I love reading books for pleasure. A few years ago I realized that there are lots of people who rarely or never read a book for fun. There were a few interesting articles lately on this topic you might want to check out.

• “Twilight of the Books” – New Yorker article
• “To Read or Not To Read” – NEA Study on Reading

The basic finding is that reading for pleasure and rates of reading proficiency both appear to be trending downwards in young adults. The NEA study attempts to correlate other items like education attained, rates of voting participation, rates of volunteer activities in order to highlight the fact that if reading is lost as a past time perhaps societal losses will be experienced beyond the local bookseller and publisher. The reading rates for voters was especially interesting to me. While people always bemoan rates of voter turn out, since voters tend to be readers and non-voters tend to be non-readers perhaps this is a better informed electorate.

The NEA document is pretty long, you might want to wait for the movie version.