Americans Read Fewer Books

DesScorp writes "The National Endowment for the Arts has released a study that shows a decline in the reading of fiction, poetry, and short stories. The study began in 1982, but shows a particularly steep decline from 1992-2002, the first decade of the Age of the Internet. They never seem to draw the conclusion that the Net may have accelerated our turn from this kind of reading, but the timing seems suspicious to me. I know I don't read for pleasure as much as I did years ago because of the time spent on the Net (and in technical books). NPR has a good audio link here for you non-readers; the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a nice article as well." You could also - assuming you read - see the study itself.

Comments

Attention spans

[smilinggoat]

I read alot, particularly content on the web, so I'm not really concerned with our culture becoming "post-literate" because of the decline in novel consumption. The thing I do worry about, however, is attention span. I believe my attention span has dropped thanks in part to sites like slashdot, where you get your morsel of information, feel satiated, and move on.

That said, I believe television to be much more dangerous to the attention span than anything else.

BTW, I just finished The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey. Incredible!

Re:Attention spans

[smilinggoat]

But yeah, I agree with you, my spelling and grammar are definetely not what they used to be when I was in high school (now I'm in college as a music/computer science student, no writing for me!) and gave a crap about that stuff. I figure language is an ever evolving way that a culture uses to describe the world. As the culture changes, the writing changes. If the majority of the people make the same spelling mistake or grammar error on a more regular basis than the "correct" way, isn't that just language evolving?

Re:Attention spans

[bsartist]

If the majority of the people make the same spelling mistake or grammar error on a more regular basis than the "correct" way, isn't that just language evolving?

Wouldn't that be a good reason to study it? We know language evolves - we can study and compare historical documents from different time periods to see that. But when have we ever been able to see the evolution happening right before our eyes, at such a rapid pace?

A thought just occurred to me - could this trend be compared to biological evolution? We can only observe that in action in insects and other organisms where the life span is so short, and reproductive cycle so fast, that we can easily observe the changes as they happen across dozens or hundreds of generations.

Could the internet be accelerating the pace of linguistic evolution similarly, to the point where we can now observe it happening in real-time? Is it really that the internet is informal, or reduces attention span, or is the language(s) evolving more quickly as a result of a more efficient and faster communications medium?

Re:Attention spans

[the_ed_dawg]

I read alot, particularly content on the web, so I'm not really concerned with our culture becoming "post-literate" because of the decline in novel consumption.

The decline in novel consumption doesn't really concern me either. However, I believe in the importance behind reading something that has been through an editorial process. As an ECE graduate student with a teaching position, I can reasonably say that the communication skills of college graduates are lacking. My guess is that they have spent too much time reading blogs, Slashdot posts, and l33t sp34k e-mails and not enough time reading properly structured English.

Then, there are those people who insist upon using uncommon words and structuring painfully complex sentences in an attempt to impress people when a simple sentence would be much more effective. I had a student like that in my senior design lab. He would write really long sentences describing his design that would cause me to reread everything two or three times. Then, another student had an inferior design but explained it very well. Anyone care to guess who got the higher grade (on the written portion)?

[contrived example]

Student #1: "The quadrature radial encoder transmits a series of unsigned binary positions and a checksum through a radio frequency (RF) channel to the monitoring terminal, where the results will be dissiminated to the proper interfaces."

Student #2: "The sensor communicates with the computer through RF."

[/contrived example]

Re:Attention spans

[nathanh]

Then, there are those people who insist upon using uncommon words and structuring painfully complex sentences in an attempt to impress people when a simple sentence would be much more effective. I had a student like that in my senior design lab. He would write really long sentences describing his design that would cause me to reread everything two or three times. Then, another student had an inferior design but explained it very well. Anyone care to guess who got the higher grade (on the written portion)?

Student #1: "The quadrature radial encoder transmits a series of unsigned binary positions and a checksum through a radio frequency (RF) channel to the monitoring terminal, where the results will be dissiminated to the proper interfaces."

Student #2: "The sensor communicates with the computer through RF."

