Read a good book lately? A report released by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in November 2007 would suggest most of us probably haven't. As reported in the NEA’s “To Read or Not to Read”, which gathered data from more than forty sources studying reading habits and related reading testing, the numbers of people reading in the United States has fallen steadily over the past twenty years.
Falling Reading Rates
The study reports that, on average, the typical 15 – 24 year old watches two hours of television a day while spending about seven minutes a day reading for leisure. Only about a third of thirteen year olds read daily, and the percentage of non-readers among seventeen year olds has doubled since 1984. Some experts have gauged the “literary reading rate” in 2002 stood at about 47% of the public.
Reading patterns definitely follow education (and typically economic) parallels. An earlier NEA report titled “Reading at Risk” suggests that only 14% of American adults with grade school educations read literature, while 74% of those with graduate school experience do.
Failing Test Scores
Not only are American reading less, they read poorly. Test results now position American fifteen year olds in fifteenth place among thirty one industrialized nations. And it’s not just youth. Reading scores among adults with graduate school experience rated “proficient” in prose reading skills posted a 20% decline between 1992 and 2003. Meanwhile, among employers who rank reading proficiency as extremely important among their employees, 38% say that high school graduates have deficient reading skills.
Poor Sales Figures and Lost Jobs
Imagine how fast any movie would be released to DVD if it sold only one million tickets, yet seldom can the biggest names on bestseller’s lists reach that mark. Perhaps we should feel hopeful that a literary writer like Cormac McCarthy can find readers at all, yet in a nation of nearly 300 million, a Pulitzer winning novel like The Road was estimated to sell a mere 135,000 copies in its hardcover release.
Devoted literary readers find such a fact no surprise, but even among the mass-marketed titles that publishers and mega-booksellers place most of their bets upon, the list of books in a given year that reach six figure copy sales is extremely short. Perhaps such numbers help explain why the Progressive Policy Institute estimates that book printing industry jobs declined by 8,000 since 2001.
Socio-economic Consequences
Of course there are many other consequences beyond lost jobs in book printing and publishing as the numbers of those reading continues to slide. There have long been correlations recognized between reading and literacy rates and their impact on educational and financial success. Indeed, some have posited that the very nature of democracy in an increasingly complex and technologically advanced society is at risk if we lack educated, adaptive, logical thinkers. And while reading alone cannot guarantee flexible, energetic minds, the absence of such a fundamental cornerstone of thought development and information gathering harkens towards sobering predictions of intellectual decline.
In a society facing ever-increasing economic and intellectual competition from around the globe and a corresponding need for imaginative, original thinkers and problem-solvers, the report issued by the NEA likely suggests declines that will have effects well beyond the bookstore cash register.
