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Pew Research: Three-Quarters of Americans Have Read a Book in Last One Year -- 67% in Print Format; Use of Audiobooks Rising (pewresearch.org)
Americans are spreading their book consumption across several formats, and the use of audiobooks is rising, Pew Research said in a report published on Thursday. From the report: About three-quarters (74%) of Americans have read a book in the past 12 months in any format, a figure that has remained largely unchanged since 2012, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in January. Print books remain the most popular format for reading, with 67% of Americans having read a print book in the past year.
And while shares of print and e-book readers are similar to those from a survey conducted in 2016, there has been a modest but statistically significant increase in the share of Americans who read audiobooks, from 14% to 18%. Overall, Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, while the typical (median) American has read four books in the past 12 months. Each of these figures is largely unchanged since 2011, when the Center first began conducting the surveys of Americans' book reading habits.
Despite some growth in certain digital formats, it remains the case that relatively few Americans consume digital books (which include audiobooks and e-books) to the exclusion of print. Some 39% of Americans say they read only print books, while 29% read in these digital formats and also read print books. Just 7% of Americans say they only read books in digital formats and have not read any print books in the past 12 months. Some demographic groups are more likely than others to be digital-only book readers, but in general this behavior is relatively rare across a wide range of demographics. For example, 10% of 18- to 29-year-olds only read books in digital formats, compared with 5% of those ages 50-64 and 4% of those 65 and older.
And while shares of print and e-book readers are similar to those from a survey conducted in 2016, there has been a modest but statistically significant increase in the share of Americans who read audiobooks, from 14% to 18%. Overall, Americans read an average (mean) of 12 books per year, while the typical (median) American has read four books in the past 12 months. Each of these figures is largely unchanged since 2011, when the Center first began conducting the surveys of Americans' book reading habits.
Despite some growth in certain digital formats, it remains the case that relatively few Americans consume digital books (which include audiobooks and e-books) to the exclusion of print. Some 39% of Americans say they read only print books, while 29% read in these digital formats and also read print books. Just 7% of Americans say they only read books in digital formats and have not read any print books in the past 12 months. Some demographic groups are more likely than others to be digital-only book readers, but in general this behavior is relatively rare across a wide range of demographics. For example, 10% of 18- to 29-year-olds only read books in digital formats, compared with 5% of those ages 50-64 and 4% of those 65 and older.
at PEW Research
Well, makes it easy to buy political SEO and hide the cash trail.
You don't read audiobooks, you listen to them, an entirely different process!
You listen to an audiobook, you can't read it unless it comes with subtitles.
No way I'm buying 74% of all Americans can read, that's impossible.
Unless ears are your main sensor, listening to audio "books" while doing something else is not "reading".
Research, what's that? Why don't we take what my gut opines as the definitive word, right? /Kendallism
Danielle Steele wouldn't recognize this new generation of spineless Republican whelps. She'd call you idiots unpersuasive fiction, and my god the dialogue is atrocious...
I'm burned out on books except for comics. I read/write all day long; telling people on the internet that they're wrong.
I wish I could publish my book as an audiobook. They're rising in popularity and it would be nice to be able to tap into that market. Unfortunately, audiobook publishing is prohibitively expensive. The least expensive option has you buy about $200 worth of audio gear, spend hours recording yourself reading your book, and then spend more on a sound engineer to turn that into something decent sounding. The higher priced option is to spend about $2,000 to have a professional read/record your book for you. I'd love to release my novel as an audiobook, but I just can't afford it. I'll have to stay with print and ebook for now.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Research, what's that? Why don't we take what my shit-filled head-in-ass gut opines as the definitive Republican last word instead? #Queer-Anon GOP
Reading is hard. Proofreading is even harder.
Not comic books.
...my reading list, that is. Some nonfiction I read would include lefties like Chomsky, and factual stuff like books on motorcycles, guns, etc.
Most is in digital, for the convenience.
Treasured volumes, I go out of my way to get in hardback. Eventually. Let's see.. 20 years of Potter, and I still don't have a single dead-tree version of it, it's all in my phone and tablet.
I have just one audiobook, for some strange reason I can't quite get into audiobooks as deep as I get into the "printed" book (paper or screen, don't matter.) I hear the words but they don't stick as well, I don't see the "world" the author's painting as well as I do when it's in visible words.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
I listen to a lot of audiobooks, but I also listen to a lot of ebooks read to me by Kendra, my Android TTS voice. She's got some quirks, like always reading "no." as "number" or "apt" as "apartment", but she's been my constant companion over many a long, lonely drive.
