Watching the publiching industry crumble, we have a glimmer of some good news for those hearty souls that survive the next few years. According to the National Endowment of the Arts, “For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature.”
Better yet, it is no insignificant bump. The overall rise as 7%. The demographic breakdown:
- Young adults show the most rapid increases in literary reading. Since 2002, 18-24 year olds have seen the biggest increase (nine percent) in literary reading, and the most rapid rate of increase (21 percent). This jump reversed a 20 percent rate of decline in the 2002 survey, the steepest rate of decline since the NEA survey began.
- Since 2002, reading has increased at the sharpest rate (+20 percent) among Hispanic Americans, Reading rates have increased among African Americans by 15 percent, and among Whites at an eight percent rate of increase.
- For the first time in the survey’s history, literary reading has increased among both men and women. Literary reading rates have grown or held steady for adults of all education levels.
And, most encouraging for those in my line of work: “Fiction (novels and short stories) accounts for the new growth in adult literary readers.”
Another aspect of this story that should come as a big “duh” for people reading a blog post written by a SF writer: On-line reading accounts for a not-insignificant portion of this increase. And judging by the statistic “15 percent of all U.S. adults read literature online in 2008” it might actually account for most of it.
If you think about communication, we are actually becoming more literate communicators because of the internet. The primary mode of information transfer over the internet is text. As many people use cell-phones to communicate by text as they do by voice. E-mail, blogs, Twitter . . . text, text text. It makes a certain amount of sense that if you communicate primarily in the written word, it will influence your entertainment choices.
