{"id":73347,"date":"2022-05-01T05:00:44","date_gmt":"2022-05-01T09:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=73347"},"modified":"2022-04-30T20:31:22","modified_gmt":"2022-05-01T00:31:22","slug":"despite-the-ever-present-smartphone-people-are-still-reading-actual-books-in-pretty-good-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/05\/01\/despite-the-ever-present-smartphone-people-are-still-reading-actual-books-in-pretty-good-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"Despite the ever-present smartphone, people are still reading actual books in pretty good numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the latest SHuSH<\/em> newsletter, Kenneth Whyte<\/a> provides some mildly hopeful numbers for both readers and writers:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014print, audiobook, ebook). That’s not bad considering only 86% of American adults can read.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

According to PEW, the average reader manages twelve a year.<\/p>\n

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%).<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831,28,13],"tags":[294,956,290],"class_list":["post-73347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","category-media","category-usa","tag-literature","tag-millennials","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-j51","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73349,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73347\/revisions\/73349"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}