How do you stack up to your peers, reading-wise?

The fine folks over at the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project recently published the results of a survey they performed to study the reading habits of younger Americans. They define "young" as under 30, which makes me wonder if they have any ties to the Hippies back in the 60's. But that's probably not important right now.

What is important, as well as interesting, is what they found out about the reading habits of the elusive wild teenager. Fully 86% of Americans 16 or 17 years of age have read at least part of a book in the past year. That's a higher percentage than any other age group except for 18-24 year olds, who clock in at 88%. So y'all are doing just fine when it comes to reading, but there's still room for improvement. If you know any of the 14% that don't read at all, though, feel free to kidnap them, tie them up and drop them off at your friendly neighborhood library. We'll take it from there.

That 86% is for any type of book, in any format. When you break it down by format you learn that only 12% of 16-17 year olds have read an e-book in the last year, despite the fact that e-books are supposedly the wave of the future.. That puts them way behind the 21% of 18-24 year olds who've read an e-book in the last twelve months. In fact, the only age group that has a lower rate of e-book reading is people 65 and older. Only 8% of them have read an e-book in the past year. All of those percentages are only going to go up as time goes by. I'm very curious to see when e-book readership surpasses print readership. It'll be awhile, but it's most likely coming.

If you're interested in reading more about the study - and who wouldn't be? - you can find a good summary here:

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2012/10/23/younger-americans-reading-and-library-habits/

The whole report is here:

http://libraries.pewinternet.org/files/legacy-pdf/PIP_YoungerLibraryPatrons.pdf