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Is reading online worse than reading print?

Previously: Does internet use improve or impair academic performance? Does it decrease the amount of time spent reading? Today: Is it more efficient to learn by reading print, by reading online, or by watching video?

When surveyed, medical students and business school say that they prefer to print out reading materials rather than read them onscreen. But an experimental test of 114 Scandinavian doctors found no significant difference in comprehension and retention of a short article between those who read it on paper and those who read it online, despite the doctors' overwhelming preference for reading on paper. [Carrie Spencer, "Research on Learners' Preferences for Reading from a Printed Text or from a Computer Screen," Journal of Distance Education, 2006. Linda A. Martin and Mark W. Platt, "Printing and Screen Reading in the Medical School Curriculum: Guttenberg vs. the Cathode Ray Tube," {link to citation only} Behaviour & Information Technology 2001. Pal Gulbrandsen, Torben V. Schroeder, Josef Milerad, and Magne Nylenna, "Paper or Screen, Mother Tongue or English: Which Is Better? A Randomized Trial," Journal of the American Medical Association 2002.]
In a 2007 study, 132 college students in Alabama were shown a PowerPoint slide presentation on the country of Mali in one of three formats: text only, text with audio commentary, and text with an audiovisual commentary. The commentary was by a presenter who read the material on the slides almost word for word. When quizzed about the presentation, those shown the version with audiovisual commentary scored significantly lower than those shown the text-only version. The scores of those shown the version with audio commentary fell in between. Those shown the text-only version were more likely to agree with the statement "The presentation was interesting," and those shown the text with audiovisual commentary were more likely to agree with the statement "I did not learn anything from this presentation." [Steven C. Rockwell and Loy A. Singleton, "The Effect of the Modality of Presentation of Streaming Multimedia on Information Acquisition," {link to citation only} Media Psychology 2007.]
In a number of studies led by Barrie Gunter and Adrian Furnham in the late 1980s, adults and children proved better able to recall information conveyed to them in print than by audio or television, "even where exposure time is equated across viewers, listeners, or readers." (In fact, equal exposure time gives an advantage to readers; not only can readers set their own pace, slowing down when they reach a difficult passage and speeding through an easy one, but readers are often able to read a transcript silently more than once in the time it takes for the same material to be performed or read aloud.) Gunter and Furnham proved that print was superior whether the subject matter was television news, party political broadcasts, television advertisements, or scientific information. A 2002 study, however, found that when children and adults were quizzed about a children's news program that they had either watched or read in transcript, children had better recall when they watched, especially if they were not proficient readers; adult recall was the same for both modalities. [Adrian Furnham, Barrie Gunter, and Andrew Green, "Remembering Science: The Recall of Factual Information as a Function of the Presentation Mode," {link to citation only} Applied Cognitive Psychology 1990. Adrian Furnham, Samantha de Siena, and Barrie Gunter, "Children's and Adults' Recall of Children's News Stories in both Print and Audio-visual Presentation Modalities," {link to citation only} Applied Cognitive Psychology 2002.]

The end! This is the last installment of an online annotated bibliography for my review-essay "Twilight of the Books".

UPDATE (27 Feb. 2009): For ease in navigating, here's a list of all the blog posts I wrote to supplement my New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books":

Posted by Caleb Crain on Thursday, 27 December 2007 at 07:07 AM in bibliography, history of technology, items new in print, literacy, notebook, reading habits | Permalink | Comments (6)

Does internet use compromise reading time?

Previously: Does television impair academic performance and cognitive development? Today: Does internet use improve or impair academic performance? Does it decrease the amount of time spent reading?

In a 2006 survey of the existing research, written as the preface to an experimental study, the authors concluded that "causal relationships have been difficult to establish" between children's computer use and their academic achievement, although "available evidence suggests that having a home computer is linked to somewhat better academic performance." As with television, it is difficult to get reliable information about hours of internet use from self reports, and what children do online is likely to be even more variable than what they watch on television. In the HomeNetToo study, 140 Michigan children who were eligible for federal school-lunch subsidies—mostly African Americans with single mothers—were given home computers and internet access in 2001 and 2002 in exchange for allowing researchers to monitor their internet use. According to an early report, an increase in internet use improved grades at twelve months and sixteen months, and improved reading scores on standardized tests at six months and later (math scores were unchanged). A later report found correlations between the types of websites visited and academic performance. Students' math scores on standardized tests were improved if they visited websites about technology, music, corporations, web services, downloads, pornography, and search engines, among others. Students' reading scores were improved by visiting websites associated with technology, downloads, MSN/Yahoo, and pornography. [Linda A. Jackson, Alexander von Eye, Frank A. Biocca, Gretchen Barbatsis, Yong Zhao, and Hiram E. Fitzgerald, "Does Home Internet Use Influence the Academic Performance of Low-Income Children?" Developmental Psychology 2006. Linda A. Jackson, Ricky Samona, Jeff Moomaw, Lauren Ramsay, Christopher Murray, Amy Smith, and Lindsay Murray, "What Children Do on the Internet: Domains Visited and Their Relationship to Socio-Demographic Characteristics and Academic Performance," {link to citation only} Cyber Psychology and Behavior 2007.]
In a spring 2000 study of 410 third graders in northern California, students with a with a computer at home scored higher on several tests. [Dina L. G. Borzekowski and Thomas N. Robinson, "The Remote, the Mouse, and the No. 2 Pencil: The Household Media Environment and Academic Achievement among Third Grade Students," Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, July 2005.]
In 2002, students who emailed friends or family once or twice a month scored higher on a national reading test than those who emailed either more rarely or more frequently. On a 500-point scale, students who never or hardly ever emailed scored 279, those who emailed once or twice a month scored 289, those who emailed once or twice a week scored 281, and those who emailed almost every day scored 284. On the other hand, in 2002 and 2005, the more often that students read articles on the internet not required for schoolwork, the higher they scored on the test. [National Center for Education Statistics, "National Assessment of Education Progress Data Explorer," incorporating data from reading assessments conducted in 1992, 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2005.]
In a 2005 review of the sociological research about reading, three authors noted that internet use has correlated positively with book-reading in a number of recent studies. The authors suspect, however, that the correlation has been caused by "cultural omnivores," elite and proficient consumers of culture, who adopt new technologies early and consume more of every media and genre than most people. As internet use spreads to average readers, pressure to choose between book-reading and internet-surfing will increase, and a new gap will open between those who "read books on a regular basis" and those who merely "read as part of their jobs, online activities, and the daily business of living." [Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, "Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century," Annual Review of Sociology 2005.]
A 2001 Gallup poll of 512 adults found that regular computer users spent 1.5 hours daily online, and that they spent as much time reading books as those who were not regular computer users—1.1 hours daily. Participants reported watching an average of 2.5 hours of television daily. [Jennifer Robison, "Does Reading Still Stack Up," Gallup Tuesday Briefing, 3 September 2002.]