I'm hoping the first one. The second one conveys no information about the transmission other than it used RF. What is the computer doing? What does the sensor measure? What happens to the data? Hopefully you had a third student who wrote:

Student #3: The temperature sensor communicates with the monitoring terminal through RF. The encoding scheme is quadrature radial encoding [Bib199]. This encoding consists of unsigned binary positions and a checksum to detect data corruption. The monitoring terminal is an IBM computer with multiple outgoing interfaces. It demultiplexes the data stream from the sensor.

The first student needs a smack in the head for that run-on sentence but the second student is a lousy engineer. If they can't describe the situation more precisely than "communicates with RF" in a written report then I wouldn't want them anywhere near my team.

Not the Net

[geekoid]

I feel this is the eventual fallout of not teaching the novel innhigh school.
Many schools will allow a magazine article to stand in for a book.

Disgusting

Re:Not the Net

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The reason they teach "old, and hard to read" books is because they are part of our shared culture. Ender's Game, for all of its "fun" has had little impact on contemporary culture outside the narrow-band of science-fiction. Great Expectations, on the other hand, is well-known to orders of magnitude more people. References to it and similar "classics" are sprinkled through-out our culture.

So, the point is not merely to teach basic reading skills, it is also to give people a historical context in which to better understand our shared modern culture (for example, just look at how many movies are rewrites of such classics - "Cruel Intentions" is "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," "Clueless" is "Emma," "Apocalypse Now" is "Heart of Darkness," Shakespeare gets redone both overtly like Baz Lurhmann's "Romeo + Juliet" and undercover like, "10 Things I Hate About You" and "My Own Private Idaho" - the list is effectively endless, our culture just keeps repeating itself). In light of the goal to teach a common cultural base, most Science-Fiction can't even begin to come close to replacing "the classics."

Besides, Dickens is not hard to read, at least not compared to titles like Canterbury Tales, Dante's Inferno or most of Shakespeare's plays.

PS - please no diatribes about concentrating on "western culture," as our country becomes more culturally diverse, certainly classics from non-european countries gain more and more relevance to modern American culture.

This Is Sad

[myc18]

It is no surprise that books are "going to the wayside." The problem is largely because of the Internet and television. People are glued to screens/monitors for their source of education and information. I mean take a look at encyclopedias and libraries --since the revolution of the Internet, sales of encyclopedias have skyrocked downwards, and fewer people are visiting libraries. And for good reasons, the WWW is literally a library and it is convenient. Libraries and encyclopedias once spurred reading.

It is only until now that I realize the value of reading. I am seriosuly pursuing a doctorate in Computer Science, and a critical part of the doctorate program is reading and writing --reading technical journals and lots of papers (on paper). Training yourself to read at a fast pace is vital in order to catch up with your work and to comprehend all the information. The less capable you are reading, forget any chance of being a researcher. Nonetheless, this news is sad.

Re:I read fewer books because

[Wumpus]

There's more to reading than sci-fi, you know.

Far-Fetched idea - people are busier creating now

[SuperKendall]

One thought that came to my head is that people are busier creating media now - more photos, lots more video - and thus do not have as much time to read.

In a way, even posting to Slashdot as indulgent as it seems is another form of creation - I'm sure a lot of people spend a lot of time on forums now that might otherwise be reading. And perhaps the act of a lot of people writing is just as mind-expanding as reading a good book (depends on the forums you are in of course!)

Re:Prices, etc...

[smilinggoat]

Book prices have gone thru the roof in the past 10 years.

Riiiight. It costs so much to walk down to the local public library and check out a few books every now and again. Remember, if you return them on time they're FREE!

Also, I buy used books. They're cheap and have the exact same content.

Re:I read fewer books because

[Nasarius]

GRRM r0x0r3d my s0x0rz as well. I actually got up to the beginning of book 9 in WoT before finally tossing it. Robert Jordan keeps writing the same dull crap, where every female (except Min) is an annoying bitch.

Stuff actually happens in A Song of Ice and Fire, and GRRM can tell a damn good story. His characters are believable, deep, and diverse; you'll remember them, unlike in WoT, where you're buried in a mass of minor characters that you're expected to remember if you want to follow the story. I just wish he'd hurry up with book 4.

