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

why books

[RepeatedEigenvalue]

Why should we read books? It's just a matter of time before they become movies anyhow. America rules.

Re:why books

[afidel]

Yeah, like I, Robot
/shudder.

Re:why books

[gamgee5273]

My wife keeps asking me why I don't want to see the movie. I keep telling her that Will Smith makes for one very butch-looking Susan Calvin...

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

[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 We know language evolves - we can study and compare historical documents from different time periods to see that.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]

Prices, etc...

[Joe U]

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

Combine that with more Internet use and a 500 channel cable TV system (with a DVR, of course) and it's no wonder I hardly read anymore.

Drop softcover prices down to a sane $4 and hardcover to $12 and we'll see an increase in reading again.

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: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.

Re:Prices, etc...

[EinarH]

Book prices in USA are lower than in many European countries. And in some of the countries where people read much more than what Americans do, like in Scandinavia, France, Germany, UK and Japan they have to pay more for their books than the average american reader.
If you compare newspaper readership statistics which is somewhat linked to reading of books you will see that you can't blame it on the recent economic downturn either. During the financial crisis in Japan in the ninthies people continued to read newspapers. (and book readership remained more or less frozen AFAIK).
So I don't think price is the problem.

I would rather think that it has something to do with culture. There is a term called "cultural capital", coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The term makes a distinction between the traditional capital value of material wealth and of the cultural "assets" or capabilities of a particular class. Just as traditional capital(money) cultural capital can be aquiered, ignored and converted. Cultural capital again can be divided into several sub-classes just as traditional capital. Some of the sub-classes helps define the person based on the fact that they are "thought into the person" and therefore they can't be changed easily.
For example if your parents are "white trash" you don't read Bourdieu, or any other written text/newspaper, because no one told you about him and you are busy watching the latest news about Lacy Peterson and Kobe Bryant.
On a related case consumers will decide what they want to consume based on their cultural capital. (10 bucks and a beer on continued decline in US book readership...)

The term really makes sense if one belive that people in the USA are more or less to some extent seperated into different classes both economical/social and cultural (regardless of whether you think that this is a good/natural/bad thing). If one say that these differences have increased in the 1992-2002 period it matches the teory that increased differences will lead to a larger gap between peoples cultural capital and also inderectly to a larger gap between those that read more and those that read less.

So even if people in the USA do have the money to buy tons of books some of you don't because the more cable TV you watch the more you are prone to continue subscribing.

Is this really a big surprise??

[the_rajah]

I've got several books stacked up to read, but I just don't seem to get around to them as interesting as they are. It's not that I don't read a LOT, but the majority of it is on this little screen that I'm looking at now. The immediacy and interactivity of the Internet much more easily grabs my attention. The times when I do get some significant reading done are those times when I don't have easy Internet access, like sometimes when I'm traveling or if I'm stuck in waiting rooms like the doctor's office.

"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

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

[Sycraft-fu]

Well I think part of the problem there is that high schools have trouble teaching good novels. I appreciate that kids do need some exposure to classic literature, but in my high school that's like ALL it was. We read book after book after book of "great" literature which more or less meant old, and hard to read. Anything new was crap, anything kids might enjoy was crap. I mean there was like NO sci fi. Well I must ask why that is the case. There is GREAT sci fi. Ender's Game ought to be required reading. It is interesting, easy to read, and speaks to adolescents. This is the kind of book that will make kids want to read, not Great Expectations or Jane Eyre.

Thus you find that kids don't do well at reading novels, they get bored and don't finish them and don't perform well. You find they do better with magazines since they are shorter (thus easier to force your way through bored), usually easier to read, and usually more interesting.

Now before you go on about reading skills, the thing you have to remember is that not everyone is bound for university. What I generally find when people argue for these dense novels is that they expect all kids should perform at university level. Hell, some seem to think that they should all perfom at unviersity level IN HIGHSCHOOL. That's just not a valid assumption. The majority of kids will not go to university. They need good English skills, of course, including reading, but good to common literature, not good at decoding Dickens overly verbose and arcane style.

So I don't see a problem with allowing magazines and the Internet in more, and I do think that when novels are tought, they need to be ones kids can actually enjoy. Sure you do harder stuff for honours/AP classes, but not for all kids.

Also the net really is increasing the amount people read overall. IT may not be for pleasure, but no one said you must read for pleasure. People get more and more information from the Internet instead of books. This is not a bad thing, just a different way of doing it. The old way in education is NOT the best way, we revise educational theory all the time.

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.

Re:Not the Net

[cooldev]

You both have a point; it's all about balance. Both classic and contemporary authors should be read in school, and in my opinion students should be able to pick at least 25% of the books they read for class (from a reasonable list).

After taking many honors, AP, and college english classes, it took years before I could get back into reading for enjoyment.

To make matters worse, most English teachers are female, and at least in the classes I took there was a definite skew toward books that are torture for normal teenage males (eg. Emma).

Poetry disgusts me to this day, having had to survive though the bizarre, biased interpretations that make astrology and dream interpretation seem like science. And remember kids, you get graded on having the same interpretation as the teacher!

Luckily I was able to BS my way through, always getting at least a B.

Re:Not the Net

[Sycraft-fu]

That's fine, but I can name even more, and even older writings that are even MORE influencial to our culture. How about the Lord of the Rings? This is the very basis for almost all modren fantasy. It was what D&D took it's basis on, and because of that and its formalized rules, many, many games base on that. LOTR and it's counterpart D&D form an immensly strong basis for the fantasy world. Horrible novels, if you asked me, but they are where most of the fantasy came form.

Or let's go more modern: Neuromancer. That is what started cyberpunk. It is the DIRECT influence of The Matrix (to the point the named a song "The Mona Lisa Overdrive" in Reloaded). The dark, syber-techno universe that is so popular in many movies, games, shows, etc started here.

