Few Americans Read for Pleasure | Hacker News Reader

Few Americans Read for Pleasure

washingtonpost.com

12 pointsperihelions9 comments

The age of eBooks has reduced the amount I read. Fewer actual books are available and, for whatever reason, I just can't immerse myself in a book in eBook form.

"In the U.S., printed book sales totaled 782 million in 2024—a 23% increase over the past decade (source)

Not only is print still popular, but print sales also grew by nearly one-fourth from 2014 to 2024. This includes both paperback and hardcover, sold through brick-and-mortar retailers as well as online retailers like Amazon."

So .. there's more printed books being sold than ever before, and the amount sold continues to increase every year.

https://www.newprint.com/blog/book-sales-statistics

That may very well be, but it doesn't really help me much. Books are less available to me than ever.

Screen reading for work or reference, physical (book) reading for pleasure or archive. The overlap is when you dip into an online text to see if it is interesting enough or important enough to purchase the physical book for pleasure reading or archival copy.

I don’t experience the lack of actual physical books myself. The used book market meets my needs pretty fully (and economically) across a wide spectrum of content.

I mean it's not a surprise considering that 54% of Americans are functionally illiterate (<5th grade level).

My curiosity is about why aren't the big publishers setting up literacy programs to grow their marketshare?

Why aren't shareholders up in arms about not growing the potential reader base?

Why set up literacy programs when, for online content, you can get the definition of any word instantly, or ask some AI assistant what the meaning of a phrase is, diving down as deeply as you wish and asking for the explanation at a 5th grade reading level? Such active reading itself is the best sort of literacy program. Why aren’t people actively reading with these tools?

And the Americans who do mostly read genre fiction exclusively. The Americans who read "literature" for pleasure read for social signaling reasons.

Can you blame them though? Contemporary non-genre fiction is almost completely written as/for signalling. Maybe there’s a chance that this bolus of woke will pass…

There's more than enough historical literature of a high enough ilk that missing references to it is a signal. I think contemporary literature can do whatever it wants and its not an adequate explanation, OTOH contemporary other media being an important reference is an explanation for not reading.

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