Book sales up, reading down
Frank Wilson, book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, who wrote about Blogit and several members commented, is off to BookExpo America. According to this New York Times story (registration required):
Consumer spending on books rose 8 percent, to nearly $21 billion, in the three years that ended in December, according to a recent report by the Book Industry Study Group, a publishing trade group, pushing the industry's sales back above the levels reached before the stock market decline helped to lead the country into a recession in early 2001.
...On the doom-and-gloom side, a survey of Americans' reading habits by the National Endowment for the Arts, released last year, found that only 47 percent of the adult American population reported reading literature in 2002, down from 54 percent 10 years earlier. But those results are difficult to interpret. "Literature" was not defined, for example, and the percentage of adults who reported reading a book of any kind was nearly 57 percent, down from 61 percent 10 years earlier.