How about we go way back, to one of the most influencial of all: The Bible. Now don't get me wrong here, I'm not Christian, I think the Bible is a bunch of fiction and nothing more, but it is probably the sole most influencial book in western society. Yet, I've never seen it read in public schools (believe it or not, you can look at the Bible from a secular standpoint).

Or how about philosphy? Why no Descart, Locke, Searle, Nagel, Popper, Harnish, Berkley, Bach, Kant, Plato, Frege, etc. All these people helped to shape modren western thought on at least one important issue (and yes, I have read at least some of each of their works). They didn't just write stories, they contemplated important issues and shaped thinking.

Face it, the "part of our culture" argument doesn't hold water. Most of what I read in high school is not at all or a very minor part (Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights stand out in my mind). Even that which is a larger part, pales in comparison to other things I can easily think of.

And Yes, Dickens IS hard to read. I fucking HATED Tale of Two Cities. It was hard to read, irrelivant, and boring. Personally, I find it harder than Shakespeare, but that might be because Shakespeare knew how to write about something worth reading.

Either way, my point stands. The point of English class is to teach kids English first and foremost. For that you must get them to read and write and to do that you need things they want to read and write about. I'm not saying you can't find a way to expose them to some classic literature, but saying it has to be all classics because of culture is a load of crap. I can design a much better curriculm of more influencial readings than what is normally taught if you want, but I won't claim it will hold their attention any better.

Re:I read fewer books because

[slavetrade55]

Have you tried Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin? That and the two subsequent books rocked my socks...this coming from someone who could never get passed the first 100 pages of Eye of the World. I mean come on, "Mountains of Dhoom"? That's just not trying very hard.

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!)

Do not neglect the rise of "Infotainment"

[SetupWeasel]

Along with the internet, a separate beast arose: News Entertainment. Between the OJ Simpson trial, the Bill Clinton scandal, and all the rest of the yellow journalism of the 1990 the need for harlequin romances has diminished.

Here you have things that appear pressing, dramatic, and interesting that also are kind of real as well. Why read fake dirt about fake people when you can have real dirt on a public figure?

I'm sure the internet has had something to do with the reduced book reading, because everyone who uses the internet reads and writes a hell of a lot more than they used to. That cuts into the desire to "read for fun," as they say. But for my money the rise of programming for every demographic possible and the horrible yellow journalism of today have satisfied our need for fiction.

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

Former Bookworm...

[decipher_saint]

First off I'm Canadian and I used to read a lot when I was in my early teens (and I do mean a lot) I would rip through novels and be hungry for more then I'd get into history and politics and then switch back to novels. Through high school and college I was still reading fiction but only a few hours after going to bed, still a good flow of literature, but nothing like before. Once I got working though I found that I really didn't have the time or the juice to read every night, then that turned into every week and now I barely read at all. Personally I think it's sad and I often wonder why I can't get back into the groove. I went through a streak of some really bad (new) books and I started working more overtime and found that I was too fatigued to keep up even a rudimentary interest in reading consistantly.

Oddly though, I find myself reading a lot of humour content on the web (blogs, articles, etc), but it still doesen't compare to a good book. I guess I have a kind of reader's apathy, I would like to read more, but I never do...

From time to time it strikes me when I go searching through the cards in my wallet and find my old, expired, Library card and think to myself "oh yeah, I should renew that one day..."

Anyone else there in Slashdotland feel this way? Did you ever get back into reading on a regular basis (if so HOW)? ;-)

P.S. The last good book I read was "Goodbye, Mickey Mouse" by Len Deighton written in 1982 which I am convinced the 2001 film "Pearl Harbor" stole it's story from, but whatever...

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:I read fewer books because

[cshark]

You're missing the point. This study is obviously biased and funded by Microsoft. You see, a decline in reading paper books, actually helps them sell e-books in ridiculous proprietary formats. Think of the selling point, "no one wants paper anymore, and this proves it, buy our DRM enhanced versions of the classics today!"

gutenberg, iblist

[j1m 5n0w]

This seems like as good a place as any to throw in a plug for Project Gutenberg (old books for free!) and the Internet Booklist (a good place to go if you don't know what to read).

-jim

Re:But of course!

[cmacb]

"The internet is a platform delivered through text and porn."

True. But I read it just for the articles.

PIAA?

[LuxFX]

So now is somebody going to tell us there is a PIAA (Publishing Industry Association of America) that is going to start suing big anonymous blocks of IP addresses, under the assertion that rampant online piracy is to blame for a large drop in book sales?

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:television is the opium of the masses

[abulafia]

I agree with most of what you said. My experiences, exactly. Just a personal difference...

TV is also disruptive to anyone within earshot who wants to do something else (like read a book).

I actually don't have this problem. Tonight, for instance, the toob was on, my housemates watching it, me in the same room, and I had no problem with my book (I'm re-reading The Prince. It has been a while, and I haven't read the Adams translation before).
The reason for me writing this is that I think people are wired differently for dealing with background noise - I live in Brooklyn, and have spent all of my adult life in large cities. I grew up in extremely rural areas, and went nuts - I was constantly bored and edgy. In a city, I feel at home. I think it has to do with background stimulus. When my mother comes to visit, she goes nuts - there's too much noise (that I never conciously notice), too many people, too much going on.

A high tolerance for others' background radiation allows me to read a book with the TV on, code when people are talking, and sleep on the subway. (Although sometimes there are exceptions... the meth head who just moved in above me will soon learn to eat his techno CDs... I can only deal with thumpa-thumpa-diva-shriek for about 14 hours out of the day.)

No real point, just highlighting what seems to me to be an interesting differentiator in people.