Where Be Our Readers
If I ran for President, it would be on the single issue that every American adult must read 10 or more books. Well... uhhh... just kidding.
At the end or beginning of every year, there is a deluge of pieces on reading behavior. These range from personal reflections to data-driven surveys of population-wide trends. The latter are of special interest to me because in a Bloomian1 way I mourn the evident deterioration of America’s already anemic literary culture. For whatever reason this year, I noticed more data journalism on the subject.2 I’ve finally taken a moment to think a bit about these trends. I’ll also do the annoying personal comparison to these trends for curious readers.
Americans are not the most voracious readers.3 Reading one book a month, puts one in the top quintile of readers! And the most commonly completed book total for an American is between 1 or 2 books a year! If we factor in pressures of social desirability and response bias into this figure, it may be safe to conclude that the median American is reading no books at all.4 Importantly, these figures are agnostic to both format and rigor. Is a reading American paging through Moby Dick or the latest title from Colleen Hoover or James Patterson? In our era of almost unlimited access to free or cheap digital collections of reading material, a small minority are engaging in a sustained and serious fashion.5 I’m not sure how this state of affairs can be improved, but it certainly should be.
Old-fashioned paper books remain the plurality of what readers reach for, but if we shift our attention from the middle of the distribution to the tails, we see an interested in digital formats taking hold. Less ardent readers appear to turn to either physical books or audiobooks, while heavy readers prefer ebooks. Although these preferences are not incredibly stark, it partially aligns with my preferences as a heavy reader. I also love audiobooks, but I think ebooks enable deeper and more engaged reading. The ebook format allows for dynamic interaction with the text - all of which is immediately retrievable. I can annotate and comment to my bibliophilic heart’s content. Plus, both digital formats (audio and ebook) increase available reading time and thus overall consumption of books. I can easily fill interstitial time with books thanks to technology. Why do more people not do this? I don’t know. Is it really that much better for one to read more? I don’t know for sure, but it seems like more than just 1 book a year would be good for attention spans at least.
When reading behaviors and preferences are subset further by the usual demographic categories, there are some interesting observations but nothing shocking. Those who earn less or are politically independent, young (18-29), prime working age (45-64), or an ethnic minority6 read less. Interestingly, this survey data appears to suggest Americans may perceive an economic tradeoff between working and reading. However, there was still large share of likely retirees who haven’t read anything in the last year, ~40% of 65+ in the survey. So the economic explanation of reading behavior is at best incomplete.
Interestingly, this survey data appears to contrast somewhat with Substack writer
’s argument that “Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV.” Despite the title, Hanania isn’t talking specifically about book reading.7 His argument is concerned with the differences in the style of information consumption between partisans. Apparently, this does not translate into difference in actual consumption of books. Maybe in reading choices though? I’ve reproduced a table from his piece as a summary of his arguments. I think it does capture something about the aesthetic differences between partisan media, but this is probably explained by the educational stratification observed between the parties. It is unclear if it says something more essential about being a liberal or conservative. In some ways, the ultimate explanation for these difference may be entirely aesthetic to begin with.The survey also asked about book ownership, which isn’t super interesting to me because I am not sure how great of a proxy it is for actual reading. The main finding is that many people own way more physical books and ebooks/audiobooks. I think I am about even in terms of format for ownership. It is really easy to accumulate ebook titles very cheaply whether via deals, online downloads, or as galleys from publishers. Eventually, I anticipate having many more ebooks that actual books. Sad but efficient.
The reading survey also examined genre popularity. Nothing really jumps out in the aggregate or by age, but when subset by sex, all the reading stereotypes are confirmed. Men read more history and sci-fi. Women read more romance and crime fiction. This unfortunately exhausted the survey data or at least the reporting on it. However, there are other sources to plumb for insights on reading behavior like Goodreads.
I haven’t had time to try to scrape together data and assemble some of my own figures, but I have stumbled across the analyses of others. The chart below purports to show a relationship between book length and Goodreads rating among classics. There is a clear under-sampling of longer works with the fitted trend mostly driven by the Harry Potter series, Gone with the Wind, and French and Russian classics. Nonetheless, I do think there is something to the idea that if an author can induce a publisher to put out a tome then it may have something to offer that shorter works do not.
I started Goodreads at the end of 2019 so I wasn’t able to accurately accurately track my reading prior. However, I am fairly confident I have been reading at least ten books annually since 2010. I recently eclipsed logging 1000 total books.8 In recent years, a lot more of my reading has been fueled by audiobooks and ebooks.9 Hence, the 2020-2023 years where I was above or close to 100 books in a year.
My reading by genre looks a bit stereotypical for a male reader. A majority of my nonfiction titles are science, history, or social science with history titles making up a full quarter. 75% of the authors I read are male. However, the books I read skew toward recent publication dates.
I hope to return to both a broader dataset of population-level reading and of my own reading behavior to do analyses beyond the above. I think more granular questions about content and authors may be illuminating at the population level. I hope readers found the above data interesting. I also hope it prompts more people to crack open books. Obviously, reading isn’t a magical panacea to all social and personal ills, but it is often a more edifying thing to do with leisure time than other options.
Harold Bloom, that is.
The Washington Post ran a piece on the current reading behavior of Americans at the beginning of the year derived from an Economist/You Gov poll. I have cribbed the figures from that piece liberally and from a few other places.
I haven’t seen any numbers of how this stacks up against the reading behavior in other countries, but, if I let my perception of literary cultures guide my prior beliefs, I would likely put the U.S. below other advanced nations on this metric.
In fact, if we break out the survey day on the 1 book entry, it is actually 95% comprised of respondents saying they read zero books. Reading two books in a year literally puts one in the top half of readers in America.
If we came at this questions by looking at the what major publishers turnout and what sells well, it isn’t flattering either.
The survey here is apparently not large enough to consider other ethnic groups besides blacks and hispanics.
Hanania is actually a bit skeptical about the venture of reading books in a SBF-like way. I agree with some of his criticisms of book but there are plenty of books beat his critique. Also, some of his critique is myopic about the value of old books.
I don’t track re-reading on Goodreads, though this is something I do for a small set of books. Plan to do more of it.
This also omits technical reading, which is much more fragmentary so is not worth tracking.
This was so well researched! Super interesting. I do wonder whether the machinery we use to read is actually a catalyst for creativity too - what do you think? I feel like voracious reading gives substrate to new thought... but on the other hand, less exposure might give space for original thought... keen to hear your take on this.
I ran into a review of yours on Good Reads and was super impressed with 1k books. Very nice. Biggest issue I have with book reading is a major loss in retention without something like spaced repetition. For more serious works, I put facts into Anki.