First: I wanna clarify this. I know that loads of people read like 100 books a year, or read all the time. I know these people exist. I’m asking about people that are like… average. An average american who just… reads. Doesn’t track everything or sets goals of like 100, or never stops reading… Anyway, I’ve been searching this up, and i find answers like 15-50, even 100. I find this highly unlikely, especially for average US citizens. Half the people i know don’t even pick up 5 books a year, let alone 15! I just don’t believe these stats. I read somewhere that people read 8 a month on average? That can’t be right for an average person. That’s like 2 books a week… I know people do read this much, but still… For an average person? So be real… how many books do people actually read a year?
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Anecdotally, I’m at 87 books this year rn.
I read about 12. I bet that is way above average.
The statistic I saw recently is that men read an average of 3 per year and women read an average of 5.
Mist of the people I know never read anything, not even the documents I ask them to review.
My friends average like 3-5 and they’re basically all audiobooks while they commute lol
Yeah audiobooks are so great. I’ve been going through around 3 - 5 as well
I would guarantee the median of average adult Americans is between 0 and 1. Out of the 30-40 people in my coworker / friend circle that I know pretty well there is exactly 1 other reader in that group that reads anything outside of business material. The average will be higher from the higher end folks skewing it up but median Would be a better figure here.
the average might be, but I doubt the median is between 0 and 1 (obv being pedantic)
Statistics jokes. I like it.
That makes you an outlier
You can read half a book in a year
I’m gonna out-pedant you and say that the median can indeed be between 0 and 1.
I reckon the average would be quite higher than the median, since there’s a very few super active readers, and then a long tail of light to non-existent readers.
To continue with the pedantry, the „long tail“ would be the few people who read a ton of books. The light- to nonexistent readers would be close to the „center“ of the data, eg the median or mode.
Nah, median is usually lower than average, as the average number gets inflated by the top numbers.
Median is specifically the middle number in a range of numbers sorted from smallest to largest. Hard to have “between 0 and 1” show up in a list of numbers.
Technically if there were an even number of respondents then the middle is 2 numbers, and you average those together to find the median. So if by a stroke of luck the exact middle of the array contained a 0 and a 1, you’d get 0.5. Unlikely scenario though.
Numbers dont have to be integers. Who said that you can only anwsers in integers. If you read a book over 2 years it would be perfectly reasonable to anwser you read 0.5 books a year and then you can have a median that is not 0 or 1.
You’re just being mean.
Well played! 😂😂
I’m just going by my friends and I would say 8-12
I think the average is about 12 but I would guess the median is maybe 2.
Read the article. Chart 3 shows the Median of all americans is 4. But it’s higher for Females, College Educated, Rural and Upper income groups.
College Educated has a Median of 7 and a Mean of 17.
This morning’s New York Times newsletter said that less than half of adults read one book (or more) for pleasure in a 12-month period. Here’s the study they were citing: https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/93659-nea-finds-worrying-drop-in-reading-participation.html?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20231125&instance_id=108580&nl=the-morning®i_id=66530689&segment_id=150941&te=1&user_id=cb7393c0aa64f4b2b0dc868f6ca39d68
I looked at that link and the data behind it; there’s no mention of the average number of books read, just that just about half of those surveyed (48.5%) “read books” in 2022; when they included audiobooks, slightly more than half (51.9%) “read books and/or listened to audiobooks” in 2022. (Those figures are for books as a whole; for literary works, the figures are quite a bit lower.) And the study notes that this is down from 2017. But this survey does not address the average number of books read. As other comments have noted, avid readers raise the mean considerably.
surely avid readers raise the average a lot, the mean not very much
I agree that audiobooks must be included. It’s all language processing, and it’s wrong to dismiss the experience of those with low vision, mobility concerns, or who prefer audiobooks.
Absolutely true. I was mostly just excited that some data I had encountered earlier yesterday had a bit of a bearing on OP’s question. But yes, you’re right, and that’s an important distinction.
As other comments have noted, avid readers raise the mean considerably.
Which is exactly why any reasonable person would look at the median rather than the mean. I also think you are greatly overestimating how many avid readers there are. If one in ten people reads a book every month (which seems very unlikely), that still only amounts to 1.2 books/year on average from them.
The median is just as skewed a piece of data with how many people don’t read at all. If 51% of people don’t read at all, the median is zero. If you want to know something interesting, you want the percentage of people who read books, and then the mean books read a year among those who do read.
