The National Endowment for the Arts has taken a look at the nation’s reading habits and has come away appalled. Maybe this should come as no surprise in a nation where two of the top 10 non-fiction national best sellers are books on the South Beach Diet.
At least people reading diet books are reading.
According to the NEA, a survey of 17,000 adults revealed that only 47 percent of those 18 and older had read a fiction book, poetry or play for pleasure in the last 12 months.
If you throw non-fiction books–current events, biographies, etc., and all those diet books–into the mix, only 57 percent had read any book at all for pleasure in the last 12 months. (You do have to wonder if the South Beach Diet book readers realized they were reading for pleasure.)
That’s a whole lot of people taking a pass on the printed word.
The results of this survey have caused a lot of consternation in book circles, which apparently are growing smaller every year. Ten years ago when the NEA took a similar snapshot, nearly 61 percent reported they had read a book, fiction or non-fiction, in the previous 12 months, and 54 percent said they had read fiction for pleasure.
The survey shows the number of readers is declining for men and women of all ages across all education, racial and ethnic groups. The number is falling particularly fast among young adults, 18 to 34.
This is a bleak picture, according to NEA chairman Dana Gioia. “It quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted: our society’s massive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information.”
You may say, so what, particularly if you’re reading this editorial online. The world has changed since the invention of the printing press. People get information from all sorts of sources other than the printed page. They rely on television, radio, the Internet, publications on CD and tape.
You do have to wonder, though, how much value the reading experience loses when the means of delivery changes. A book forces one to pause for time, for reflection. No one is going to read “Anna Karenina” or, for that matter, “The Da Vinci Code” online. Television has a permanent case of attention deficit disorder.
There are some signs that as a nation we aren’t quite ready to divorce ourselves from the printed word. It may be that those who still read are taking greater advantage of the pleasure.
Though the NEA survey shows the number of people who read books is in decline, more book titles are being published each year.
There’s also this little literary nugget, courtesy of a 2003 study by the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University: In 1975 the top fiction best seller, E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” sold 230,000 hard-cover copies. Compare that with Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections.” It sold 720,000 hard-cover copies in 2001–and only came in fifth in the best-seller category for the year.
Somebody’s buying all those books. Somebody’s probably even reading them.