Next: Is it more efficient to learn by reading print, by reading online, or by watching video?

UPDATE (27 Feb. 2009): For ease in navigating, here's a list of all the blog posts I wrote to supplement my New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books":

Posted by Caleb Crain on Wednesday, 26 December 2007 at 09:53 AM in bibliography, internet, items new in print, literacy, notebook, reading habits, statistics | Permalink | Comments (1)

Merry Christmas

Source: George Cruikshank, "December," The Comic Almanac, ed. Horace Mayhew (London: David Bogue, 1835; rpt. 1860), facing page 27.

Posted by Caleb Crain on Monday, 24 December 2007 at 06:37 AM in Religion | Permalink | Comments (0)

Does television impair intellect?

Yesterday: Is literacy declining? Today: Does television impair academic performance and cognitive development?

There is little doubt that television is on average bad for a person's intellectual development. If you read through the studies below, however, you will see that there's some dispute about whether a small dose of the right kind of television at the proper age might be beneficial.

A 2001 meta-analysis of data on more than 1 million students found "little room for doubt concerning the negative nature of the overall linear relationship between television viewing and educational achievement." However, the analysis also suggested that the relationship was not best graphed as a straight line but rather as "an inverted check mark shape," also called a curvilinear graph. That is, for each age, there is an optimal viewing time, up to which point television viewing is beneficial, and above which it is harmful. The author, Micha Razel, found that this optimum was 2 hours a day for nine-year-olds, 1.5 hours a day for thirteen-year-olds, and 0.5 hours a day for seventeen-year-olds. The benefit of the optimal viewing time decreased with age. Razel found that 55 percent of the students in the data set were exceeding their optimal viewing time by 3 hours a day, and that this excess viewing was lowering academic achievement by about one grade level. Razel speculated that "the finding of a larger optimal viewing time for younger children may be related to their higher quality viewing," that is, to the probability that they were watching educational programs under parental supervision. [Micha Razel, "The Complex Model of Television Viewing and Educational Achievement," {link to citation only} Journal of Educational Research, July/August 2001.]
In a summary of pre-2002 research, two authors concluded that "educational television has a substantial positive impact and that entertainment television has a negative impact." The benefit of shows such as Sesame Street has been extensively documented, the authors wrote. One study found that boys who watched educational television at age five had higher grades even in high school (the effect for girls was not statistically significant). On the other hand, a study of the introduction of television into Canada found that its arrival lowered the reading scores of second graders. The positive impact seems to be limited to educational television watched during the preschool and early elementary-school years, and above an optimum level, television watching hampers academic achievement, in a so-called curvilinear graph. Does television displace reading? Educational programs encourage reading, but entertainment programs do displace it in the early, "decoding" stages when reading is an effortful activity. Once reading habits are established, television seems not to affect them. The authors were not persuaded that television shortened attention spans, interfered with homework, taught children to expect all learning to be effortless, or was inherently disabling of cognition. [Marie Evans Schmidt and Daniel R. Anderson, "The Impact of Television on Cognitive Development and Educational Achievement," Children and Television: Fifty Years of Research, {book available for purchase} Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007.]
In a longitudinal study of 330 German kindergarteners and second graders, who were assessed through time-use diaries and achievements tests between 1998 and 2001, researchers found that children who watched entertainment television scored significantly lower on tests of phonological awareness, reading skills, and general achievement, even if their viewing was relatively light. The effect increased as time passed, so that by the third grade, heavy viewers were between one and one and a half years behind light viewers in reading scores. Since light viewers outperformed medium viewers, who in turn outperformed heavy viewers, the study seems to contradict the notion that the relation between television viewing and academic achievement is "curvilinear," that is, that a certain moderate amount of television is beneficial. (Note that heavy viewers in Germany would be classified as normal viewers in America.) In the German study, the correlation between educational television and test-score gains ranged "from insignificant to moderately positive"—much less substantial than American researchers have found. The researchers controlled for IQ, socioeconomic status, and early literacy. [Marco Ennemoser and Wolfgang Schneider, "Relations of Television Viewing and Reading: Findings from a 4-Year Longitudinal Study,"{link to citation only} Journal of Educational Psychology, 2007.]
A survey of 1,008 parents in February 2006 found that babies who were eight to sixteen months old knew six to eight fewer words for each additional hour of baby DVDs and videos watched daily. [Frederick J. Zimmerman, Dimitri A. Christakis, and Andrew N. Meltzoff, "Associations between Media Viewing and Language Development in Children under Age 2 Years," {link to citation only} Journal of Pediatrics, August 2007. Alice Park, "Baby Einsteins: Not so Smart After All," Time, 6 August 2007. Lisa Guernsey, "The Genius of 'Baby Einstein'," New York Times, 16 August 2007.]
Through a re-analysis of longitudinal health data for 1,278 children who were seven years old between 1996 and 2000, researchers found that hours spent watching television at ages one and three correlated with a higher likelihood of attention disorder at age seven. The correlation was present even when the data were controlled for factors such as mother's drug use or socioeconomic status, and the investigators call the link "robust and stable." Other researchers, however, have questioned the way that the study's authors defined attention deficit disorder. [Dimitri A. Christakis, Frederick J. Zimmermann, David L. DiGiuseppe, and Carolyn A. McCarty, "Early Television Exposure and Subsequent Attentional Problems in Children," Pediatrics, April 2004. Roger L. Bertholf, Steve Goodison, Dimitri A. Christakis, and Frederick J. Zimmerman, "Television Viewing and Attention Deficits in Children," Pediatrics 2004.] Note: A later Danish study failed to replicate the findings; the study's authors argue that this may have been because Danish infants watched far less television, and a certain threshold was not crossed by them.
The effect of television on cognitive development was studied in a later re-analysis of the Christakis etal. data set, this time focusing on about 1,700 children who were six years old between 1996 and 2000. Hours of television watched before age three caused lower scores on several different cognitive tests. Television watched between ages three and five improved scores on a reading recognition test and a short-term memory test, though not on others. [Frederick J. Zimmerman and Dimitri A. Christakis, "Children's Television Viewing and Cognitive Outcomes," Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, July 2005.]
In a spring 2000 study of 410 third graders in northern California, students with a television in their bedroom scored lower on all tests than those without one, and students with a computer at home scored higher. The lowest scores belonged to students who newly acquired a bedroom television in the course of the study. However, self-reports by the students did not support the hypothesis that television use was displacing homework, in terms of time usage. [Dina L. G. Borzekowski and Thomas N. Robinson, "The Remote, the Mouse, and the No. 2 Pencil: The Household Media Environment and Academic Achievement among Third Grade Students," Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, July 2005.]
A September 1999 survey of 4,508 middle school students in New Hampshire and Vermont found that the more time children spent with television and video games during the week, the less likely they were to have excellent grades, and the more likely to have below-average grades. When the data were adjusted to control for covariates such as level of maternal support and child's rebelliousness, the correlation between television and grades held up, but the correlation between video games and poor academic performance disappeared. In a later letter, the authors suggested that their evidence on video games was weak because few children in the study played video games for as many hours as they watched television, and argued that if they did, the study would have been able to detect video games' effect on grades. Academic performance was also impaired by having more cable channels available at home, being allowed by parents to watch any kind of content, and being allowed by parents to watch R-rated movies. [Iman Sharif and James D. Sargent, "Association between Television, Movie, and Video Game Exposure and School Performance," Pediatrics, 2006. Jerald J. Block, Iman Sharif, and James D. Sargent, "Lack of Association between Video Game Exposure and School Performance," Pediatrics, February 2007.]
The effect of television on attention and learning difficulties was studied through interviews with 678 families in upstate New York between 1983 and 2004, when the families' children were age fourteen, sixteen, twenty-two, and thirty-three. Fourteen-year-olds who watched one or more hours of television daily were more likely to have poor grades, to fail to complete high school, and not to attend college. The effect was present whether the children tested high or low on verbal skills, and whether or not their parents had completed college. Those who watched more than three hours of television a day at age fourteen were even more susceptible to these failures; they were twice as likely not to earn a college degree as those who had watched less than an hour of television a day at age fourteen. Adolescents who watched more television at age sixteen than at fourteen raised their risk of future failure; those who watched less lowered it. When environmental factors were controlled for, learning problems did not in themselves predict future television watching habits. In other words, television was shown to cause academic failure, but not the other way around. [Jeffrey G. Johnson, Patricia Cohen, Stephanie Kasen, and Judith S. Brook, "Extensive Television Viewing and the Development of Attention and Learning Difficulties during Adolescence," Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, May 2007.]
The effect of television on long-term academic achievement was studied through interviews with 980 New Zealanders born in 1972 and 1973, starting when they were age five and ending when they were twenty-six. The more television the subjects watched during the week in childhood and adolescence, the more likely they were to leave high school without a diploma, and the less likely to earn a college degree. The effects were present even after adjusting for IQ, socioeconomic status, and childhood behavioral problems. The authors considered it possible that a poor academic experience in high school might have been causing some of the increase in adolescent television watching, but point out that there could not have been any reverse causation at work in the strong correlation between childhood television watching and failure to earn a college degree. The less television a child watched, the better his educational outcome; there was "little support for the hypothesis that a small amount of television is beneficial." [Robert J. Hancox, Barry J. Milne, and Richie Poulton, "Association of Television Viewing During Childhood with Poor Educational Achievement," Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, July 2005.]

