ABSTRACT
Since early in this century U.S. book reading habits have been found wanting. Gray and Munroe (1929), in summarizing 150 studies done prior to 1929 on reading habits of adults, concluded “that young people and adults engage more in reading short, unrelated types of material and less in reading longer selections and books, or materials which are closely related” (p. 260). Surveys of reading habits in the United States have shown that the amount of time spent reading books varies with education (e.g., Parsons, 1923, cited in Gray & Munroe, 1929, p. 35), as does the particular parts of the newspaper that are read, with the more highly educated tending to focus more on the informational parts and the less educated, on the entertainment parts (Kirsch & Jungeblut, 1986). Total amount of time spent reading books in 1977 was only about 5 minutes per day for employed men and about 4 minutes for employed women (Robinson, 1977).