Why? This is not some great divide where 50%+1 read no books and 50%-1 read a book per week. If you want interesting information with details you’ll look at distributions and historical trends and so on but if you are only looking at 1 or 2 numbers, you’ll get limited info.
The average was 12.6 books per a year on average as of 2022 from a Gallup poll.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx
I would bet the average is still small, like 2. It is true that big numbers weigh heavy on calculations of mean, but the big numbers here are not ginormous, they’re 100x the small numbers, not 100000x (i.e., we’re not talking wealth statistics). I’d place a large wager on the average being in the 1-3 range based on the data presented
I’m trying to find the actual links, but it’s something that’s obviously been posted here before. IIRC, if you go by mean the average is 12 and if you go by median the average is 4.
Honestly I’d bet it’s below 1. I dont think anyone I know irl has picked up a book since school.
Honestly, the average of little importance. I’ve found overwhelmingly amongst my friends and coworkers that it really is just two kinds of people: people who read and people who don’t. The people who read all do so regularly, as their schedules and preferences allow. But whether those people read 4 books a year or 40 is really irrelevant: they all have something they are actively working through and other books on their radar and no one would ever hesitate to call them a reader.
And the other people, just… don’t. Some of them will be people who want to read but are just failing for whatever reason, and others just don’t read and don’t much think about books.
This is the best answer here.
The anecdotal one?
Agree
Agree. I am a reader but nothing crazy. I don’t set reading goals, I don’t read for hours a day or 100 books a year. I don’t read with every spare second I have or carry a book everywhere I go. But I read daily. My husband is not a reader. He reads once in a while. Maybe 1 book a year. I read like 60. That means our “average” is 30 books each. Which is meaningless information because it’s not remotely representative. One year I might read 30, and another year I might read 80. But I read regularly and have a TBR list.
The fact that 1/2 of Americans don’t read books for pleasure at all is the most important fact.
Also the average reading level in the US is 8th grade.
And the US is 17th in the world in literacy.
And the numbers among youngsters bodes for a worse reading future here.
Great, great comment.
Keep in mind that ~20% of Americans are functionally illiterate. So I think if you took the amount of adults that can read, that would change the numbers.
Makes sense for me, im on book 2 this year.
Here’s another New York Times article claiming the average person reads 100 books per year. There’s no way that is true. https://nypost.com/2023/11/20/lifestyle/heres-how-many-books-most-people-read-a-year-poll/amp/
Keep in mind that you’re going to get highly skewed answers from this subreddit. I’d wager that it’s probably around five. Most adults are completely burnt out from reading after finishing high school/college.
Average American? Rounds down to 0. Average American who reads sometimes? Probably 3-5
Out of curiosity, what are you basing that on?
Anecdata
Their sense of superiority from having an intelligent and rare hobby
They were feelin it
I read in a different sub that 2,000 people would be a representative sample size for the U.S. population (and YouTube’d the methodology). I bet if you could select 2,000 random adult American Citizens, from 18-80 (~natural lifespan), across socioeconomic and demographic groups, the mean “n books read for pleasure, start to finish in a rolling 12-month period” would round down to zero (so, 0.4444 or something similar). That would still imply ~889 books read in totality across that population.
Depends if you include children’s books or not. Even parents who don’t really read books for themselves often still read children’s books to their children.
Seconded. In this calendar year’s bedtime reading to our 7-yr-old, I finished The Order of the Phoenix, and read in complete The Half-Blood Prince, The Deathly Hallows, and Tress & the Emerald Sea.
I wouldn’t really count those as “my” reading on a survey, though. Even including graduate school work, I don’t think I’ll hit 10 books start-to-finish this year, and maybe only 4 that count as “for pleasure”, depending on how December goes.
This. I easily read 3-6 children’s books every day. But my own books for my own reading enjoyment, I read 1-2 every month.
Not just parents either. I usually read ~10-20 books each year to my nieces/nephews and I only see them a few times a year. They love story time.
You would be surprised how many people don’t read to their kids. I had around 150 kids last year and about 5 said their parents read to them when younger on a survey. This was 6th grade.
That’s so sad.
I’m not surprised that 6th graders aren’t being read to. My parents read to us until we could read on our own, but even though they didn’t read to us I was a book addict. I had 3 bookcases full of books that I read myself.
