They define "literary reading" as "novels, short stories, poetry, and plays," and lament its decline
Yeah, that was the big sticking point when it first came out -- wossname David Jones (IIRC) of the Golden Rule blog had a series of rather withering posts about it. I d'know why they knocked out nonfiction, because even leaving out things like celebrity memoirs and cookbooks and religious self-help and whatever else I see on the Times nonfic list most days, there's scholarly biographies and history books for the snootiness quotient. At the v least it should've been broken down into fic and non/fic -- and probably separated out into narrative-length fic/nonfic and poetry/drama, as I think the audience for the last two is a lot smaller and gets artificially plumped up if you put it in the same category as novels.
I suspect that there is something else which causes for both reading and community participation, and that's leisure time and a higher level of education
That's a good point.
I also think surveys like this have a built-in statistical skewing in that it's like the Nielsens -- people are less likely to report what they watch/read as what they think they should watch/read. It reminds me of the enormous shift when record stores started using purchase scans instead of foozleable data and suddenly Garth Brooks was No 1 and Dr Dre was No 2, or something like that. This is something you can't really prove or adjust for, but I think it happens a lot with this type of survey.
I think if you included "fiction on the internet" (yes, fanfic) or "nonfiction on the internet" (blogs, electronic newspapers, copies of journal articles) the figure would go up exponentially. Most people I know who read a lot of books also spend a lot of time reading on the net.
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Date: 2005-07-11 06:47 am (UTC)Yeah, that was the big sticking point when it first came out -- wossname David Jones (IIRC) of the Golden Rule blog had a series of rather withering posts about it. I d'know why they knocked out nonfiction, because even leaving out things like celebrity memoirs and cookbooks and religious self-help and whatever else I see on the Times nonfic list most days, there's scholarly biographies and history books for the snootiness quotient. At the v least it should've been broken down into fic and non/fic -- and probably separated out into narrative-length fic/nonfic and poetry/drama, as I think the audience for the last two is a lot smaller and gets artificially plumped up if you put it in the same category as novels.
I suspect that there is something else which causes for both reading and community participation, and that's leisure time and a higher level of education
That's a good point.
I also think surveys like this have a built-in statistical skewing in that it's like the Nielsens -- people are less likely to report what they watch/read as what they think they should watch/read. It reminds me of the enormous shift when record stores started using purchase scans instead of foozleable data and suddenly Garth Brooks was No 1 and Dr Dre was No 2, or something like that. This is something you can't really prove or adjust for, but I think it happens a lot with this type of survey.
I think if you included "fiction on the internet" (yes, fanfic) or "nonfiction on the internet" (blogs, electronic newspapers, copies of journal articles) the figure would go up exponentially. Most people I know who read a lot of books also spend a lot of time reading on the net.