published on August 18, 2024 in Quick Update

How many books did you read in 2023? Are you in the top 1 percent?

Most “what percent are you” analyses focus on how much money you make. But we prefer to shift the discussion to what really matters: how many books you read. By that metric, even a newspaper journalist may have a shot at becoming a one-percenter.

The data on most books read comes from our friend David Montgomery, “the spork pollster” who released the results of a new Economist/YouGov poll about America’s reading habits not long after we published last month’s column about America’s biggest readers. Though the Department of Data was supposed to be closed this week in honor of our annual holiday sabbatical, we couldn’t resist popping into the office to do a quick update.

So what did Montgomery find? Of 1,500 Americans surveyed, a less-than-ideal 46 percent finished zero books last year and 5 percent read just one. So, if you read more than two books in 2023, congratulations! You’re in the top half of U.S. adults.

Reading five books put you in the top 33 percent, while reading 10 books put you in the top 21 percent. Those of us who read more than 50 books are the true one-percenters: people who read more books than 99 percent of their fellow Americans.

“While reading 20, 30, or 40 books per year probably won’t earn you a free personal pan pizza, it does put you in rare company — among the top 10 to 15 percent of readers,” said Montgomery, who read 29 books in 2023. (His quip is a reference to Pizza Hut’s venerable Book It program that, having started in 1984, will soon be old enough to sue for age discrimination.)

The poll counted all types of books, but Montgomery found that dead tree books (i.e., paper) remain about twice as popular as their newfangled rivals. About 42 percent of us read physical books in the past year, compared with 22 percent who read digital books or 19 percent who read audiobooks. Digital books are most popular among the heaviest readers, presumably because you run out of shelf space alarmingly fast when you’re plowing through fifty-plus tomes a year.

The popularity of book formats remains fairly consistent across politics and demographics with the exception of audiobooks, which are read (“read?”) by about a quarter of us under age 45, but only 9 percent of those age 65 or older. They also may be slightly more popular among Democrats, but party-line differences rarely rear their heads in this sphere.

“Political identity does not appear to be strongly correlated with reading habits,” Montgomery told us, “at least not compared to other variables such as age and education.”

Moving to book ownership, about 85 percent of us own at least one physical book, while just 49 percent own at least one electronic book. Men were more likely to own e-books than women (53 percent to 45 percent), and Democrats were more likely to own them than Republicans. Folks under age 45 are much more likely to own e-books, though the older folks who do have e-books tend to have larger libraries than their younger friends.

Almost a quarter of us own at least 100 physical books, with 7 percent of us owning more than 500 and 3 percent owning more than 1,000, according to a separate October survey in which Montgomery asked over 29,000 Americans about their book collections.

Only 9 percent of us owned zero physical books, compared with 45 percent who don’t own any e-books. Unlike physical books, which tend to accumulate with age, e-books tend to skew younger. Only 36 percent of the retirement-age crowd have any e-books, while about 3 out of every 5 zoomers and millennials do. E-books are most popular out West, and least popular in the Midwest and South.

The most popular genres overall were history and mystery, but their popularity is far from universal. About 26 percent of men read at least one history book, versus only 13 percent of women. But 25 percent of women read a mystery or crime book, versus just 15 percent of men. Major gender gaps also lurked in romance, where women double men’s interest, and in sci-fi, which shows the opposite pattern. The least popular genre, more or less across the board, was poetry.

Crime and thrillers hit harder with older readers, while romance, fantasy and graphic novels tend to resonate more with the young. White readers prefer mystery and crime over other genres, while Black readers gravitate toward religion and spirituality. The top genre for Hispanic readers is history.

While the youngest adults go for fantasy, millennial readers in their 30s and early 40s go for history, and older readers prefer mystery and crime. Millennials are also among the biggest fans of graphic novels, politics and children’s books — the last presumably because they’re (theoretically) in their peak childbearing years, and not because they’re lost in some sort of intense nostalgia or arrested development.

Democrats are among the biggest fans of academic writing and drama, while Republicans are harder to pin down.

Incredibly, Montgomery, a French history podcaster and enormous goshdang nerd after our own hearts, slipped in a poll question about how people organize their books. A plurality of us — 28 percent — don’t. Organization by genre and size are roughly tied at 19 and 18 percent, respectively, and alphabetical would be up there, too, if it weren’t split into alphabetical by author (10 percent) or title (8 percent).

The younger you are, the more likely you are to organize your books by size, title or author. Older readers, on the other hand, tend to organize by genre or to eschew organization altogether.

Though Montgomery organizes his own 1,500 to 2,000 books by genre and chronology, he tells us age gaps probably reflect a more important factor: the sheer number of books you own.

“People tend to accumulate more books as they age, and the more books you have, the more likely people are to organize them with a methodical process,” Montgomery said. “Education also has a huge impact here.”

As he points out, 42 percent of people with a postgraduate degree have at least 100 books, compared with 10 percent of those with just a high school diploma. (Montgomery’s vast personal collection was recently expanded via marriage.)

No matter what the home decorating shows try to tell you, organizing your books by color is not terribly popular. Only 3 percent of those surveyed said they line up their tomes by hue.

Meanwhile, 4 percent said they use “another system.” Dewey Decimal? Library of Congress? If you’re one of those four-percenters, help us out with a clue.

Ahoy! The Department of Data would love to start the new year with new questions. What are you curious about: The biggest library users? The politics of music genres? The areas with the fastest-rising suicide rates? Just ask!

If your question inspires a column, we’ll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. We should probably send at least one to David Montgomery in Minnesota, who single-handedly inspired us to write yet another column for the bibliophiles!

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