American reading habits: answers
The answers to that poll about American reading habits:
According to a 1999 Gallup poll:
As of right now, the most-chosen answers for questions 1 (no books) is the right answer. Most of you severely underestimate the percentage of Americans who read at all. (Or maybe you misread the second question?) You also underestimate the number of people who read more than ten or more than fifty books a year.
This confirms something I’d noticed, which is that a lot of people in the rough science-fiction-computer-geek communities seem to be really pessimistic about how much reading gets done by Americans in general. I’m always seeing posts on discussion boards or newsgroups about how reading is a minority taste, and readers are a tiny elite in a mass of illiterates, etc, and it’s just not true. My friends in publishing tell me about how more books are being sold now than ever before - more titles, more kinds of books, bought by a wider diversity of people. Yet somehow the Americans-as-illiterates meme keeps getting passed around, probably because it confirms some existing prejudice of ours. I’ve run into it twice just in the past couple of weeks.
Then again, this poll of mine is just the sort of bullshit opt-in poll that I’m always saying nobody should take seriously. I’d probably ignore the results if they didn’t confirm my existing prejudice. And it’s always possible that the Gallup people conducted their poll badly. Illiteracy researchers come up with higher figures for adult illiteracy than that Gallup poll implies.
Oh, and the Gallup poll also says that 46% of American readers prefer non-fiction to fiction.
According to a 1999 Gallup poll:
- 13% of Americans read no books in the previous year.
- 85% read all or part of at least one book.
- 38% read more than ten books.
- 7% read more than fifty books.
As of right now, the most-chosen answers for questions 1 (no books) is the right answer. Most of you severely underestimate the percentage of Americans who read at all. (Or maybe you misread the second question?) You also underestimate the number of people who read more than ten or more than fifty books a year.
This confirms something I’d noticed, which is that a lot of people in the rough science-fiction-computer-geek communities seem to be really pessimistic about how much reading gets done by Americans in general. I’m always seeing posts on discussion boards or newsgroups about how reading is a minority taste, and readers are a tiny elite in a mass of illiterates, etc, and it’s just not true. My friends in publishing tell me about how more books are being sold now than ever before - more titles, more kinds of books, bought by a wider diversity of people. Yet somehow the Americans-as-illiterates meme keeps getting passed around, probably because it confirms some existing prejudice of ours. I’ve run into it twice just in the past couple of weeks.
Then again, this poll of mine is just the sort of bullshit opt-in poll that I’m always saying nobody should take seriously. I’d probably ignore the results if they didn’t confirm my existing prejudice. And it’s always possible that the Gallup people conducted their poll badly. Illiteracy researchers come up with higher figures for adult illiteracy than that Gallup poll implies.
Oh, and the Gallup poll also says that 46% of American readers prefer non-fiction to fiction.