Next: Does internet use improve or impair academic performance? Does it decrease the amount of time spent reading?

UPDATE (27 Feb. 2009): For ease in navigating, here's a list of all the blog posts I wrote to supplement my New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books":

Posted by Caleb Crain on Saturday, 22 December 2007 at 06:16 AM in bibliography, child development, intelligence, items new in print, literacy, notebook, reading habits, statistics, Television | Permalink | Comments (5)

Is literacy declining?

Yesterday: Are Americans spending less money on reading? Today: Is literacy declining?

Explanatory note: You'll see, if you read through these summaries, that some students of literacy think demographic shifts such as immigration are crucial, and others think they're largely irrelevant. I'm inclined to the latter opinion myself, but my goal in this list is to present the findings of others in a relatively neutral way.

A National Assessment of Educational Progress test of more than 21,000 twelfth graders in 2005 found that the average reading score was 286 on a 500-point scale, down from 292 in 1992. More distressing, the proportion of students at or above a proficient level in reading fell from 40 percent in 1992 to 35 percent in 2005, and the proportion reading at a basic level fell from 80 percent in 1992 to 73 percent in 2005. (At the basic level, corresponding to scores between 265 and 302, a student should be able to, say, extract information from a document and connect it to the outside world. At the proficient level, 302 to 346, a student should be able to "provide [an] example of difference between two editorials" or "specify language that depicts [a] character's emotional state." At the advanced level, 346 and above, a student should be able to "interpret [an] author's belief and provide supporting examples" and "explain [the] symbolic significance of [a] setting.") When reading scores were differentiated by context, it emerged that, between 1992 and 2005, scores had fallen 2 points in reading for information, 6 in reading to perform a task, and 12 in reading for literary experience, which involves "exploring themes, events, characters, settings, and the language of literary works." Although the proportion of whites in the student population has declined since 1992, from 74 percent to 67 percent, and that of Hispanics has risen, from 7 percent to 14 percent, the demographic shifts cannot alone account for the fall in reading scores, because the separately tallied scores of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all fell between 1992 and 2005. [W. Grigg, P. Donahue, and G. Dion, The Nation's Report Card: 12th-Grade Reading and Mathematics 2005 (NCES 2007-468), U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2007.]
National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests of more than 165,000 fourth graders and more than 159,000 eighth graders found that the average reading score of fourth graders rose moderately from 217 in 1992 to 219 in 2005, and then to 221 in 2007, and the score of eighth graders rose moderately from 260 in 1992 to 262 in 2005, and then to 263 in 2007. The proportion of proficient fourth graders rose from 29 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2005; proficiency among eighth graders had risen by exactly the same amount. Tallied separately, fourth-grade reading scores by whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asian/Pacific Islanders all increased—dramatically in some cases—and there were substantial gains by eighth-grade whites, blacks, and Hispanics. Among fourth graders, scores in reading for literary experience rose from 219 in 1992 to 222 in 2005, and reading for information rose from 214 to 216. Eighth graders improved in reading for literary experience from 259 to 261, in reading for information from 261 to 263, and in reading to perform a task from 261 to 262. [M. Perie, W. Grigg, and P. Donahue, The Nation's Report Card: Reading 2005 (NCES 2006-451), U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2005; J. Lee, W. Grigg, and P. Donahue, The Nation’s Report Card: Reading 2007 (NCES 2007–496), National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C.; and National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Education Progress "Data Explorer," incorporating data from reading assessments conducted in 1992, 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2005]
The National Assessment of Education Progress also studies long-term trends in reading scores, using tests with an older and different methodology, not comparable with those above. In 2004, the assessment tested more than 11,000 students at each of the ages nine, thirteen, and seventeen. Seventeen-year-olds in 2004 scored 285, the same as they did in 1971. Thirteen-year-olds improved moderately, from 255 in 1971 to 259 in 2004. Nine-year-olds, however, improved dramatically, from 208 in 1971 to 219 in 2004, and most of the improvement occurred after a 1999 assessment. Just as dramatic was the decline in the black-white score gap among nine-year-olds—from 44 points in 1971, to 35 points in 1999, to just 26 points in 2004. When coupled with similar improvement in the white-Hispanic score gap among nine-year-olds, the results would at first glance seem to suggest that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has been effective, but test results from the regular NAEP "Nation's Report Card" series (see the paragraph above) suggest that the bulk of the improvement seems to have taken place before 2002, when the NCLB was signed into law. It is nonetheless an intriguing jump, and one wonders what caused it. Looking over the numbers, the only historic parallel is a sharp decline in the white-black gap among seventeen-year-olds in the late 1980s—from 50 points in 1980 to just 20 points in 1988—an improvement that some scholars have attributed to governmental interventions in civil rights, including desegregation. [Marianne Perie and Rebecca Moran, NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress: Three Decades of Student Performance in Reading and Mathematics (NCES 2005-464), U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2005. David Grissmer, Ann Flanagan, and Stephanie Williamson, "Why Did the Black-White Score Gap Narrow in the 1970s and 1980s?" The Black-White Test Score Gap, Brookings Institution, 1998.]
In a 2006 report, analysts at ACT, a test manufacturer, noted that only 51 percent of high school graduates who took their test in 2005 were "ready for college-level reading." Tests administered by the company to eighth and tenth graders, however, showed about 62 percent of the students on track for college reading, suggesting that the slowdown is taking place in the later high school years. The authors note that although the No Child Left Behind Act requires reading standards for elementary school students, many states have none for older students. Questions involving complex texts single out college-ready students better than other kinds, the test-makers find, and so they speculate that high school students are not reading enough complex prose. [ACT, Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals about College Readiness in Reading, 2006.]
In 2003, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy tested over 19,000 adults and found that average prose literacy had declined one point between 1992 and 2003, from 276 to 275 on a 500-point scale, and that document literacy was stable at a score of 271. The proportion of adults deemed proficient in prose and document reading—capable of "comparing viewpoints in two editorials" or "interpreting a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity"—declined from 15 percent in 1992 to 13 percent in 2003. Some of the changes may be due to demographic shifts, as groups with lower literacy rates have become more populous. Hispanic literacy decreased markedly—35 percent were at a below-basic level of prose literacy in 1992, and 44 percent were in 2003—and seem to have offset gains in literacy among blacks and Asian/Pacific Islanders. Whites maintained the highest literacy scores, but even among whites, proficiency in prose literacy decreased slightly, from 18 percent to 17 percent. Perplexingly, between 1992 and 2003 it became somewhat easier for a person with below-basic literacy to find employment. Only 53 percent of adults with below-basic prose literacy voted in the 2000 presidential election; 84 percent of proficient readers did. [Mark Kutner, Elizabeth Greenberg, and Justin Baer, A First Look at the Literacy of America's Adults in the 21st Century, NCES 2006-470, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 2006. Mark Kutner, Elizabeth Greenberg, Ying Jin, Bridget Boyle, Yung-Chen Hsu, and Eric Dunleavy, Literacy in Everyday Life: Results from the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, NCES 2007-480, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, April 2007.]
In a January 2007 report, analysts at the Educational Testing Service, the makers of the SAT and others diagnostic tests, predicted that "by 2030 the average levels of literacy and numeracy in the working-age population will have decreased by about 5 percent." They based their prediction on estimates of demographic change, noting that "between 2000 and 2005, two-thirds of the nation's civilian labor-force growth and 86 percent of its employment growth was generated by new immigrant arrivals," and that these trends were likely to continue. In other words, there will be proportionally more Americans in 2030 from ethnicities that have historically had lower literacy rates. The authors note, however, that on a 2005 adult literacy assessment, U.S.-born Hispanics scored 50 points higher on a 500-point scale than foreign-born Hispanics. (Intriguingly, U.S.-born blacks scored 7 points worse than foreign-born blacks, and U.S.-born Asians scored higher than any other ethnic group, wherever they were born.) When compared to literacy rates in other developed countries, U.S. scores are average. [Irwin Kirsch, Henry Braun, Kentaro Yamamoto, and Andrew Sum, America's Perfect Storm: Three Forces Changing Our Nation's Future, Educational Testing Service, January 2007.]
Interviews and assessments in 2003 of 3,420 adults in the United States—as part of the international Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey that assessed similar samples in Bermuda, Canada, Italy, Norway, Switzerland, and the Mexican state of Nueva Leon—found that the average American prose literacy score had dropped from 273.7 on a test in 1993 to 268.6 in 2003. The decline was statistically significant and somewhat unusual; of the six regions where comparison was possible, only Italian-speaking Switzerland showed a similar decline. Looking at the American decline more closely, the analysts observed that most of it came from America's most proficient readers, writing that "there is a small improvement among low-skilled adults only, and a comparatively high decline among high-skilled adults." In 2003, America outperformed Italy and Nuevo Leon on prose and document literacy, but came in behind Norway, Bermuda, Switzerland, and Canada. [Statistics Canada and Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Learning a Living: First Results of the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey, 2005]

Next: Does television impair academic performance and cognitive development?

UPDATE (27 Feb. 2009): For ease in navigating, here's a list of all the blog posts I wrote to supplement my New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books":

Posted by Caleb Crain on Friday, 21 December 2007 at 05:52 AM in bibliography, child development, items new in print, literacy, notebook, reading habits, statistics | Permalink | Comments (1)

On the radio

I'm scheduled to be interviewed on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show tomorrow, Friday, 21 December, starting around 11:15am, about my New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books". The call-in number is 212-433-9692 if you want to ask me a question in real time. UPDATE: The show is archived, if you want to download it or listen to it online (scroll down for the segment "Brains on Books").

Posted by Caleb Crain on Thursday, 20 December 2007 at 05:43 AM in being in public, radio | Permalink | Comments (0)

Are Americans spending less on reading?

Yesterday: Are Americans reading less? Today: Are Americans spending less money on reading?

Before I give the summaries, I want to provide little context. As you'll see, there's some reason to think that publishing revenues have increased overall in the last five years. If one is trying to determine from this fact whether Americans have grown more or less readerly, however, it's important to keep in mind several factors. First, the U.S. population has grown. Second, the U.S. economy has grown. And third, the average price of a book has risen (see below for evidence). In other words, it is possible that the publishing industry took in more revenue even as the average citizen read fewer books and the proportion of readers in the population shrank. In fact, that's what I think happened. That's why I made a point of looking at units, as well as dollars, and of dividing those units by the Census Bureau's population estimates. (One last note: To simplify my own life, I'm linking to the data that I collected in late summer, but some government departments have released another year's data since I did my research.)

