There are plentiful sources, which might not agree on the data that they have. Actually investigating that might take more effort than most people are willing to put in, few would care enough to sit down for the better part of the day and go through numerous studies.
> Book reading remains a popular pastime, with the most recent data showing that three quarters of all adults had read at least one book in any format in the past year.
> Almost half of the respondents haven’t read any books in over a year: 48.5%
> According to the Pew Research Center, about 64% of American adults say they have read a book in the past 12 months. This is a similar share to the previous year, and is consistent with the findings from 2020.
> The National Endowment for the Arts released a report in 2015 that showed literary reading among Americans had declined significantly over the previous 20 years. In 1992, 56% of Americans had read at least one work of literature in the previous year. By 2014, that number had fallen to 46%.
> The NEA report also found that literary reading was more common among older adults than younger ones. In 2014, 53% of adults age 65 and older reported reading literature, compared with just 36% of adults ages 18-24.
> Roughly a quarter of American adults (23%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form, according to a Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults conducted Jan. 25-Feb. 8, 2021.
> The percentage of Americans adults who read at least one book of fiction or nonfiction in the previous 12 months (outside of work or school requirements) fell to the lowest level on record in 2017 (Indicator V-04a). In 1992, 61% of Americans had read a book for pleasure during the previous year, but by 2017 less than 53% had done so.
> Americans say they read an average of 12.6 books during the past year, a smaller number than Gallup has measured in any prior survey dating back to 1990. U.S. adults are reading roughly two or three fewer books per year than they did between 2001 and 2016.
So I guess there's a decline of sorts, but the exact figures vary a bit, probably depending on the particular polls and their audiences, the risks of self reporting biases and so on. That said, people are still definitely readings books, for the most part. Of course, some also include stuff like audiobooks, which is also an interesting format. I don't think that verifying everything is very easy, though, since a meta study that explores the methodology and so on might be more useful for that, rather than just taking everything at face value.
I would still unironically enjoy a SummarizeGoogleGPT or something, to not have to dig through various articles, each with a different layout and formatting.
I heard that over half of people in the US read at least one book per year, is that true?
I am not sure of the most current statistics, but according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2019, about 74% of American adults said they had read at least one book in the previous year. This means that a majority of people in the US do indeed read at least one book per year, which is positive news for lovers of literature. It's worth noting, however, that the definition of a "book" in this context includes e-books and audiobooks in addition to print books, so it's possible that some of those respondents did not read a print book specifically.
How many have read a non-fiction book? Watch the stats plummet to nearly nothing. Non-fiction is where you get in depth information and historical context for current events. Half the country is unread and easily mislead.
You had so little attention span you made an unsourced old-man-shouting-at-clouds comment that people have little in the way of attention spans...
...and then couldn't be bothered to investigate, out of intellectual curiosity, an easily verified statement by someone replying to you.