Who’s Really Reading Books These Days? Surprise—It’s Not Who You Think

A new Pew Research Center survey found that when it comes to cracking open books, young adults under age 30 are totally crushing it.

Get ready to say good-bye to the stereotype of the texting and selfie-posting millennial holed up in Mom and Dad’s basement binge-watching The Vampire Diaries. According to a new report from the Pew Research Center, Americans younger than 30 are more likely than any other age group to have read a book in the last year.

For its Younger Americans and Public Libraries report, Pew conducted cell phone and landline surveys of more than 6,200 people over the age of 16. They found that 43 percent of millennials under 30 read on a daily basis, slightly more than the 40 percent of folks age 30 and over who read every day. What’s more impressive is that 88 percent of the under-30 crowd had read a book in the past year, compared with 79 percent of those 30 and older.

Indeed, the report’s authors found that young adults read a median of 10 books every year. Although the demise of the printed book is often predicted, it turns out that only 37 percent of young adults report that they read an e-book in the past year—they’re still down with old-school paperback and hardback texts.

It might be tempting to chalk up the high reading rates of young adults to their status as students. However, Pew broke out the data and found that 25- to 29-year-olds read on a daily basis at the same rate as college-age 18- to 24-year-olds. Interestingly enough, the 25- to 29-year-olds were more likely to read on a weekly basis (27 percent) than the 18- to 24-year-olds (22 percent).

Read more: http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/09/16/unexpected-truth-about-who-really-reading-books-america

Reading from books is better for you than reading online

Just half an hour of reading, either with a book or a tablet, can have a multitude of positive effects on your mental health, and 'slow reading clubs' are popping up around the world to do just that. Just don't check Twitter halfway through...

The Slow Reading Club of Wellington in New Zealand is a small group of people who all go to a cafe at the same time, shut their phones off, and read for an hour. It doesn’t sound that revolutionary, but the ‘slow reading’ movement has been gaining momentum around the world, and research has suggested that it could be having many significant effects on the participants’ brains.

Members of the group would happily tell you that the benefits they’re getting from their commitment to 'slow reading' include improvements in concentration and the ability to think through difficult concepts and emphasise with other people's feelings and beliefs, and a slew of recent studies seem to back these claims up.

According to Jeanne Whalen at the Wall Street Journal, a study published last year in the journal Neurology and conducted by researchers from the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center and Departments of Neurological Sciences at the Rush University Medical Center in the US, showed that in 300 elderly people, those that engaged regularly in activities that challenged them mentally, such as reading, had slower rates of memory loss as they aged. And last year, a separate study published in Science revealed that reading literary fiction could actively improve your ability to understand and empathise with other people’s mental states and beliefs.

"Yet reading habits have declined in recent years,” says Whalen. "In a survey this year, about 76 percent  of Americans 18 and older said they read at least one book in the past year, down from 79 percent in 2011, according to the Pew Research Center."

Because many of us now read more on our phones than we are from books and even tablets, we’ve unwittingly changed the way we take in words. In 2006, an eye-tracking report by scientists at the US-based research group, Nielsen Norman, showed that people read web pages in an “F” pattern, scanning the top line all the way, then halfway across the next few lines, and then only down the left side of the page, all the way down to the bottom of the article. This kind of reading helps us scan quickly for important words to spark our interest, but does nothing for our ability to actually gain a deeper understanding of what we’re reading.

Read more: http://sciencealert.com.au/news/20141809-26196.html

Don't buy a new book - rent it - BookSwim

Saves trees... use Online Book Rental

by Michael Smith

BookSwim is the first online book rental library service lending you paperbacks and hardcovers, Netflix®-style, directly to your house, without the need to purchase! Whether it's new releases, bestsellers, or classics, we have something for everyone, with free shipping both ways! Read your books as long as you want – no late fees! Even choose to purchase and keep the titles you love!

Now there is an environmentally friendly – or a more environmentally friendly – way of dealing with one's addiction to reading and books. This may be, aside from e-books, especially those in PDF that one can then print out if one so desires, a way to go for those of us who love reading but hate to have to buy all the books and then, once we have bought and read them have to deal with them afterwards.

While we all like to keep this book or that after we have read it for the “just in case we want to read it again” there are masses more books that we buy to read that we hardly will ever have a need or desire to read again. So, what do with them then. Because we have bought them and often paid good moment for them we are very reluctant often to dispense with them and throw them out, even if to a charity shop to be sold on to others and there are only that many friends and relations that you can otherwise pass them onto. With a service such a BookSwim this is all eliminated.

From an environmental standpoint dead tree books are not something that often is promoted and everyone is on about e-books nowadays, and I am even looking of producing e-books from the Green (Living) Review, the occasional sort-of annual “Best of Green Living”, in PDF, which is the best format for e-books, in my opinion, I still find reading on screen difficult for more than a few pages or so. Hence I still prefer to have books printed, even if printed from a PDF via my printer at home. It makes reading still a nicer experience. I certainly would not even try to read novels on screen. It just is not the same as a book, whether hardback or paperback.

BookSwim gives those of us who want to read books and may even want to keep the occasional book that we particularly like a chance to do just that without having to travel to the local lending library and without the danger of incurring late fees should we forget about the book for a while or such.

Yes, I know, that in most libraries, public lending ones, you can borrow books for free but... and the but is the inconvenience of having to travel to the library if you happen to live, say, in the boonies and then, as said, if you run late, forget about the book for a while, or whatever, you incur late fees and they can mount up if you cannot get to the library for some reason to return the book(s). In addition to that the books are not, necessarily, the latest offerings that are available at the local library and also, you cannot, if you like the book, purchase it. With BookSwim, on the other hand, you can.

© M Smith (Veshengro), November 2008
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