The Book Industry Study Group has estimated that 3.09 billion books were sold in 2005, and 3.10 billion in 2006, for net dollar sales of $34.63 billion in 2005 and $35.69 billion in 2006. BISG projects that sales will be 3.15 billion in 2007, 3.18 billion in 2008, and 3.24 billion in 2011. Because of a change in methodology, the group's earlier data aren't comparable to the numbers it is collecting now. For comparison's sake, however, they have recalculated what their new numbers would be under their old methodology, arriving at this series for unit sales: 2.36 billion in 2001, 2.37 billion in 2002, 2.34 billion in 2003, 2.296 billion in 2004, 2.36 billion in 2005, and 2.38 billion in 2006; and this series for dollar sales: $24.74 billion in 2001, $25.27 billion in 2002, $26.00 billion in 2003, $26.47 billion in 2004, $27.84 billion in 2005, and $28.60 billion in 2006. When the unit sales numbers are divided by the population estimates of the U.S. Census Bureau, it works out that there has been a decline in sales from 8.27 books per person in 2001 to 7.93 in 2006. When the old-methodology numbers for dollar sales are divided by the old-methodology numbers for unit sales, it transpires that the average price of a new book has risen from $10.49 in 2001 to $12.04 in 2006. Consumer books are a subset of total book sales, comprised of adult trade, juvenile trade, and mass market paperback books. Under the BISG's old methodology, unit sales of consumer books have also stagnated: 1.54 billion 2001, 1.56 billion in 2002, 1.53 billion in 2003, 1.48 billion in 2004, 1.52 billion in 2005, and 1.53 billion in 2006. [Michael Healy, ed., Book Industry Trends 2007, {for-purchase publication} pages 10, 13, 204, and 207. The Book Industry Study Group is also cited in table 1118, "Quantity of Books Sold: 2004 to 2009," of the Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007.]
Slightly higher estimates of consumer book sales are offered by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, who see a very modest increase in net unit sales between 2001 and 2006. VSS estimates that per-person, per-year spending on books has increased somewhat, but notes that "Consumer book spending growth consistently trailed that of GDP from 2001 to 2006." Like the Book Industry Study Group, they estimate that the average price of a a new book rose between 2001 and 2006. [Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Communications Industry Forecast, 2007 {for-purchase publication}, page 56, table ES.14, page 360, page 368, and page 374, table 13.11.] Note: Veronis Suhler Stevenson provided me with their report as a courtesy and for the purposes of reporting; since they make a living by providing data and since I didn't end up having room to quote them in the final published article, I'm not publishing their numbers here.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spent an average of $141 on reading in 1985, $153 in 1990, $163 in 1995, $146 in 2000, and $126 in 2005. The data are reported yearly. Those between the ages of 55 and 64 spent the most yearly on reading, $167. Whites spent more than blacks or Hispanics, and the Northeast and the West outspent other regions. [U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007, table 1217, "Expenditures per Consumer Unit for Entertainment and Reading: 1985 to 2004," and U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Consumer Expenditures in 2005," February 2007, page 3 and page 10.]
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has released to the National Endowment for the Arts previously unpublished data about consumer spending on books (as opposed to reading generally). As summarized in To Read or Not to Read, the average spending by a consumer unit (household) on books went from $37.74 in 1985 to $57.43 in 2005; when the figures are adjusted for inflation to 1982-84 dollars, the spending dropped from $33.25 in 1985 to $28.59 in 2005. [Sunil Iyengar et al, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, National Endowment for the Arts, 2007, p. 49, table 4C]
U.S. consumers spent an increasing amount on "Books and maps" between 1990 and 2006, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis: $16.2 billion in 1990, $23.2 billion in 1995, $33.7 billion in 2000, $34.6 billion in 2001, $37.1 billion in 2002, $39.0 billion in 2003, $40.4 billon in 2004, $41.8 billion in 2005, and $43.4 billion in 2006. [U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007, table 1218, "Personal Consumption Expenditures for Recreation: 1990 to 2004." Bureau of Economic Analysis, Department of Commerce, National Income and Product Accounts Table, "Table 2.5.5 Personal Consumption Expenditures by Type of Expenditure, 2005-2006."]
The total amount that U.S. consumers paid for books, according to the Book Industry Study Group, was $49.15 billion in 2004, $51.92 billion in 2005, and $53.62 billion in 2006. [U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007, table 1119, "Books Sold—Value of U.S. Domestic Consumer Expenditures: 2004 to 2009." Michael Healy, ed., Book Industry Trends 2007 {for-purchase publication}, page 17.]
The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the revenues of the book publishing industry have been climbing moderately in the past few years: $24.98 billion in 2000, $25.83 billion in 2001, $26.93 billion in 2002, $26.06 billion in 2003, $27.90 billion in 2004, and $27.73 billion in 2005. [U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007, tables 1107 and 1120. U.S. Census Bureau, "2005 Service Annual Survey, Information Sector Services," page 20, table 3.0.1.]

Tomorrow (or thereafter): Is literacy declining?

UPDATE (27 Feb. 2009): For ease in navigating, here's a list of all the blog posts I wrote to supplement my New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books":

Posted by Caleb Crain on Thursday, 20 December 2007 at 05:21 AM in bibliography, Books, economics, items new in print, literacy, notebook, reading habits, statistics | Permalink | Comments (2)

Are Americans reading less?

Yesterday: A list of books quoted in the article. Today's topic: Are Americans reading less?

