"When it comes to reading books, the kids are all right. But the rest of us have some work to do," Jacket Copy observed in reaction to new survey results released this week by the Pew Research Center. 
This is what we're up against: 72% of American adults have read a book within the past year, whether in whole or in part and in any format. That figure is down a bit from 2011 (79%) but is "statistically in line" with survey findings starting in 2012.
As they say in disaster movies just before the proverbial sh$% hits the fan, "There is no cause for alarm at this time." But, yes, the end is near, the sky is falling, it's an "emergency, everybody to get from street." Or is it?
Here's my favorite stat from the Pew survey: A "somewhat surprising generational pattern in book reading" emerged, with 80% of young adults (18 to 29 years old) having read a book, compared with 71% of those ages 30 to 49, 68% of those 50 to 64 and 69% of those 65 and older.
And here are some other Pew highlights:
- 63% of American adults said they read at least one book in print in the past year, compared with 69% who said the same the year before and 71% in 2011.
- 27% read an e-book (down from 28% in 2014).
- 12% listened to an audiobook, a figure that has remained stable.
- 12 was the mean average and four the median number of books read in the previous year.
- Women read 14 books on average, compared with nine by men, which Pew deemed "a statistically significant difference."
- The "typical college graduate or someone with an advanced degree" read an average of 17 books in the previous year, compared with nine for high school grads and three for those who did not graduate from high school.
- 27% of adults said they hadn't read any books over the past year, while 1% said they did not know or refused to answer.
If I worry about anything after seeing these numbers, it may be the folks among that 1% who didn't know whether they had read a book during the past year. Here's a hint (though they won't be reading this either): If you did not know, you did not read.
Maybe I should be more concerned with statistical declines in reading habits, but they don't scare me. In 2004, National Endowment for the Arts chairman Dana Gioia announced the disheartening results of an NEA survey, including the news that people who said they had read fiction, poetry or plays dipped to 46.7% in 2002, down from 54% in 1992.
At the time, I wrote a blog post (later picked up by Bookselling This Week) in which I said that as a bookseller, "I live in a narrow corner of the universe where perhaps 90% of the people I converse with every day are readers by almost any definition of the term. The simple act of opening a bookshop's front door and walking in separates these people from the herd."
Still, I was actually amazed that 47% of Americans had read novels, plays and/or poetry. It seemed remarkable that we'd somehow managed to cling to a readership that high. "As to the dumbing down of young people that the NEA study seemed to imply, I can't imagine when this was not an issue in societies the world over," I wrote. "One imagines Og complaining to his wife a few thousand years ago that Og, Jr. showed no interest in making proper stone axes or painting accurately detailed woolly mammoths on the cave wall.
"Children have always been going to hell. The majority of my college classmates 30 years ago certainly exhibited no mass interest in reading for pleasure, at least none that was apparent to me at the time.... Statistics show... And yet, and yet, I work with young people at the bookstore all the time who read, who reflect, who think outside the cultural handcuffs of peer pressure and media influence."
What will become of our book readers?
In 1936, the New York Times reported that a nation-wide survey of reading habits conducted by Columbia University, the University of Chicago and the American Library Association found that only 30% of the the adult population "reads books, most of which are 'cheap' fiction, only a third representing the best in research, scholarship and creative ability.... In the country as a whole it was found that each person reads fewer than four books a year."
The distractions of modernity are everywhere. Why, just 162 years ago the Times cautioned: "It would be better, perhaps, if the solid, coherent substance of erudite books were more the vogue; and all subjects were studied profoundly and systematically. But not such is the order of the day.... The call for magazines--quarterly, monthly and daily--will therefore continue with increasing activity, answering to the accelerated progress of the world in civilization and its incidents."
I agree with Jacket Copy. The kids are all right, though it looks like Boomers, my generation, could stand to flip a few more pages each year. Readers, however, are not an endangered species. There's no need for everybody to get from street. Unless, of course, it's to go back inside and read a great book. --Robert Gray, contributing editor (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)