline was among young adults, 18 to 34 (less than 1%).
In fact, there is good evidence that the much-maligned millennials read more than their parents, and they overwhelmingly prefer hard copies to digital books. Even better, the millennials pay for their books:
I have had a number of people over the years ask me why I prefer hard copy books to electronic documents. I’ve come up with a few reasons.
–Books are easier to cross-reference than electronic media. Often I’ll need 6 or more reference books on a particular topic, and it’s just not possible to quickly access all that information electronically. It’s also FAR easier to read a map in hard copy, as you can see the whole thing, not just the tiny little area your screen shows.
–Books have an end date. I know that my copy of The Dinosauria contains the info on dinosaurs that humans had up to a few months prior to the publication date. Sure, more info has come out, but there’s value in having definitive information on what was known in the past. We can more easily see trends in the acquisition of knowledge, and–perhaps more importantly today–that past knowledge doesn’t change. No one can say “This person is no longer acceptable, their contributions will be removed”, at least not without breaking into my home. Further, no third-rate programmer is going to re-write the code that gives me access to force me to give more personal information in order to enjoy the thing I paid for (something that’s happened to me with purely electronic media).
–I can annotate books. Marginalia is one of the great joys of reading old textbooks. I’m not talking the doodles of bored kids, but rather the writings of serious people doing research. You can literally see the workings of great minds as they worked, long after the person is gone. It’s a connection with the past that you simply cannot get in GoogleDocs or Wiki pages.
–Books handle abuse better than smart phones. I’ve crammed field notebooks (the yellow pocket-sized books that all field engineers and geologists carry) into fissures of rocks to take strikes and dips, and to get a better grip while free climbing. I’ve used books as flower presses and as weights and as a means to prop up lab equipment. This is normal among scientists; we use what’s on hand. And just try to squash a bug with a smartphone! I’ve also had electronic devices fail because the ambient temperature was above 85. Books handle that sort of heat just fine.
–You feel more like an intellectual reading a book. I like the aesthetics of sitting in an office, reading a book, or sitting in a chair outside enjoying an adventure story while the boys play in the yard after a hard day’s work. This is what great men throughout history have done with their free time, from Roman emperors to American presidents to the laborers that built the infrastructure for this nation. Reading your smartphone doesn’t have that same feel; that’s what idiots who can’t handle real intellectual activities do when they’re in a checkout line. It sounds petty, but since I can choose the life I want, I want to choose the life *I* want.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll read electronic books as well–Libby is a fantastic app, that lets anyone with a library card rent any media your library has in electronic format, and I use it a lot. But there will always be a place for books.
Comment by Dinwar — May 2, 2022 @ 12:37
I find reading on a screen or other electronic device to be more physically tiring than reading the same on paper. Perhaps it’s the difference between backlit images and ordinary surfaces, but after a day working on the computer, a printed book is a refreshing delight. I haven’t found the same ease of cross-referencing that you clearly have, and the last time I was writing anything involving many different sources, my desktop quickly became overwhelmed with books. I’ve certainly used bookmarks, clips, post-it notes, and other ways of tracking things in a printed work that I want to go back to, but this is an area I’ve found the electronic works easier to find/link/quote. You clearly have had better luck with marginalia than I have … the doodle-to-valid-gloss ratio in my experience has been very high indeed!
Comment by Nicholas — May 2, 2022 @ 12:52