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?

  • UncutEmeralds@alien.topB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • rmpumper@alien.topB
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Nah, median is usually lower than average, as the average number gets inflated by the top numbers.

        • linguisticabstractn@alien.topB
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • LARRY_Xilo@alien.topB
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

      • tim_p@alien.topB
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • GailTheSnail7@alien.topB
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.