"When George Gallup interviewed readers in 1937 [for the Book-of-the-Month Club], he found that 29 percent of all adults were reading books at that time. In 1955 the percentage had fallen to 17 percent." The BOMC thereafter stopped commissioning the surveys, because they felt they were unreliable; Americans were too likely to exaggerate their reading habits to pollsters. [Al Silverman (identified in contributor's notes as "the president and chief operating officer of the Book-of-the-Month Club"), "The Fragile Pleasure," Daedalus, 1983.]
In a 1978 survey by Yankelovich, Skelly and White of 1,450 adults, which was commissioned by the Book Industry Study Group, 25 percent of Americans said they had read ten or more books in the previous six months, 30 percent said they had read one to nine books, 39 percent said they had read newspapers and magazines but no books, and 6 percent said they had read nothing at all. That is, 55 percent of Americans had read a book in the previous half-year. [Herbert Mitgang, "Study Finds Nearly Half in U.S. Do Not Read Books," New York Times, 14 November 1978. Ray Walters, "Who Reads What and Why," New York Times, 19 November 1978.]
A survey conducted by an academic consortium found that in 1998, 968 of 1,387 people (69.8 percent) reported having read a novel, short story, poem, or play not required for work or school in the previous twelve months. In 2002, the proportion was roughly the same, 987 out of 1393 (70.9 percent). [James A. Davis, Tom W. Smith, and Peter V. Marsden, General Social Surveys, 1972-2006 {institutional subscription required} (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2007).]
In Reading at Risk, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that the proportion of Americans who had read any creative literature in the previous year declined as follows: 56.9 percent in 1982, 54.0 percent in 1992, 46.7 percent in 2002. In 1982, more than 17,000 people were surveyed; in 1992, more than 12,000; and in 2002, more than 17,000. The proportion who read any book, literary or not, in the previous year declined from 60.9 percent in 1992 to 56.6 percent in 2002. (By comparison, in 2002, 95.7 percent of those surveyed watched at least one hour of television daily in the previous year. But the proportions of readers in other countries are similar: Canada 67 percent, Denmark 55 percent, Sweden 72 percent, United Kingdom 63 percent, Belgium 23 percent, Portugal 15 percent.) Among those who read any books, the median number they read in 2002 was six. Women, whites, the highly educated, the rich, those aged 45-64, and those in the West and Northeast were more likely to be literary readers. When the results were broken down by gender, race/ethnicity, education level, and age, the trend was downward in every subcategory. When age cohorts were compared across time, the trend was also downward. Because the decline is marked within each age group and race/ethnicity group, the decline cannot be explained by demographic shifts. Literary readers were more likely to attend performing arts events, go to museums, volunteer for charity work, and attend or play sports. Those who did not read literature watched 3.1 hours of television daily, as opposed to 2.7 hours daily for literary readers, but overall television watching seemed to have declined very slightly from 1982 to 2002. Because of population growth, the size of the American reading community has remained stable despite the proportional decline. The only increase: the proportion saying they write literature. [National Endowment for the Arts, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, June 2004.]
In the fall of 2005, a survey by Mediamark Research, Inc., found that only 35.4 percent of those surveyed had participated in the leisure activity of book reading in the previous year. This made it one of the highest-ranking leisure activities in the survey, which didn't report on television watching or listening to music—reading a book had about the same as the frequency as barbecuing. The majority of readers engaged in the activity at least twice a week. [U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007, table 1225, "Adult Participation in Selected Leisure Activities by Frequency: 2005," citing Mediamark Research, Inc.]
27 percent of American had read no books in the previous year, an Associated Press–Ipsos poll found in August 2007, in a survey of 1003 adults. The median number of books read was four overall (Gallup Polls found a median of five in 2005, ten in 1999, and six in 1990); seven if only readers were considered. Among readers, the median number of books read for women was nine; for men, five. Those who are white, have college degrees, are over 50, and vote Democratic tend to read more. Those who never attend religious services read nearly twice the number of book as those who attend regularly. The NEA's report "To Read or Not to Read" points out that the AP-Ipsos poll did not ask respondents to exclude books they read for work or school. [The Associated Press and Ipsos Public Affairs, "Book Study," interview dates August 6–8, 2007. The Associated Press, "Poll: 1 in 4 U.S. adults read no books last year," International Herald Tribune, 21 August 2007.]
In a 2006 time-budget study, the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the average American (age fifteen and over) reads for 0.33 hours (20 minutes) on weekdays and 0.44 hours (26 minutes) on weekends and holidays. By comparison, he watches television for 2.35 hours (2 hours 21 minutes) on weekdays and 3.10 hours (3 hours 6 minutes) on weekends and holidays. [Bureau of Labor Statistics, Department of Labor, "Table 11. Time spent in leisure and sports activities for the civilian population by selected characteristics, 2006 annual averages," American Time-Use Survey 2006.]
Industry analysts Veronis Suhler Stevenson estimate that there has been little change lately in the number of hours that American spend with consumer books each year: 107 in 2000, 105 in 2001, 109 in 2002, 109 in 2003, 108 in 2004, ---* in 2005, and ---* in 2006. But there have been declines in the number of hours spent on newspapers and on magazines and increases in time spent with cable television, the internet, out-of-home media (such as billboards and in-elevator televisions), videogames, home video, and mobile electronic devices. [U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2007, table 1110, "Media Usage and Consumer Spending, 2000-2009," citing earlier reports by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, and Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Communications Industry Forecast, 2007, page 54, table ES.13.] *Note: Veronis Suhler Stevenon provided me with their report as a courtesy and for the purposes of reporting; since they make a living by providing data and since I didn't end up having room to quote them in the final published article, I'm only giving here the numbers from them that are also available in the Census Bureau's Statistical Abstract.
