@Jim: I’m curious how you feel about the K-12 potential of AI – ideally used with human tutors as well. The right AI not only could help spot gaps in kids’ knowledge but also create highly individualized drills. The tutors could offer encouragement and help keep the kids on task. As the challenges of the One Laptop per Chiid initiative showed, tech by itself isn’t enough. You need the humans too! Needless to say, the AI could be used not only to help teachers upgrade their own subject matter knowledge, but also their pedagogical techniques.

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Most of all, I’m worried about society as a whole, but if nothing else, your comments serve as a warning to major publishers. They need to look beyond the elite for markets, and the only way for this to happen is to consider not only companies’ immediate needs but also those of society at large.

Perhaps not reading aloud to children and otherwise encouraging them should be considered a form of child abuse – with special provisions made for families where the parents themselves are illiterate or where they must work several jobs. I know – dream on. But I myself think the parents are as much at fault as the schools. If nothing else, we need to change laws that give parents too much clout at the expense of their children’s education. And, yes, we need tutoring as well as accommodations for non-English speakers. Carrots, too, not just sticks!

Higher standards for teachers colleges would help as well. One problem is that many teaches themselves are not that much into books.

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Improved mass literacy is difficult to achieve. Having taught middle school, where the pressure on teachers to improve student reading and comprehension scores is heavy, I had 32 students in class. The students who are slower readers or who have learning disabilities or ADD tend to create distractions and act out. Non-native English speakers have additional obstacles. Tutoring programs help for sure. I initially thought computers and smart phones would encourage literacy, but dazzling graphics and videos capture attention at the expense of real reading, especially long-form books. Even in good schools, turning the lowest 20% into readers is extraordinarily difficult. They will of course go on to become non-voters, or low-information voters vulnerable to disinformation and demagoguery.

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Excellent points, Jim. Among other things, voters’ ignorance is ultimately one reason for the abysmal quality of so many public officials – including, of course, corrupt ideologues like Justices Thomas and Alito. Trump himself thrives on many people’s ignorance, not just their anger. Improved mass literacy would pay countless dividends in countless ways.

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Gosh, $92 per household per year, what a sad statistic. I didn’t realize my wife and I are such outliers. We spend about that much per month. While our sons and grandson are not so book- or reading-impoverished as the average American, I do doubt that younger generations will value reading as much as my siblings, in-laws, wife and I do. We may be the last literate generation, and America may be entering a post-literate era. A friend who teaches religion and philosophy at the college level says that’s already happened. College students who are sent to a religious college by their parents don’t have very basic knowledge, never heard of Abraham nor Moses nor the three Abrahamic religions. College students I taught could name the seven dwarfs but not more than 2 Supreme Court justices.

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1. Yes, musicians as a group are badly underpaid, just like writers.

2. For BLS’s definition of “entertainment” spending, go here and scroll down. Among the big categories there would be “fees and admissions,” “television, radio and sound equipment,” “pets, toys, hobbies, and playground equipment,” and “other entertainment and services.” Streaming services like Netflix would fall within “fees and admissions.” Even basic Netflix service costs more than $100 a year. Of course, that’s just a smidgen of the entertainment category. But it’s still a helpful example of nonbook spending.

3. Public library spending wouldn’t be a consumer expenditure. But for what it’s worth, the operating budgets of U.S. libraries could come to around $13 billion a year. Actual content spending would be maybe $1.7 billion. Per capita, that is not very high.

4. Yes, the reading category includes lots of nonbooks, driving the book total even lower.

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Music is still a gigantic part of the culture — and in fact, musicians make a slim percent of music spending because music streaming services get a significantly higher piece of the pie that the musicians themselves when compared to authors. So the real question I have about this data is: what’s the breakdown of entertainment spending? I don’t think it’s only netflix here; that includes concerts, plays, movie theatres, sports events?

Second, this statistic doesn’t include the public spending on libraries. I wonder what the per capita spending (or median/mean) for libraries. That’s probably a lot.

Third, I’d be curious how much of the READING budget includes subscriptions to news media (NYT, Washington Post, Atlantic — and whatever the rightwing equivalent is). I think book-averse people see the value in subscribing to online content they really dig. Certainly educated people do.

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At the same time, based on non-BLS information, too, it is already clear in my opinion that the industry could be doing a lot better in expanding the universe of readers.

Meanwhile, thanks again to you, Cliff, and Steve for writing that wonderful report, which inspired me to do this and the earlier post.

David

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Hi David: As you know, we’re on the same page for much of your analysis and conclusions. The big fly in the ointment for everyone using BLS “reading” data is that their definition includes everything up to, but not quite including, reading the labels on medicine bottles. We are in desperate need of more granular data about book reading, preferably cross-referenced to how the book was obtained (plus a few other data correlates). Until then, some of our observations must remain broad. Which is a pity, because there are clearly issues that must be addressed, soonest.

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