There’s an interesting set of statistics on the book industry at the Para Publishing site and as you’d expect some of the prominent bloggers in the publishing industry have picked up on it.  The stats that will horrify people like my Mom are these:

Who is Reading Books (and who is not)

• One-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest
  of their lives. Many do not even graduate from high school.
• 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.
• 42% of college graduates never read another book.
• 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year.
• 70% of US adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

To be honest I don’t find these surprising.  Growing up I was considered pretty weird by my friends because I enjoyed reading and I learned at an early age to not mention how much I enjoyed a book.  In fact I can’t think of any conversations we had about books, but we talked a lot about sports, music, movies, video games and music videos (those were the early days of MTV).  Now as an adult I notice how few books, outside of coffee table books, I see in other peoples’ homes but how many more music CDs and movie DVDs they own than we do.

My love of reading can be traced to some wisdom that Mom had, namely that any reading was better than no reading so she indulged my early passion for mysteries (Hardy Boys) and adventures (anything besides Hardy Boys).  And of course seeing her read on a daily basis had an influence on me as well.  Carting her boxes of books around every time we moved definitely had an effect on my back.

Celeste and I are both avid readers and it has had an effect on our kids, most notably our youngest.  He earned more Advanced Reader points than any other child in the fourth grade at Lewisville Elementary and I think there was only one kid in the entire school with more points and he didn’t consider it work.  He did it for fun. Our older kids also read, albeit not as much as the youngest and I think it has definitely helped them in their ability to communicate in writing.  My feeling is that they’ll have to "work" on their writing much less than their peers in the coming years.

Now book reading is not the only form of reading out there and I can think of several people who would never read a book who read voraciously online.  My theory is that reading online is done in small, easily digestible chunks so it doesn’t feel like "reading" to them.  It isn’t "boring" and each individual piece isn’t time consuming, although if taken in the aggregate I think most people would be surprised how much time they spend reading online.

What’s going to be interesting to watch is what happens over the next 10-20 years.  As online video and audio become more common will reading and writing fade into the background?  Or is there something unique in how our brains process the written word that will keep it at the forefront of information sharing?  And will there still be a place for books in all this?  Personally I think so since books provide a time-tested vehicle for sharing large chunks of information and I think there will always be a segment of the population who will enjoy the long narrative of a novel, but I fear it could become a group as small as those who still enjoy chamber music.