American reading habits: answers

The answers to that poll about American reading habits:

According to a 1999 Gallup poll:

• 13% of Americans read no books in the previous year.
• 85% read all or part of at least one book.
• 38% read more than ten books.
• 7% read more than fifty books.

As of right now, the most-chosen answers for questions 1 (no books) is the right answer. Most of you severely underestimate the percentage of Americans who read at all. (Or maybe you misread the second question?) You also underestimate the number of people who read more than ten or more than fifty books a year.

This confirms something I’d noticed, which is that a lot of people in the rough science-fiction-computer-geek communities seem to be really pessimistic about how much reading gets done by Americans in general. I’m always seeing posts on discussion boards or newsgroups about how reading is a minority taste, and readers are a tiny elite in a mass of illiterates, etc, and it’s just not true. My friends in publishing tell me about how more books are being sold now than ever before — more titles, more kinds of books, bought by a wider diversity of people. Yet somehow the Americans-as-illiterates meme keeps getting passed around, probably because it confirms some existing prejudice of ours. I’ve run into it twice just in the past couple of weeks.

Then again, this poll of mine is just the sort of bullshit opt-in poll that I’m always saying nobody should take seriously. I’d probably ignore the results if they didn’t confirm my existing prejudice. And it’s always possible that the Gallup people conducted their poll badly. Illiteracy researchers come up with higher figures for adult illiteracy than that Gallup poll implies.

Oh, and the Gallup poll also says that 46% of American readers prefer non-fiction to fiction.

Hugo, man of a thousand ballots

I’m way behind on my Hugo reading, and with the deadline at the end of this month, I dunno if I’m gonna make it, not all the novels and the short fiction. But on my most recent visit to Barnes & Noble I saw that Charlie Stross’s Singularity Sky is out in mass-market paper, and snatched it up. I really ought to read the other Best Novel nominees too (except the Robert J. Sawyer; I feel pretty confident predicting that I wouldn’t like it, though I suppose I might hate one of the others more), but a book that contains the line “the brightly colored sporks of revolution” has a definite leg up.

If I see 28 Days After I’ll have seen all the Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) nominees; out of the other four I’m leaning towards Pirates of the Caribbean for first, X2 for second.

The Dramatic Short Form I’ll probably just skip. I’ve only seen one out of the five, and don’t consider that one award-worthy, and seeing the others would likely be a pain in the ass, unless someone wants to lend me a Firefly DVD.

Note to self: Nominate PNH, TNH, Jim Henley, and John M Ford for Best Fan Writer next year. Langford’ll take the award anyway, but maybe one of ’em’ll get on the ballot.