The Internet improves literacy, at least in theory

[daviddennis]

One thing nobody's pointed out yet (at least that I've noticed) is that people do much more writing now than they used to, thanks to the Internet. The fact that your writing actually has a chance to be read, and to influence people, defintely makes you more likely to write. The threat of grammar nazis makes it more likely that you will want to write correctly, too.

I know that I write more than ever, and that's A Good Thing from the standpoint of literacy.

Also, when people go on the Internet, they are almost always reading or writing. And this means literacy is more important than ever, not less.

Perhaps this is something to applaud. If reading stuff on the Internet is displacing TV watching as entertainment, then that's surely a good thing for reading as an activity.

D

lol

[real_smiff]

"sci fi sucks lately."

i love the way you went anonymous to say that. you know, /. is probably the one place you don't need to do that :p. proclaim your love of sci-fi loudly from the rooftops. personally, i hate sci-fi. mostly. well, i've never really given it a chance. does Red Dwarf when i was younger count? :p

to contribute to the topic.. it just occured to me that the only time i really read (other than you know newspapers, mags and TFM*) is when i don't have internet access. i get through several novels a year, on holidays and staying with people w/o net access.. guess i'm pretty sad too huh.

a good novel often sticks in the mind. my web browsing (which there's so much more of) rarely does. hmm, should take a hint from that.

*instructions for tech-toys

Re:I read fewer books because

[jridley]

Then do what I'm doing. Go back and read the golden age stuff. I'm working on the Med Ship series now, and Doc Smith is always good for a quick couple of hours. A.E. van Voght, Heinlein of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of titles, all great.

Technology is actually increasing my reading. I don't generally get a chance to carry books around with me, but I always have my palm. With a 512M SD card in there, I not only have about 10 hours of NPR programs to listen to, and a couple hundred photos, I've got about 100 books in there as well.

Sure, I prefer paper, though the new 320x320 screens are quite good so I don't care that much either way anymore. But I ALWAYS have 100 books on me, usually 2 or 3 of them in progress, and I can read any of them any time I have to wait 5 or 10 minutes for something.

Re:Reading is poor...

[Free_Meson]

At the end, the total amount of recall I have of specific aspects of the book will be about equivalent to the recall I'd have after seeing a movie, only the movie gives me the information passively and in a fifth the time. Do you really remember significantly more detail about a story from reading a book than from seeing a movie?

You need to work on your reading skills... You should retain more info from the book that is not in the movie than info actually in the movie... Even the most pathetic contemporary authors like Clancy, who are writing in order to sell screenplay rights, include far more detail than you could hope to include in a movie...

If you think that a movie can replace a book, you don't know how to read fiction. Seeing an elephant's shadow is not the same as seeing an elephant...

Re:Reading is poor...

[globalar]

"Do you really remember significantly more detail about a story from reading a book than from seeing a movie?"

I agree that sight/sound/effects is a better combination for memory, but I think time plays a critical role in format. When I was reading LOTR, I remember thinking, outside of reading, about the characters (mostly characters - Gandalf's voice/tone, the beauty of Arwen, etc.) and what the fantasy world was like. As I took my time reading the books, I grew my own conception of the world. Now I'm not a big fiction/fantasy reader (in fact, LOTR is the only such series I can name), but Middleearth was a place in my mind and I was a part of that mental creation. In a way, I made my kind of film-like experience in my head.

But that took time. I had to think a little about it, turn over a few ideas at night (I read before bed), until I decided what I wanted the world to be like. As I read, my world grew with the book's story. By the end, I was left somewhere else where I was comfortable.

Having three movies with some good length helped the theater experience, but the books were my highlight (which I read before the films). The films also reinforced how I envisioned the world from the books. In some ways, the movies are foriegn to me (if that makes sense).

Define 'reading'

[The Monster]

I suspect that the reading we do on the Internet doesn't count, perhaps because it's so difficult to quantify, but I suspect it's because of an implicit elitist arrogance:

• PhD's debating sophisticated cultural nuances amongst themselves are 'better' than talk radio/TV
• Newspapers are 'better' than web pages.
• Glossy magazines are 'better' than pulps.
• Hardcover is 'better' than paperback.
• Hand-crafted illuminated manuscripts, slaved over by monks, that could only be owned by the Church or a wealthy nobleman, were 'better' than Gutenberg's mass-produced works that the bourgeoise could purchase.