A 2004 survey of 2,032 school-age children found that on average they had spent 4 hours 15 minutes watching "screen media" (television, video, DVDs, and movies) the previous day, 1 hour 2 minutes on the computer, 49 minutes on video games, and 43 minutes reading for pleasure (books, magazines, newspapers). In a similar 1999 survey, children had watched 4 hours 4 minutes of screen media the previous day, spent 27 minutes on the computer, played video games for 26 minutes, and read for pleasure for 43 minutes (exactly the same amount of time!). The total time spent on media changed very slightly—from 6:19 to 6:21. The increases in consumption were fit in by multitasking. In 2004, 73 percent of the students surveyed said they had read for pleasure at least five minutes the previous day; 47 percent said they had read at least thirty minutes. Heavy users of any particular medium tended to consume more of all other kinds of media than light or moderate users. [Donald F. Roberts, Ulla G. Foehr, and Victoria Rideout, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-Olds, The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, March 2005, pages 24, 26, 37, 52.]
In a study of multitasking, using data collected in 2003 and 2004, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that schoolchildren read for fun as their primary activity 2.14 hours a week but only focused on it exclusively 38 percent of the time. The children watched television as their primary activity 16.56 hours a week, and focused on it exclusively 55 percent of the time. The analysis drew on media-use diaries kept by 694 students. [Ulla G. Foehr, Media Multitasking among American Youth: Prevalence, Predictors, and Pairings, Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, December 2006, pages 18-19.]
A 2005 survey of parents of children six and under found that the average child spends 1 hour 36 minutes daily consuming "screen media" (television, videos, video games, or computers), and only 40 minutes daily with a book (reading or being read to). 43 percent of children under age two watch television every day. 54 percent of two- to three-year-olds know how to change channels with the remote. 43 percent of four- to six-year-olds have a television in the bedroom; when their parents are asked about it, 30 percent say it's to help the children fall asleep. The data were collected by a telephone survey of 1051 parents in November 2005. [Victoria Rideout and Elizabeth Hamel, The Media Family: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers, Preschoolers and Their Parents, Kaiser Family Foundation, May 2006, pages 8, 18, 26.]
The proportion of twelfth graders who read for fun on their own at least once a month has declined as follows: 77 percent in 1992, 72 percent in 1994, 71 percent in 1998, 66 percent in 2002, and 70 percent in 2005. The proportion who talk with friends at least once a week about what they are reading has declined thus: 54 percent in 1992, 50 percent in 1994, 51 percent in 1998, 35 percent in 2002, and 37 percent in 2005. [National Center for Education Statistics, "National Assessment of Education Progress Data Explorer," incorporating data from reading assessments conducted in 1992, 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2005.]
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress's long-term data (which are distinct from its main data set), the proportion of nine-year-olds who read for fun at least once a month fluctuated between 88 percent in 1984, 86 percent in 1999, and 87 percent in 2004. The proportion of thirteen-year-olds declined steadily, from 84 percent in 1984, to 81 percent in 1999, to 79 percent in 2004, as did the proportion of seventeen-year-olds, from 81 percent in 1984, to 72 percent in 1999, to 67 percent in 2004. The proportion of seventeen-year-olds who "never or hardly ever" read for fun rose from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. [Marianne Perie and Rebecca Moran, NAEP 2004 Trends in Academic Progress: Three Decades of Student Performance in Reading and Mathematics (NCES 2005-464), U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 2005.]
In 1970, there were 62,107,527 daily newspapers printed in the United States, or 0.30 per person (the U.S. population in 1970 was 205,052,174). In 2006, there were 52,329,230, or 0.17 papers per person (the U.S. population in 2006 was 299,398,484). [U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States 2007, table 1114, "Daily and Sunday Newspapers—Number and Circulation, 1970–2005," quoting Editor and Publisher International Year Book. Editor and Publisher International Year Book 2007.]
Daily newspaper readership declined from 57 percent in 1999 to 52 percent in 2005, according to Scarborough Research. According to the Editor & Publisher International Year Book, total weekday newspaper circulation has declined steadily since 1990, as follows: 62.3 million in 1990, 58.2 million in 1995, 55.8 million in 2000, and 53.3 million in 2005. [The Project for Excellence in Journalism, State of the News Media 2007: An Annual Report on American Journalism].
In 2006, the Pew Research Center polled 3,204 adults for its biennial news consumption survey. In 1994, 49 percent of adults surveyed had read the newspaper the day before; in 2006, 43 percent had, including online readers. Newspaper readership has declined in every age category, and in all but the youngest age-cohort categories. The proportion of survey respondents who had read a magazine the day before declined from 33 percent in 1994 to 24 percent in 2006, but the number who had read a book unrelated to work or school rose, from 31 percent in 1994 to 38 percent in 2006. When people are asked why they don't read newspapers, the fourth-most-popular answer is "Don't like to read." [The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership; Maturing Internet News Audience Broader Than Deep: 2006 News Consumption and Believability Study, 30 July 2006, pages 8, 20, 24.]
In a 2005 review of the sociological research about reading, three authors posited that a "reading class" will emerge. They noted that the National Endowment for the Arts (see above) and Dutch studies (see below) have found marked declines in reading. The authors have no idea whether book-reading will be a marker of prestige, as it was in the age before mass literacy, or merely "an increasingly arcane hobby." [Wendy Griswold, Terry McDonnell, and Nathan Wright, "Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century," {institutional subscription required} Annual Review of Sociology 2005.]
Between 1955 and 1995, sociologists in the Netherlands studied leisure time by asking participants to fill out time-use diaries. The Dutch scholars found dramatic shifts in reading and television-watching habits, especially in the first two decades, which witnessed the introduction of television to the Netherlands. Reading on weekday evenings and weekends fell from 5.0 hours/week to 4.0 between 1955 and 1962, while television watching rose from 0.2 to 5.4. The rise of television and fall of reading continued in the next two decades, though at slower rates. Between 1975 and 1995, the total hours a week spent reading fell from 6.1 to 4.6 hours, while television watching rose from 10.2 to 12.4. (The Dutch methodology changed in 1975 from measuring just evenings and weekends, to measuring all hours of the week.) In 1955, reading took up 21 percent of people's spare time; it took up only 9 percent in 1995. In the 1950s, men read more than women, but by the 1990s, women read more than men. [Wim Knulst and Gerbert Kraaykamp, "The Decline of Reading: Leisure Reading Trends in the Netherlands, 1955-1995," Netherlands' Journal of Social Sciences, 1997.]