Creimer wrote this about pedophiles and trolls on a nameless tech news website similar. You would think he was writing about Slashdot.
if creimer stops printing books
what am i supposed to wipe my ass with
Nah, just convince yourself everything you say is always correct and drown out factual, documented information to the contrary. Why do the hard work? Just assume your gut-level bullshit redefines and supercedes reality. /Kendal
"on a nameless tech news website similar."
LOL
your fat stubby ogre fingers aren't getting the commands correctly from that rancid chunk of blubber in your head
do you really not check the crap you type before hitting submit gris
Read 52 books last year. Just 2 were paper books. All the rest were Kindle. I just find it easiest to handle while on a cardio machine, using only one hand, and sweating. All means I don't have to make room on a book shelf, fill a landfill, or deal with dropping them off for donation when I'm done.
Are these fiction novels? I can read one over a day or two.
Or are these non-fiction behemoths of very difficult subjects. Last year it took me six months to get through a thousand page tome on the interplay between epistemic methods, politics, and society throughout history.
Quite a difference between a day and half a year, but both are a single book.
https://www.mythofcapitalism.c...
This is one helluva read, and the best book I've read since Lundberg's The Rich and the Super-Rich --- and that's quite a compliment!!!!! This books really explains it all (and although I am not in 100% agreement with the authors, those areas I somewhat would correct are just minor quibbles).
Some educated people just don't read books. My father, for example, is a retired internist. He reads the paper every day, and keeps up with his medical journals, and various popular magazines, but I can't remember the last time he read a book.
I read 18 novels in the C.J. Cherryh Foreigner series for two months last summer. Language, mathematics and aliens. Space opera at its best.
26% HAVEN'T read a single book in the last year.
I know this doesn't represent all reading - my wife, for example, isn't really into books, but reads substantial, magazine-format articles like Science News or The Economist voraciously, pretty much every evening.
But the idea of not reading a book in a year, my delightful spouse notwithstanding, is crazy for me. It's nuts if I haven't finished a book in the past 2-3 days.
-Styopa
You do not read them.
This article says nothing about the quality of books Americans are reading, or whether Americans are reading books cover to cover. It would help to get a breakdown by number of pages per book, and whether books being read are fiction or non-fiction. Does reading a recipe in a cook book count as reading a book?
How can the survey determine if respondents are telling the truth? No one wants to admit to being a functional illiterate.
Audiobooks are NOT reading.
Its listening to a story on tape.. like in the old days on radio before TV.
I probably average a book a week. Some weeks I don't finish a book, but other weeks I finish two (since I read multiple books concurrently noting the finish date is easiest).
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Kids take 10-20 children's books out of the Public library. That is going to skew the statistics in the survey.
If you read a book you could craft a better title than the steaming piece of shit you wrote.
Unless they're picture books, you can't get to 74% when half the population is illiterate.
From WaPo:
Approximately 32 million adults in the United States can't read, according to the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that 50 percent of U.S. adults can't read a book written at an eighth-grade level.
Just another day in Paradise
183 of them were digital, only 2 were print.
9 out of 10 were fiction, mostly Sci-Fi, but I'll read just about anything.
Despite the difference in numbers I prefer printed books, but I have a Kindle Unlimited account and it's less expensive for me to use that. If I had the disposable income I would buy all of my books in print, for many reasons I consider it the superior format.
Obviously I read fairly quickly, but I'm slower on my Kindle by about 30% because it's slightly harder on my eyes.
I had to read this three times over wondering if I wasn't pausing in the right spot. Nope. Just a fudged up headline.
This guy had one job to do.
how we consume data has changed significantly. reading books has huge merits, but we now get so much information and knowledge from reading online news, scientific articles, and so on, that I feel like I am reading all day. Much more so than I read 5-10 years ago. Books synthesize several things together in a cohesive story, but perhaps a lot of folks are growing up with shorter attention spans, and thus, prefer bite size info.
Getting a random sample that is truthful is impossible. Pew claims they aren't seeing this, but nobody I know answers their home phones if it is an unknown number all the time. Telephone polls only get bored people to answer. I was bored today, answered a random phone call ... they were offering to have someone prey with me immediately. As a practising atheist, I was offended by the call and let the person know that after being transferred. They really just wanted a donation. I thought that was illegal.
I routinely lie on surveys if the taker is nice.
If they aren't nice, I'm fairly short with them. It isn't my job to help them with their jobs for free. But if it is entertaining, I will screw with them. That can be fun.
