Reading is Still Trending, Without All the Words

What are you reading? Books are still trending and influential, but blogs, articles, and social media are as popular, if not more. Tolerance for wordiness is nonexistent. You can count the number of books sold or downloaded, but who is reading is a mystery. Reading is still trending, without all the words.

A Pew Research survey from early this year shows that 75 percent of U.S. adults read a book in the past year. Of those, 65 percent prefer print books, and 33 percent a combination. A recent Statista study shows that the average daily time spent reading is 16.8 minutes.

Less Is Technically More

The LMS and GEM teams cover the spectrum of reading preferences, but technology is the pervading choice. Best-selling technology books fall under general nonfiction categories. That said, most techies lean toward blogs and articles.

A survey of teammates reveals AWS, Envato, CSS-Tricks, Neil Patel, and Smashing Magazine are among the preferred. To read is to learn, and continuing education is essential to stay ahead of the learning curve.

Reading is Still Trending

Reading a book is fun and a great way to learn. The rewards show up when you reach the end or 20 years later when you still remember it. 

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is near the top of the New York Times Best Sellers under Combined Print & E-Book Fiction. To start with, it has been on the list for 173 weeks. Secondly, it sold 15 million copies and is now a theatrical release by Sony.

Owens’ story (400 pages) features two timelines, including the adventures of a young girl in North Carolina and a murder involving a local celebrity. It is also the debut novel for  Owens, a zoologist and conservationist in her 70s.

Without All The Words

A report by research data and analytics group, WordsRated, reports that the average length of a New York Times Bestseller has dropped from 437.5 pages in 2011 to 386 in 2021. Not a surprise but telling.

Reading is still trending, without all the words. It’s okay if you’re not reading a book, but by the way, September is National Literacy Month. It features World Letter Writing Day, National Read a Book Day, and National Online Learning Day. International Day of Sign Languages and International Day for Universal Access to Information bring it to a close.

If you read through all of those titles, literacy month is already a success.