How do you encourage people to read? I’ve no idea, except to adopt the wisdom offered by one of the miscreants I taught. During one lesson, this young man, whose attention span was around 7 minutes (if it wasn’t a windy day and if none of the other “students” in the class were wound up), was writing furiously non-stop.

“How come you’re working like this”, I asked, “When usually you’re a complete head-banger?”

“That’s cos I’m interested in this topic”, he answered. “You never give me anything interesting to write about.”

(Presumably he thought I had a resource book called “1,000 really boring writing prompts to give students”.)

Anyway, that seems to be one answer: make sure there are lots of interesting things to read. However, given that thousands of books are published each year, I don’t think it’s the answer.

I looked up the stats, and according to an article published in 2014 (which I agree was a technology lifetime ago), Americans read for an average of 19 minutes a day.

An article published in February 2021 states:

(I don’t understand why the word “admitted” appeared in the second statistic. I can understand it being appropriate, or at least unsurprising, if the question had been about the number of hours spent looking at pornography. I can see why, if schoolkids were asked in front of their mates how much they read, they might (reluctantly) “admit” to reading for more than 14 hours a week. But 18-34 year-olds? I don’t get it. Still….)

I became interested in this topic because every time I open the Kindle app on my phone I get a message like this:

Given that I start the day reading, usually end the day reading, and won’t even leave my home without making sure I’m carrying something to read, I find this sort of thing highly patronising. Maybe it’s the “Keep it up!”, complete with an exclamation mark, that raises my blood pressure. I mean, I’m sure Amazon means well (actually, I’m not sure but I’m going through a phase of giving people the benefit of the doubt and thinking benign thoughts. I can’t wait for this to end), but surely this is the kind of thing you would say to a five year old?

Or perhaps it’s because it’s devoid of context. Amazon doesn’t know what my reading goals are, so it can’t possibly know how well I’m doing. (Pretty rubbish, since you ask. I’ve set myself the goal of reading every book ever published. I’m not making much headway on that.)

I’m convinced of this because, according to another article, published in 2020, reading tracking apps do motivate some people to read. I don’t know why anyone would need an extrinsic incentive to read, unless they’re mugging up for an exam, or for a pub quiz night, or to impress people.

(On that last suggestion, I recall that one of the characters in Stephen Potter’s One-Upmanship books tried to impress people by always having a fresh collection of books. He did this by acquiring the dust jackets of newly-published books and putting them on his existing books.)

Back to the opening question: how do you encourage people to read? I don’t know, but perhaps ensuring that schools have well-funded libraries, and not closing public libraries, would be a reasonably good start.