The readership of books in times of de-reading

The precipitous decline in book reading in the past 50 years has prompted a question previously considered inconceivable: who still reads books? While this question has to some degree been answered in prior research, this investigation focuses primarily on whether certain bookgenres have been abandoned more rapidly than others as opposed to the characteristics of the public which abandoned books or continued to read books. Dutch time-budget data allow us to depict the extent of "de-reading" over the 1975-2000 period. Since 1990, respondents have been asked about the genres of books they read; this has made possible an investigation of the relation between "de-reading" and type of books read over the 1990-2000 period. From the work of cultural critics (Postman and others), the hypothesis has been derived that more demanding books, i.e. literature, were likely to suffer most from the dominance of television entertainment formulas. Based on a threefold distinction between (1) literature and non-fiction, (2) adolescent books, comics and thrillers, and (3) romantic novels, however, this hypothesis was found to be lacking empirical support. In contrast, the decline in reading, occurring among the three reading publics, was most notable among readers of romantic novels. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.