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Comment by pixelmonkey | Hacker News Reader

This is a shockingly small number. For comparison, Pew reports that 24% of Americans have not read a single book, in whole or in part, in 2017.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/03/23/who-doesnt-r...

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I didn't read a book for probably 2 years at some point.

That doesn't mean I'm poorly educated or ignorant. I was reading a lot, I was just reading articles rather than books.

I still don't read a lot of books. I just don't enjoy them that much. I'll read short fiction and poems, but I just don't really like novels.

What about non-fiction?

I guess it depends on what you qualify as a book.

Media comes in a lot of forms these days. I've definitely read a book in the past year, but - especially if you restrict it to written word (e.g. no visual novels) - there's a good chance that the 3 otherwise reasonably intelligent people I live with haven't done the same.

They've listened to audio books, watched movies and tv, played video games, gone to plays, played board games, read both long and short form articles, flipped through facebook, kept up with the news, listened to music, watched youtube videos and other short films, but reading a book is a really big investment, and there's a good case to be made that it just isn't as important as, for instance, keeping up with culturally relevant tv or movies, if you want to keep up with the best and most widely experienced parts of modern culture.

I'm pretty sure audiobook counts.

If performances of literary works count, then presumably TV, movies, and plays are included as well?

To perceive and interpret information in form of long text (which can thus have much complex structure due to having less limitations in length) surely requires more brain work than something like TV. Certain formats of narrative simply do not work in a play or a movie. They have to be adapted.

Usually if people read books, they will often be able to listen audiobooks to the same effect - and vice versa, people who can't read 3 pages because "they get bored", often can't listen to long audiobooks either (and focus on them, as opposed to just have them in background).

That number doesn't surprise me. I personally did not read a book in whole or in part in 2017 or 2016. It's something I don't need to do for my career and is not a past time of mine. My reading primarily comes from the internet. When I do read it's maybe a handful of books in a year.

That’s alarming and sad. No pleasure or drug is as powerful as a good work of fiction.

I have read fiction in the years in question, but most of my fiction consumption lately has been serial TV (by internet). Modulo Sturgeon's Law, the quality in the last decade has gone way up.

This could be said about Game of Thrones in the first book. Sadly, it's not 1996 anymore.

I don’t think so - web forums and HN itself has taken over a lot of my attention that was once given to books. I still read a book or so a month, but that’s probably a quarter of what it was ten years ago.

There's nothing sad about it. I know people that hadn't watched a movie or TV show in 2017. I know people that hadn't played a video game in 2017. It's just a matter of perspective and interest.

What’s the connection between reading books and the internet, aside from literacy? They’re such different things, I’m not clear on the connection between reading and the internet.

There's a shockingly high percentage of people age 60+ who get all their news from local/cable/satellite TV and never read books.

Not shocking at all when you consider what age does to the eyes.

> I’m not clear on the connection between reading and the internet.

Prior to the internet, books were the only way humans consumed large amounts of textual information. Now, we have web pages, which 89% of people use, whereas books, which have never been more accessible, still linger at 76% usage.

One assumes of the 89% of people who use the Internet, 100% of them use web browsers, web sites, and thus read lots of textual information. That's as close to 100% penetration for a technology as you're gonna get, in my view. I wonder what percentage of Americans use toothbrushes!

I suppose there might be some subset of Internet users who exclusively use YouTube/Netflix (children, maybe?) That would be the only wrinkle in the comparison, IMO.

> books were the only way

I am sure you mean newspapers and magazines. Books still are.

and thus read lots of textual information.

I don't think that follows. If you use Instagram, YouTube, Imgur, 9GAG, and such, you barely need to read any text. Same for Facebook, depending on the people you follow.

How much of a book must one read to qualify as reading a book? Do we include online books that are unfinished, or not read start-to-finish?

The cited study was a number for "in whole or in part". So, in other words, 24% of Americans "neither cracked open a print book nor sat down in front of a Kindle to start reading a digital one."

Frankly I'm shocked it's only 24%.

I mean... there are many years (since being an adult) that I haven't read a book: why would I need to read one when I have online news, blog articles, wikipedia and other such resources.

And IMO internet amplifies attention deficit, making it harder to read books unless you're very willing or isolated.

whats the exchange rate with wikipedia articles?

I think that’s a fair point. If you exclude audiobooks, I don’t think I read one between the two previous summer solstices… but I’ve been writing and am now in the middle of editing what is currently a 130k word novel.

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