Have you ever wondered how Dan Brown can have a runaway bestseller? Here’s how:
- 1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
- Only 58 percent of college graduates will ever read another book after college.
- 53 percent read fiction
- A successful fiction book sells 5,000 copies.
- The favorite fiction category is mystery and suspence, at 19 percent.
- 55 percent of fiction is bought by women, 45 percent by men.
- 43 percent read nonfiction
- A successful nonfiction book sells 7,500 copies.
- 80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
- 70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
- 57 percent of new books are not read to completion.
- About 120,000 books are published each year in the U.S.
- 70 percent of which do not earn back their advance.
- 70 percent of which do not make a profit.
[From statistics compiled by Publishers Weekly, Book Wire and The Jenkins Group.]
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These statistics make me want to cry– books have transformed the world I live in, metaphorised the person I was. As a nation, we need to change this–before it’s too late! How can I help?
I really have no idea what would change the sorry state of literacy in the States, or anywhere else in the English speaking world (it seems Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK all have the same dismal stats).
You could probably make a case that the slow death of liberal education in the West is responsible. I bet literacy and book-use rates declined right along with Latin instruction and rote poetry memorization.
The sad fact is that education in the US is slanted (to a ridiculous degree) towards only those facts, subjects, and processes that will have direct and immediate use in earning money, and face, reading, especially reading deeply, is not a saleable skill.
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