The Harry Potter series is wildly entertaining, but so is Angry Birds, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube Justin Bieber re-enactments, texting, Halo, The Disney Channel, Transformers 3, and a consumer flying drone.
Books have a lot more competition these days, and a new study from Nielsen Books suggests that digital fun (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/appsblog/2013/sep/26/children-reading-less-apps-games) is starting to crowd out the habits of occasional readers. Specifically, "the proportion of occasional and non-readers among children aged 0-17 rising to 28%, up from 20% in 2012," reads a summary of the report, presented at The Bookseller Children Conference.
The good news is that reading is still one of the most popular activities: 32% of children read on a daily basis, second only to TV (36%). Both of these crush 21st century entertainment, with 20% using social networks, 17% watching YouTube, and 16% nose down in mobile games and apps.
Weekly, a sizable 60% read for pleasure. "But there's a really disturbing pattern beginning to emerge when you look on a weekly basis," warns Jo Henry of Nielsen Books.
Bookworms, or "heavy readers" who read 45-plus minutes a day, are unaffected by the deluge of gadgets. But non-readers and occasional readers are ditching books, which suggests yet another kind of digital divide in self-education. The blindingly colorful, 1990′s-looking graph below shows how occasional reading is falling across all age groups.
The study should be taken (http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/22/how-to-spot-bad-statistics-privacy-hysteria-edition/) a grain of salt: the numbers are simple averages and was conducted by a for-profit institution. This isn't peer-reviewed quality. But, the decline in reading does mirror other research, which suggests that reading has fallen, at least since 2005 [PDF (http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/assets/0001/4543/Young_people_s_reading_FINAL_REPORT.pdf)]. Interestingly, research from the National Literacy Trust finds that children who say they read on websites is down from 2005 (64% to 50), suggesting that new forms of reading are not replacing books.
Sure, reading is great for developing brains (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/sep/16/reading-improves-childrens-brains), but pictures are so much more fun. Maybe teachers should call for an essay of Lord of The Flies to be composed in Snapchat.
[Image Credit (http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidanmorgan/6475675533/sizes/z/)]
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Source: Study: Children Reading Fewer Books, Down 8% From 2012 (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/7IYksr3jRX0/)