Nobody reads anymore

Posted by egable on October 22nd, 2007 filed in Journalism

This weekend, I attended Women Writing the West’s annual conference in Colorado Springs. It was a great experience for me to hang out with a bunch of other women writers, but the conference also shed some light for me on the awful state of reading in the United States. As a journalist, I am well-accustomed to the latest bad news from the newspaper industry (layoffs, declining subscriptions, etc.), but the book world is new to me and although I was somewhat aware of the troubles in the book publishing industry, the conference really brought home the horrible state of literacy in our country.

Some interesting factoids from the conference: the average adult reader reads at a fourth grade level, only 12 percent of college graduates read a book after graduation, the average fiction title sells just 3,000 copies, and there are only 190,000 readers in the United States. These figures truly stunned me, and sadly, I think they will only get worse as time goes on. I’m not sure what this all means for writers in the United States, but let’s just say it isn’t good news.