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August 23, 2007
American Reading Habits
I'd rather not comment on this but need to.
Check out the CNN poll on American reading habits. It's here.
"Story Highlights
One in four Americans read no books last year
More women are avid readers than men
Southerners read more than rest of country
Democrats, liberals read slightly more books than GOP, conservatives"
Do reporters always have to take the negative perspective and whine?
What is stuff like this trying to prove?
From my perspective 75% of Americans read a book.
Books sales are up.
Publishinng of titles is up.
Public library circulation is up.
Book reading is almost double what is was in 1945.
Book reading (the Harry Potter halo) is up among younr folks.
People are writing and publishing their own creations.
Who's kidding whom? Is the Renaiissance that hard to see?
Add to this that it is almost impossible to use the Intenret without a lot of reading. And a lot of newspaper and periodical reading has moved to the web, and we can obviously see a HUGE INCREASE is the amount of reading in America.
Then again, I guess the visual McNews from CNN might have a vested interest in making reading not look too trendy. All this reading, print and electronic, has apparently been at the expense of traditional television! I guess they're worried and commissioned a poll....
Stephen
Posted by stephen at August 23, 2007 9:29 AM
Comments
Admittedly I'm biased, but I am extremely happy to see that "Southerners read more than the rest of [the] country." Maybe this will put the "illiterate redneck" stereotype to rest!
Posted by: bookdawg at August 23, 2007 11:52 AM
Another reason why, for example, newscasts on the web are of less use: one can't search them. Sure, they can be tagged, but ultimately, a videofile designed to offer information has less utility than a text file.
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Bob:
You should check out the spoken word search engines. No CC (although that works too) required. It's an emerging technology but still very interesting.
Stephen
Posted by: Bob Kosovsky at August 25, 2007 10:42 PM
Dear sirs,
i'm interested for an university research, in find all the data on the reading habits .
coud you help me or suggest sites, data bese, link, contact and so on?
thank you for your help!!
Tiziana Marchesi
Posted by: tiziana marchesi at July 4, 2008 5:40 AM