[LMB] Touchy list -- I blame publishing schedules

[James Nicoll]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Elvi Dalgaard wrote:

> James Nicoll wrote:
>> On Fri, 1 Jun 2007, Elvi Dalgaard wrote:
>>
>>> 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).
>>
> Oh, "bought". Well, I'm not sure we can assume that bought=read. There
> are a lot of variables there, after all. There are libraries, and
> friends and family members who lend you books, and on the other side
> there are books bought that don't get read for one reason or another.
>
> Out of curiosity, where can the stats be found? I did a bit of googling
> on things like "american reading statistics", and didn't get a lot of
> hard data.

IPSOS apparently compiles the numbers but my source for them was Andrew 
Wheeler, who is no longer Senior Editor at SFBC and who may no longer have 
access to the numbers (The Bookspan reorg eliminated about half of the 
people I knew there, mostly among the upper levels).