I found it difficult to find any stats on Australia or even the UK, but the US, as stated by the National Endowment of the Arts posted in 2008, has it at 50.2% of adults reading literature.
I thought it would be closer to a third or quarter of the population, but half, that’s not bad.
I’m guessing the other English speaking countries such as Aust, NZ, Canada are the same with slight variances.
That’s around 150 million readers in the US, 30 million readers in the UK, 10 million in Australia, etc.
I hear that paper books are still leading above digital downloads. I wonder if it will eventually be around 50% each? Many say paper book will be lost to us entirely. I disagree, they will go the way of the radio, cinemas, theatre, etc. Just because there's a different way of getting your entertainment, it doesn't mean it will destroy the others.
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Further (and only slightly related) thoughts:
This brings me to another interesting statistic; first, have you read any of the highest selling books over the last 10 or so years? You know, Harry Potter, The Da Vinci Code, and more recently: Fifty Shades of Grey. Well, I found some stats on the third Harry Potter book as quoted in the New York Times: 900,000 books available for sale for the first print run in the US - and 275,000 for the rest of the English speaking countries.
If you remember how many readers there are and how popular Harry Potter books are/were, it doesn’t seem like many, does it? Just over a million people reading the first lot of books when we already established that there are around 200 million English speaking readers! 199 million went without reading Harry Potter!
Did they expect to sell only that many copies - so that’s less than 1% of the reading population in (for example) the US wanted to read Harry Potter? Nope, not so. There were many more print runs after that, and again after that.
According to Nielsen Bookscan (UK) they’re up to around 3 million copies sold in the UK for each of the Harry Potter books. Sorry no such stats available to me for the US, which is annoying, although we can estimate:
3 million copies sold in UK, 30 million readers. That’s 10% of the population of readers that bought/read harry potter. 1 in 10 people. Wow, that’s actually a lot! Although, that’s still 9 people out of 10 that didn’t think the third Harry Potter book was worth a read.
And if we estimate that it’s the same in the US (10%): 15 million Harry Potter books (the third in the series) sold.
That means 135 million said, nah, I’m not reading that.
Your thoughts?
I thought everyone had read Harry Potter (actually, I haven't, but I probably will some day).
Why did I bring this tidbit of information up? Well, if you’re an author and nine out of ten people don’t want to read your book, maybe you shouldn’t feel too down? It may be that you just haven’t found the millions of people that do want to read your book?
Hell, if it was 1 in 100 that wanted to read your book, then that’s still well over 1 million copies sold in the US alone.
And what about if there were 999 people that didn’t want to read your book but the 1,000th did (1 in 1,000), that’s crap loads over 100,000 books sold in the US. Still great sales for anyone!
More thoughts:
So, if you’re a reader and you find it hard to find a person that likes your favourite author, keep asking around, maybe by the 100th or 1,000th person you’ll find someone that does.
If you’re an author, then don’t be disgruntled when you get a rejection from a publisher or when the 5 friends you showed it to didn’t like the story, there’s still a chance that there are thousands or millions that will.
Last thoughts:
I’m very aware that statistics can be manipulated or abbreviated or spliced and will then give false data, so please don’t take any of this information as ‘gospel’. This is a blog, and blogs are for people that like to unload what’s in their brain and put it to paper... okay, the internet.
Enjoy, discuss, or call it nonsense. But you did read it, so you must have thought about it too?
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