[LMB] Touchy list -- I blame publishing schedules

[James Nicoll]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Elvi Dalgaard wrote:

> James Nicoll wrote:
>>  	If the average American reads 2 books a year and fantasy accounts
>> for 4%  of the market, then on average the reader will encounter one
>> fantasy book about once every decade (and since everyone seems to be
>> reading Harry Potter, that's, what, an entire lifetime's worth of fantasy
>> right there?).
>>
> Seriously? Is that a real statistic? TWO books a year? I'm thinking that
> there are probably not a lot of people in the middle of that
> distribution. Probably there are tons who don't read at all, and then
> the readers, who almost all read a lot more than two books a year.
>
 	It's fairly close: there are 330 million people in the North
American part of l'anglosphere and they bought 663 million books in the 
most recent year for which I have figures (2003).