Do Europeans/NON U.S. citizen read more than Americans?
January 16, 2008 9:38 AM Subscribe
Do Europeans read more books than U.S. consumers? How about the rest of the world versus the U.S.?
Just wondering what the rate of reading and book sales is in the rest of the world. Steve Jobs said people don't read anymore in a NYT interview..I believe the figure was only 40% of people have read a book in the U.S. this year.
Whether his numbers are right or not I guess I am more wondering - is the future of reading not in the U.S.?
Bonus points for actual numbers!
Just wondering what the rate of reading and book sales is in the rest of the world. Steve Jobs said people don't read anymore in a NYT interview..I believe the figure was only 40% of people have read a book in the U.S. this year.
Whether his numbers are right or not I guess I am more wondering - is the future of reading not in the U.S.?
Bonus points for actual numbers!
UK stats. "In a survey of 2,000 adults, a third had not bought a new book in the previous 12 months. 34% said they did not read books."
Given that, I would be wary of trying to compare numbers directly. Even for a single country, the various studies are all over the place, because of different methodologies and different questions. If all you can say is that somewhere between 25-45% of people in the UK never read books, and 30-50% for the US, that's pretty useless.
posted by smackfu at 10:08 AM on January 16, 2008
Given that, I would be wary of trying to compare numbers directly. Even for a single country, the various studies are all over the place, because of different methodologies and different questions. If all you can say is that somewhere between 25-45% of people in the UK never read books, and 30-50% for the US, that's pretty useless.
posted by smackfu at 10:08 AM on January 16, 2008
Canadians seem to be in about the same +- as the UK and USA. Maybe just westerners in general are fairly close in how often they read.
posted by birdlips at 10:16 AM on January 16, 2008
posted by birdlips at 10:16 AM on January 16, 2008
I would be surprised if there was a significant difference between countries that have similar levels of literacy and access to books. Sticking your nose in a book isn't something you do because it's popular, as it's a profoundly anti-social activity. You do it because you love books.
posted by happyturtle at 10:46 AM on January 16, 2008
posted by happyturtle at 10:46 AM on January 16, 2008
Never thought I'd like having a long commute, but I read just shy of 60 books last year. Apparently that's enough for me, my wife, my brothers and sisters, my in-laws and my nieces. I guess I can tell them they're all off the hook.
posted by JaredSeth at 1:49 PM on January 16, 2008
posted by JaredSeth at 1:49 PM on January 16, 2008
I remember Malaysia ranking very much near the bottom (last?) in an old international list about reading, which depressed much of the public greatly. There have been many reading campaigns for every level ever since. The problem is that books are generally quite pricey, second-hand books tend to be in very metro urban areas, and the cheap ones aren't great reading.
posted by divabat at 2:51 AM on January 17, 2008
posted by divabat at 2:51 AM on January 17, 2008
Mod note: a few comments removed - it's a little too early in the thread for talking about whether having kids does/does not give you time to read. Bonus points for actual numbers.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:54 AM on January 17, 2008
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:54 AM on January 17, 2008
There's specific data about the US and the Netherlands in this article from last month's New Yorker:
The erosion isn’t unique to America. Some of the best data come from the Netherlands, where in 1955 researchers began to ask people to keep diaries of how they spent every fifteen minutes of their leisure time...Between 1955 and 1975, the decades when television was being introduced into the Netherlands, reading on weekday evenings and weekends fell from five hours a week to 3.6, while television watching rose from about ten minutes a week to more than ten hours. During the next two decades, reading continued to fall and television watching to rise, though more slowly. By 1995, reading, which had occupied twenty-one per cent of people’s spare time in 1955, accounted for just nine per cent...
By 1995, a Dutch college graduate born after 1969 was likely to spend fewer hours reading each week than a little-educated person born before 1950. As far as reading habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation—even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.
posted by mediareport at 8:43 PM on January 19, 2008
The erosion isn’t unique to America. Some of the best data come from the Netherlands, where in 1955 researchers began to ask people to keep diaries of how they spent every fifteen minutes of their leisure time...Between 1955 and 1975, the decades when television was being introduced into the Netherlands, reading on weekday evenings and weekends fell from five hours a week to 3.6, while television watching rose from about ten minutes a week to more than ten hours. During the next two decades, reading continued to fall and television watching to rise, though more slowly. By 1995, reading, which had occupied twenty-one per cent of people’s spare time in 1955, accounted for just nine per cent...
By 1995, a Dutch college graduate born after 1969 was likely to spend fewer hours reading each week than a little-educated person born before 1950. As far as reading habits were concerned, academic credentials mattered less than whether a person had been raised in the era of television. The N.E.A., in its twenty years of data, has found a similar pattern. Between 1982 and 2002, the percentage of Americans who read literature declined not only in every age group but in every generation—even in those moving from youth into middle age, which is often considered the most fertile time of life for reading. We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago.
posted by mediareport at 8:43 PM on January 19, 2008
You may also want to contact a group like this, or toss the question to a good reference librarian on a slow afternoon. The good ones live for stuff like this.
posted by mediareport at 8:44 PM on January 19, 2008
posted by mediareport at 8:44 PM on January 19, 2008
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by zeoslap at 10:08 AM on January 16, 2008