I haven't read a paper book in 10+ yrs. Just don't want the dead trees. My Calibre library has .... let me check ... 665 different books. Many are references for technical or programming stuff. Much more convenient to search ebooks.
I've read about 3 ebooks in the last year. Mostly read all day, just not books. My library makes access to magazine and reference stuff so very easy.
I've listened to at least 12 audiobooks in the last year, perhaps 20. I wouldn't call that "reading." Different parts of the brain are active.
I'm saying the 100% truth above ... honest.
Reading IS hard! Fonts are too small. Newspapers? Forget it! I have to use a tablet to read. So primitive! I feel like such an invalid!
I have been listening to audiobooks for around 20 years. fortunately I have job where I can listen while I work. I found I will listen to audiobooks I would never consider reading and even after listening I still will not read them but I will listen to them again.
What I found interesting, is the way the reader will modulate their voice between characters. You forget the reader is male or female with the way they read for both parts and can easily distinguish the different characters.
can we stop calling audio books a book? since when did listening to someone read count as reading?
lessee...
https://www.google.com/search?...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
As a physical object, a book is a stack of usually rectangular pages oriented with one edge tied, sewn, or otherwise fixed together and then bound to the flexible...
STOP! That's too long!
Siri, show me a book...
I convert my audiobooks to WAV then print them out in hexidecimal.
...that Facebook isn't really a book, right?
74% seems higher than I would have expected.
Not every damned thing is a partisan political thing!
You people on the left have gone completely insane post-2016.
Hillary lost the election, and not because of "macedonian content farmers".
Russia did not change any votes nor did Trump "collude" with them; the only Americans PROVEN to have colluded with Russians on the issue were the Clinton campaign who paid Russian spies and a British spy to make up crap about Trump, and Democrat congressman Adam Schiff who is on tape colluding with an actual Russian long after the election.
The political right in the USA has never gone this nuts over a lost election. Sadly, Democrats did this once before, in 1860 when they pretended Lincoln was not legitimate, then started an actual civil war with gunfire, and eventually assassinated that Republican - in the years right after that self-identifying Democrats were nearly as rare as self-identifying NAZIs in Germany in 1946. The path you are on is very evil and twisted and insane and it will not end well.
I stopped reading books made of paper years ago. When I got a Kindle White, I read about one e-book a month now.
Lance Zimmerman of Panther Games
Americans are literate, but use it in profoundly stupid ways.
also related, Americans can always be counted on to do the right thingafter they have exhausted all other possibilities.
(side-note) That website only works with JavaScript enabled. Embarrassing (for those dumb ass devs who apparently conned someone into paying them).
I read for an escape from the fact that the world is shit and I'm powerless to change it and will never get the chance shit on others.
If you're going to recommend anything, at least go for scifi where you might get a chance be the elite: Bobiverse, Murderbot Diaries, or Methods of Rationality.
I am HIGHLY skeptical that 74% of Americans read an actual book last year. The survey also found that 14% of Americans read over 20 books last year.
Nice post but check this website out guys: https://coinwhalenews.com/
I was hoping to see an online book, but that site is just a bunch of endorsements and links to online booksellers. And anyway, the title seems to imply there's some myth involved or that capitalism isn't delivering on its promises, but to anyone over 30, the workings of capitalism are obvious.
So "Workers are Struggling", "Wages are Stagnant", and "Inequality is Growing", eh? What else did anyone expect from capitalism?
Even at its best, the owners reap most of the benefits and the workers get just as much or as little as the owners want to share. With time, wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few, and vested interests change the rules to suit themselves. Read about the "Big Five" in Hawaii -- this is how capitalism is SUPPOSED to work. Any time democratic processes start regulating it, the owners cry "laissez-faire! laissez-faire!" and run to bribe their legislators. Threaten them with something like an estate tax (where the community re-asserts control over the property of a super-rich dead person who doesn't need it any more) and they warn that communism is taking root.
Did you think capitalism was going to automatically lead to efficient markets and competition? Not a chance. Perfect competition leads inevitably to zero profits by its very definition. Capitalists don't WANT competition. They can't STAND competition. Their goal is monopoly power.
As Tom Scholz said, "Turning corporations loose and letting the profit motive run amok is not a prescription for a more livable world."
That says that one-third of all Americans HAVE NOT READ ONE SINGLE BOOK IN A YEAR.
Now, I wonder what the correlation is between those that have not read a book in a year, and supporters of the Malignant Carcinoma in the White House....