The Few.
The Proud.
The Readers.
Originally published in Etude magazine
Spring 2007
Are books absolutely necessary?
Here is a statistic that will make you gasp, or wince, or just break down and cry: One-third of Americans with college or graduate school degrees did not read a single (non work-related) book last year. Not one book. That’s a sixty percent increase in educated nonreaders in the past twenty years.
It’s no surprise what these non-readers are doing. They are playing online and video games, watching YouTube, blogging, chatting in cyberspace, channel surfing. I get it. I mean, I don’t get why IMing with even the most fascinatingly salacious avatar is more compelling than reading just about any sentence that Joan Didion has ever written, but I get that people are otherwise occupied.
But here’s the disconnect – or the series of disconnects: As the percentage of people who read books has declined (precipitously) in all categories (young, old and in between, white, Black and Hispanic, men and women, educated and not), the number of book titles published in the U.S. has soared. Last year, almost 200,000 new books were published, up almost 50,000 from just a few years ago. And, while readers have declined, retail space devoted to selling the books they aren’t reading has soared (courtesy of the Barnes and Noble, and Borders explosions).