Is that understanding also cross-culturally consistent? That's a typical failure mode in comparative surveys between different countries - the meaning of the question depends on the translation used in each language. I imagine here the implied frequency might also vary between languages; maybe English speakers don't say they "read" unless they read once a week, while Spanish speakers are laxer?

Be cool if they would research that, instead of asking rhetorical questions and assuming that none of it matters and everything is "obvious."

I think it's just people being snooty. Bestsellers are trash, and by definition a plurality of readers are reading them. I don't think someone who reads Gladwell has any greater cognitive power than somebody who reads twitter.

People don't usually count reading an online piece of writing as equivalent to reading a book, even if the exact same content could also be in book form. Hence if you ask speakers of a language with a lot of available online reading material (English), you may systematically underestimate how much they read long-form content.