Tomorrow (or thereabouts): Are Americans spending less money on reading?

UPDATE (27 Feb. 2009): For ease in navigating, here's a list of all the blog posts I wrote to supplement my New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books":

Posted by Caleb Crain on Wednesday, 19 December 2007 at 05:54 AM in bibliography, child development, items new in print, literacy, newspaper habits, notebook, statistics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Notebook: "Twilight of the Books"

My essay "Twilight of the Books" appears in the 24 December 2007 issue of The New Yorker. As with earlier articles, I'd like to post here an online supplement and bibliography. There are, however, many more sources of data for this article than for earlier ones, so I'm going to go about it slightly differently this time.

First I'll discuss the books that I quoted and referred to; that'll be fairly straightforward. Then, in a day or so, I'll move on to the scientific papers, governmental studies, and expert reviews of the field, including many that I consulted but did not quote. There are so many of these studies that I'll group them together according to topic and present them over the course of several days. Since many are not available for free online, I'll provide a brief summary of the method and findings of each study, including such details as the size of the population surveyed or tested, which can be useful as a very rough indication of reliability. If all goes according to plan, the result will be a series of blog posts that add up to an annotated bibliography about reading habits and literacy in America. This bibliography won't be comprehensive, and you'll find in it contradictions as well as confirmations of the trends I write about in my article; that's the nature of data once you dip below a certain level of granularity. I won't be analyzing the evidence here, and I imagine that trying to read the summaries one after another will resemble eating a very organic and healthful brand of granola without so much as soy milk to assist you. My attempt at sense-making and fluency, of course, is to be found in The New Yorker article itself; please read that first!

As ever, my first debt is to the book under review, Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. In her conclusion, Wolf invites the reader to take the ideas in her book beyond what she herself has written, and I am guilty of taking her invitation quite literally; in order to write about the changing reading habits of Americans, I had to forego her discussion of dyslexia, for example, to which she devotes a full third of her book.

Wolf's book drew my attention to Proust's essay "On Reading," which was originally the preface to his translation into French of Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies, a book that has this lovely advice to those worried about what it is proper for a young woman to read: "Let her loose in the library, I say, as you do a fawn in the field. It knows the bad weeds twenty times better than you, and the good ones, too." Aleksandr R. Luria's unexpectedly charming investigation of the cognitive habits of Uzbek peasants was published as Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundation (Cambridge: Harvard, 1976). My quotes from Marshall McLuhan come from his 1967 collaboration with Quentin Fiore The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, a book that is graphically designed to the edge of intelligibility and slightly beyond, and my quotes from Eric Havelock come from his early, scholarly Preface to Plato and also his later, more accessible The Muse Learns to Write. Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole's study of the Vai, The Psychology of Literacy, is currently available as a print-on-demand book, and Routledge still publishes Walter J. Ong's Orality and Literacy. My reference to Jack Goody and Ian Watt is to their 1963 essay "The Consequences of Literacy," which is reprinted in Goody's anthology Literacy in Traditional Societies.

