Who Doesn’t Read Books in America?

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From The Pew Research Center:

About a quarter of American adults (24%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form. Who are these non-book readers?

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[A]dults with a high school degree or less are about five times as likely as college graduates (37% vs. 7%) to report not reading books in any format in the past year. Adults with lower levels of educational attainment are also among the least likely to own smartphones, even as e-book reading on these devices has increased substantially since 2011. (College-educated adults are more likely to own these devices and use them to read e-books.)

Adults with annual household incomes of $30,000 or less are about three times as likely as the most affluent adults to be non-book readers (36% vs. 13%). Hispanic adults are about twice as likely as whites (38% vs. 20%) to report not having read a book in the past 12 months. But there are differences between Hispanics born inside and outside the U.S.: Roughly half (51%) of foreign-born Hispanics report not having read a book, compared with 22% of Hispanics born in the U.S.

Older Americans are a bit more likely than their younger counterparts not to have read a book. Some 28% of adults ages 50 and older have not read a book in the past year, compared with 20% of adults under 50. There are modest differences when looking at gender and whether people live in urban, suburban or rural areas.

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The same demographic traits that characterize non-book readers also often apply to those who have never been to a library.

Link to the rest at The Pew Research Center

9 thoughts on “Who Doesn’t Read Books in America?”

      • At least 50 books. Finish a book a week in 50 of the preceding 52 weeks. Putting it another way, complete at least 50 books in the preceding 365 days. I think that’s in “finished a book in 50 of the last 52 weeks,” I’ll even accept obsessives who read the same book 50 times, but I reject anyone who reads 50 books in one week and slacks off for the next 51.

        When I was about nine, I decided that Alice Through the Looking Glass was all I needed to read, and read it over and over for several weeks, but I didn’t make it to 50.

        I’m not sure I would qualify for the book-a-week posse. Some books I read slowly, taking several weeks to finish, others I gulp down and finish in less than a day. Depends on the book and what I happen to be thinking about.

        • That’s what I thought you were interested in.
          Okay, then.

          You ever been by mobileread.com?
          It’s a global website/community for digital reading enthusiasts. It predates the Kindle by quite a bit.
          Every year, they hold a reading challenge: typically, to document and compare notes on reading habits, material, etc.

          Here’s 2019:
          https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=313320

          The goal: to reduce the size of the typically enormous TBR list.

          It’s a great resource to see what avid readers like, dislike, etc. How they find material, how they shop.

          In a nutshell? Highly literate folk, skew older, most average a book or more a week, many a book a day.

          A significant fraction are also budget conscious so they track ebook sales, permafree titles, religiously download samples, sign up for library ebook accounts (many more than one).

          Lurk for a while and you’ll see why Oyster went under, why Scribd had to put limits on their subscriptions, and why KU’S KENPC payout system is the only viable way to do ebook subscriptions.

          Like most online communities there’s “factions”. Which in itself is educational. There really are people who refuse to buy anything that hasn’t been “vetted” by tradpub. Some are still fighting the PC OS wars. 😉

          They even do polls from time to time on a variety of subjects.

          Not representative of average readers but pretty representative of avid ebook buyers.

          As for rereading: my most extreme effort was when I first ran in Tolkien. Read the full set. Twice in one week. Haven’t been able to finish even one since.

          Around the same time, I did 200 paperbacks in one summer and the entire TARZAN set in one month. Summer before College. Since then the real world limits me to a couple dozen a year.

          • Thanks! This is quite interesting. In the late 1980s I worked with a bunch of Boeing engineers on an eReader startup. We gave up after building a couple prototypes– too heavy, too thick, too slow, too expensive, delivering books was too hard (one book was a stack of floppy disks), publishers not interested. We loaded the thing by connecting to a PC with a D-9 serial connector, for heaven’s sake. Before it’s time. The last time I was serious with a soldering iron.

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