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1/3 surprised me too, but the stats you cite don't say anything about the people who do read regularly, only those who don't. They don't say anything about the
by philipkglass 10y ago
1/3 surprised me too, but the stats you cite don't say anything about the people who do read regularly, only those who don't. They don't say anything about the whole distribution. Lots of activities have skewed distributions where a particular individual is more likely to do something often or very rarely than once-in-a-while.
- gnicholas 10y agoThat's right—illiteracy stats typically focus on that end of the spectrum. My point was that if it's true that 44% of American adults don't finish a book in a year, it would be very surprising if 35% read 11+ books a year. That would be a shockingly bimodal distribution, at least to me.
- philipkglass 10y agoOn re-reading both sources, the more direct contradiction is that Gallup says that 16% of Americans read 0 books per year and the Literacy Project Foundation says 44%. The Literacy Project Foundation unfortunately cites names for the stats at the bottom of the page but does not link numbers to specific reports those numbers came from, so I can't dig further into the discrepancy.
- gnicholas 10y agoIt's actually not a contradiction — they just have different definitions of "read a book." If both are true, then it means that 84% of Americans started reading a book, but that only 56% finished at least one. But yes, it would be good if the Literacy Project Foundation linked to publicly-available sources.