Finally, a word about the National Endowment for the Arts's new study To Read or Not to Read. I knew since midsummer that the NEA had the study in the works. However, because I wanted to time my article to come out when their report did, and because the NEA declined to release any details early, I had to compile independently a survey of the existing research rather similar to the one they were compiling. There's a lot of overlap, therefore, between the studies they found and the ones I did. Of course I found some evidence they didn't, and vice versa. Because of the way I worked, their study doesn't appear often in the summaries that I'll post over the next few days. But if you've read my New Yorker article and want to look at more data, their report should probably be your next destination; then come back here for more if you're still unsated.

Tomorrow (or the day after; I'm moving a little slow this week): Are Americans reading less?

UPDATE (27 Feb. 2009): For ease in navigating, here's a list of all the blog posts I wrote to supplement my New Yorker article "Twilight of the Books":

Posted by Caleb Crain on Tuesday, 18 December 2007 at 10:01 AM in bibliography, items new in print, literacy, notebook, reading habits, statistics | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lota, 1996-2007

How do you describe a dog? Appearance doesn't seem as characteristic as behavior. The gesture she won me with, when I first met her at an animal shelter in East Harlem eleven years ago, was a way she had of putting her head down and then leaning the back of her neck against your leg, and then holding it there while you scratched her. It seemed to mean, simply, "I like you," and "I'd like you to pay attention to me." When I was sitting on the floor putting my boots on, in preparation for a walk, she would lean this way against my shoulder, in what seemed to be quiet and grateful anticipation of the walk, and sometimes I would put an arm around her neck and scratch the top of her head and talk to her for as long as a minute before getting up, neither of us in any impatience to proceed.

When she wanted to play, or when she needed to demand a walk, she had a way of capering up to you, coming to a stop, fixing a look on you, stamping her right front paw, and giving a low huff out of the sides of her mouth. It was so unmistakable that Peter and I used to imitate her, when we wanted to make fun of the idea of an impudent demand. In napping, she sometimes left the tip of her tongue hanging out of the front of her mouth, with her teeth closed around it, like the stub of a receipt still lodged in a cash register. This didn't mean anything at all, as a signal from her, but we thought it was very funny nonetheless. If you touched it, you found that her tongue would have dried so that it felt like paper, and she would pull it unconsciously back into her mouth.

She had several barks, very distinct in meaning to me. I could tell her mood from them exactly, and I felt like Dr. Doolittle when trying to convince a startled neighbor that she was saying how glad she was to see him and that he needn't feel alarmed. There was a short, sharp angry bark, repeated vigorously and connected by growling, which she used when an uninvited stranger had approached an apartment or house that she considered hers to protect. That was the only bark that anyone needed to be afraid of; there wasn't often occasion for it in New York, but there were a few times when I appreciated it. Though she never bit a human being, she was large and black and had great teeth, and children spontaneously called her "Wolf" when we passed them in the street, and I felt very safe in her company. Next there was a high, brittle, repeated bark that meant mere excitement. There was no undercolor of fear in it. It came when the doorbell rang, or when, upstate, she saw a squirrel outside the window and therefore beyond her reach. She had a whine, too, when she wanted very badly to please. A few times, when I had been away for a while and was returning to her, she greeted me with this whine, but for the most part, it was reserved for unfixed male dogs that she pined for and for a pretty blond woman who had become her great friend early in life.

Her play bark, which was a kind of extension of the huff she gave when stamping her paw, was used with us and with other dogs. It had more color than other barks and was more variable in frequency, and it shaded, if she was enjoying herself, into her best bark, which I would have to call her bark of attachment, because that's all it seemed to mean. It was a kind of warbling, crowing bark, and she gave it only when she was very happy and only with people she had met often before and knew well (such as us, but not only us). It had so much color it almost sounded human; she would kind of chew the sounds as she was giving them, in a cartoony, funny-old-man sort of way, and they wandered up and down and up again in pitch, usually ending up, in a trilling roo-roo-roo-roo. I tried once to record some of her barks, in hopes of being able to illustrate how different they all were, and I discovered, unfortunately, that run-of-the-mill tape recorders aren't well designed to capture the volumes and frequencies of dog speech. I did discover something remarkable, however, in the attempt. I discovered that she was talking to me all the time. It was a good day, and she crowed when I told her we were going for a walk, and then gargled and yodeled a little in anticipation. But what I hadn't been able to hear in life, but which the tape recorder picked up, was that as we walked downstairs and outside and down the sidewalk, and I occasionally spoke to her, in the inane, encouraging way that dog owners do, every speech of mine, every single one, she answered with a little chuff, which I hadn't heard consciously at the time but which was distinct on tape, so that what had seemed to me to be monologue was in fact dialogue, and the two of us were all the time pacing each other and measuring our happiness against each other through the sounds that we were making.

I tried to make it a point, first thing upon rising every morning, to rub her belly, and so when she saw me get out of bed she would put her head down and thump her tail and turn up her belly with an awful trustingness. But she was in fact very particular about how she was touched. She didn't like anyone to touch her paws or her tail, or to rub her fur the wrong way. Nor did she like to sleep next to anyone. If she was in our bed and we got into it, she would almost invariably get out at once, with a sort of aggrieved and indignant manner. Sometimes you could coax her into staying a minute, if you rubbed her belly or scratched her neck or chucked her under the chin, but never for very long. If she slept next to me on the couch while I was working, it was on condition that I not try to pet her. She had great dignity that way. What she did like was having the side of her neck scratched. She would lean toward the side that you were scratching, pointing her snout farther and farther upward as she enjoyed it, until her nose was pointed straight up at the ceiling, and the sides of her muzzle were hanging loose and one ear drooped while the other perked. Her ears were quite marvelous, because they could swivel at independent angles to locate a sound, or lie flat against the back of her head to express a wish to please, or jump to attention at the sound of her name or a visitor.

We had a few games. One was, when we were returning from the park, that she would pick up a stick, preferably a very long one, and hit the back of my calves with it. I was to pretend to try to wrest it away from her and to "fail" to. Then she would drop the stick and wait beside it, and I was to pick it up and either throw it a little way ahead of us or dangle it in front of her to wrest away from me. Once I had dropped the stick, she would pick it up again, and so on back and forth between us indefinitely, until in the end she dropped the stick and I did not pick it up but said we had to go home, that the game was over.

Posted by Caleb Crain on Saturday, 15 December 2007 at 02:50 PM in dogs | Permalink | Comments (7)

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Notebook: "Twilight of the Books"

Lota, 1996-2007

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