Re:Define 'reading'

[miu]

What? Oh come on, some things are better than other things.

You could subsist on a nutritious paste, water, and vitamin supplements. You must some kind of food elitist to care about texture and taste.

TV Guide, video game reviews, factoids, and political rants are not as good as an actual book written with thought, research and care. Nothing wrong with reading on the Internet, but most (99.99+%) of it is junk food.

Re:Define 'reading'

[Jeremy Erwin]

PhD's debating sophisticated cultural nuances amongst themselves are 'better' than talk radio/TV

This should be obvious. One can express many more ideas on one page than one can present in ninety seconds.

Newspapers are 'better' than web pages.

It depends on the newspaper. Some are simply a means of regurgitating the AP feed. But even the AP uses editors and fact checkers. Many webpages are written with little regard for honesty and accuracy.

Glossy magazines are 'better' than pulps.
Hardcover is 'better' than paperback.

Most SF is now published in hardcover, before a rerelease in paperback. And glossy paper is no measure of the quality of the magazine. Archival, Acid Free Paper has been adopted by many literary magazines, though.

Hand-crafted illuminated manuscripts, slaved over by monks, that could only be owned by the Church or a wealthy nobleman, were 'better' than Gutenberg's mass-produced works that the bourgeoise could purchase

Codex Hammer: 30.8 million
Rothschild Prayer Book: 8.58 million
Gutenberg Bible: 5.39 million
Audubon's Birds of America: 8.8 million
First Folio: 6.17 million
source

The Codex Hammer is in Italian (mirrored Italian, no less.) The Gutenberg Bible is Latin. The First Folio would meet with the NEA's approval, and so would the Audubon book, although the latter is nonfiction. But all those are books that will be kept in vaults, and appreciated from a distance.

The NEA wants to encourage the development of literature, not merely functional literacy. Some forms of prose can be appreciated on purely aesthetic grounds and not merely because of the facts such forms may convey.

Slashdot may be fun to read, but very few slashdotters post for the ages, carefully crafting each sentence for maximum effect. Newspapers are often good at telling the reader what happened, but the whys often remain a mystery until a book, collating additional interviews, newspaper accounts and recently declassified archival records, is published years afterwards.

Re:Define 'reading'

[hey!]

* Hand-crafted illuminated manuscripts, slaved over by monks, that could only be owned by the Church or a wealthy nobleman, were 'better' than Gutenberg's mass-produced works that the bourgeoise could purchase.

Well, printing of course make it possible for knowledge to spread more widely, but hand illumnated manuscripts written on parchment were both much more durable and much more beautiful than their printed counterparts. You can't stand in the way of progress, but progress always has its price.

I have an 1846 Leipzig edition of Dickens Christmas stories (A Christmas Carol, The Chimes etc.), I bought at the old Starr book shop years, and years ago. I don't remember whether it was the one in Boston or the one in Harvard square; they were different book stores run by brothers. The Boston Starr has been gone since the late 70s and the Harvard Square Starr passed on to the next generation and developed a well deserved bad tempered customer service. In any case: is this old book it more valuable than a modern paperback edition? Well, it is undoubtedly more beautiful: it has a fine hand tooled leather spine and unusual and marbled endpapers that are unique as fingerprints. It is certainly a more interesting artifact than a modern paperback. The paper in the book is somewhat brittle and has an old library smell of paste, dust with hints of chocolate.

I'm not a bibliophile, I'm not particularly sentinmental about books; what matters to me mainly is what is said in them. I picked this book up because it was about the same price as a new book. I doubt it has any value as a rare book. However the reason for this long winded story is that it is that it certainly very interesting as an artifact that has history. It has passed thorugh I don't know how many hands over its hundred and sixty years, been apprasied by different booksellers, rubbed shoulders with other books, been leafed through by who knows how many generations of people. This is incredibly evocative, if you have a feeling for such things. The feeling I get handling it is like the time I handled a human brain in a neuroscience class. It was just a lump of inert, pickled tissue, but once it held the experiences of a lifetime. I remember wondering whether, if we had the knoweldge, we could recover some of those experiences, perhaps of dust motes in a shaft of sunlight, or the voices of the person's parents.