6th graders should still be read to believe it or not! Somewhere around third or fourth grade kids should read with their parents (every other page or chapter). Parents are able to hear their child’s fluency and clear up any confusing or dated references. Having a middle front seat may be bizarre to someone who sat in a car seat until 8, but was perfectly normal up until the early 90s.
A coworker said one of her fondest memories was reading the Harry Potter series with her daughter who did not like books. Her daughter fell in love with the series. They’d read together. By the time Half Blood Prince and Deadly Hallows were released her daughter was in college, but they talked about every chapter over the phone. Reading with your child also grants beautiful bonding moments.
A coworker said one of her fondest memories was reading the Harry Potter series with her daughter who did not like books. Her daughter fell in love with the series. They’d read together. By the time Half Blood Prince and Deadly Hallows were released her daughter was in college, but they talked about every chapter over the phone. Reading with your child also grants beautiful bonding moments.
This is one of my fondest memories too. I was in 5th grade when the books started coming out and I got the first Harry Potter book as a gift from my Aunt. Both my Aunt and my father read every single HP book along with me (not together or out loud, but at the same time as me) and we talked about them together. We would hypothesize what was going to happen in the next books. My dad and I went to midnight book releases with me as the rest of the series came out. When the movies started coming out we went and saw them all together too, some as midnight showings.
This was asking about when they were younger though, not currently being read to.
Yeah but the survey was asking if their parents read to them when they were younger otherwise yeah my mom didn’t read to me much then she read to me some when i was younger but not much
Ah I missed that detail, but I wonder how many said no because they just don’t remember? I don’t remember much from when I was young enough not to be able to read. I can’t remember my parents reading aloud to me at all, but they told me they did and there’s pictures in family albums.
Right i was gonna say not cause from around 4 up i don’t remember my mom reading but i know i had her reading stellaluna over and over till her brain went to mush so she definitely did at some point
But you should still read to them. My 12 year old 7th grader has been reading since he was 4 or 5 and I had heard (from r/books) that what you do in that situation is choose a book that is a step beyond their current level. I’ve expanded that to books that are at his current level but outside of his range of interests, for example, poetry, as well as slower paced novels than what he might prefer.
My 12 year old seventh grader and I are currently reading All the Light We Cannot See. He wouldn’t touch it alone but is loving having it read to him.
Yeah, I wasn’t saying you SHOULDN’T read to kids once they can read by themselves, just that I am not surprised that many parents don’t. I also don’t think not being read to at that point will mean that kids won’t enjoy reading. I think that modeling reading (as in, if the parents read books themselves where the kids can see them) and having age appropriate books available in the home for them would help in making kids interested in reading too. My parents had many bookshelves around our house and I would just pick books off of them whenever I was bored, I read Lord of the Rings when I was in middle school because it was on my dad’s bookshelf for example. Just doing stuff like that will help advance their vocabulary a lot.
This makes me so sad. I can’t imagine not reading to my kiddo every night.
Bro, what are you smoking and where can I get a lot of it?
Oh man, if I included the books I read to my son in my yearly book count, I’d look like the most voracious reader on the planet. 🤓
In that case, are we also including the back of cereal boxes?
I think that’s a case of the people who read a lot skewing the average higher, because there are a LOT of people who read 100 books (especially people who only read romance/thrillers/mysteries/YA, genres that are usually easy to read & fast paced).
I know a few people that read, but besides myself & a close friend those people read probably a few books a month at most. Everyone else I know doesn’t read, or only reads a book or two on vacation.
Probably somewhere between 0 and 1.
Per Gallup as of two years ago, the average is 12.6.
They lie. LOL
The true median is probably lower than the average. Because the people who DO read, read voraciously. If 1 person reads 0 books, and another reads 30, the average is 15. But that doesn’t mean both people actually read 15 books a year. So I think removing the outliers, the “average American” probably reads 1 book a year if that.
The median has to be lower than the average for “books read” because of that skew (and because there is no such thing as reading a negative amount of books).
It’s been beat to death, but people really want the median here. You’d line up every American from least books read to most books read. That 150MM person will have 50% of Americans who read more the prev year and 50% who read less. How many did that person read?
Like you I would assume it’s 0 or 1, but apparently someone linked a survey saying it was 4. Regardless that’s the number people are curious about.
The mean basically only would give the info of how many books were read in America along with how many people are in America (which we already know). It’s pretty meaningless at an individual level.
Aren’t statistics fun
LOL if the average american read 50 books a year, we would live in a far more sensible world.