65% read books in print format
28% read e-books
14% read via audio devices
African-Americans.: 16% read on smartphones, 8% on computers, 4% on e-readers
40% read print books only
6% read digital only
College grads are four times more likely than high school grads to read e-books, and twice as likely to read print and audio.
Sources: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/one-four-americans-didnt-read-book-last-year-180960340/ and http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/01/book-reading-2016/
DISCUSSION POINT:
“Smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines in work-life balance, and hours less of family time. They have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense, then for all intents and purposes… In the course of an average lifetime, most of us will spend about seven years immersed in our portable computers.”
Globe & Mail, January 6, 2018, A8