Imagine what it would be like if science created a single edible substance that supports human nutrtion needs perfectly. It is inexpensive and plentiful, easy to store and transport, satisfies hunger perfecly and when used exclusively it prevents every form of a nutrition related disease from diabetes to obesity. In other words it performs all the bilogical functions of food without being food as we know it. No doubt this would be a huge advance for humanity, but you would lose the culture of preparing food and eating; no more recipes, no more holiday dinners, no dinner dates or midnight snacks. You wouldn't have to be a cook or a gourmand to be profoundly affected.

The death of physical literature, if it happens, will be for many of use like the elimination of food.

It's also interesting to consider that even with no special handing ny Leipzig Dickens volume may well be readable in a hundred and forty years when it has its three hundredth birthday, although it will no doubt be extremely fragile. There is NO copy of this information today that is likely to survive as long.

Re:Prices, etc...

[1000101]

So you're 3-4 months behind the "latest trend". So what? There are thousands of good books available in NY libraries. Just because you don't have the latest best seller today doesn't mean you can't read it tomorrow. Besides, how many of the top 25 best sellers have you read from March '04? Bottom line: lame excuse.

television is the opium of the masses

[j1m 5n0w]

That said, I believe television to be much more dangerous to the attention span than anything else.

And the 30-second TV advertisement the most dangerous of all. When I went to college, I would go a good part of the year without watching any TV at all. When I did watch a show, I was appalled by the idiocy of the commercials -- how did I ever accept them as a normal aspect of daily entertainment? They teach people to accept simple emotional appeals instead of complex logical arguments, and tend to encourage vices (buy stuff you don't need with money you don't have, convince yourself you deserve a higher standard of living than the people around you) instead of virtues (solve your own problems, be happy with what you have).

Digression: short attention spans are a threat to society because they cause people to be intellectually lazy and assume that the world is simpler than it really is. Then they make poor decisions based on their incomplete understanding.

I try to avoid TV now, but I keep having the misfortune of living with someone who can't live without it.

TV is also disruptive to anyone within earshot who wants to do something else (like read a book). I wonder how often people are drawn to the tube because someone else insists on watching something and they say to themselves "oh well, as long as its on, I might as well watch because I can't concentrate on anything else."

-jim

Re:Reading is poor...

[gamgee5273]

Wait... I have to take issue here:

When I've read a new book, the first thing I want to do is discuss it with other people. However, since relatively few people have read the same book. The meme hasn't propagated.

It's called a reading group. They do exist. For many years I was involved in one at the University of Michigan, and it is still going.

But you do not have to be connected academically to start a group. You have seen people at Borders and B&N and your local coffee shop, right? They are all holding the same book in many cases...

If, for some reason, a physical reading group doesn't work for you, then there is always the Usenet (it's not all porn and warez) and other sites on the Web.

Don't blame your lack of reading on those around you. While the Internet may very well to blame for the severe downturn in reading over the past 12 years, it is also the greatest tool you have to discuss things.

Like we are now. ;)

Farenheit 451

[DunbarTheInept]

This article reminds me of a very scary thing I heard from a friend many years ago:

Me: "I really liked the book Farenheight 451. Especially the description of how the world got that way. The censorship didn't come from the leaders - it came from the masses. They wanted everyone to be as vacuous as they were, so they started pushing their leaders to outlaw various intellectual things."

Him: "Wow. That's kind of deep. Who wrote it?"

Me: "Bradbury". You should see the film version too - it's done fairly well.

Him: "Oh, there's a movie of it ? I think I'll just save time and watch that. Reading the book takes too much time..."

Me: "uhh. that's pretty funny - good one.:

Him: "What? What did I say that was funny?"

Me: "Oh...never mind."

Suburbanites read fewer books

[CrazyTalk]

In the city, people are always reading - primarily on busses and subways, it seems. You cannot read in your car, which tends to limit the reading habits of suburbanites. More people are living in the suburbs now than 50 or even 20 years ago, ergo less people are reading. Time is in shorter supply for everyone, which adds to the trend.

Obviously an over simplification, but just one observation that may help to explain the trend.