A Troubling Case of Readers' Block

Here is some of what it found:

Thirty-eight percent of employers rate high school graduates as "deficient" in reading comprehension, while 72 percent rate them deficient in writing. Good reading skills correlate strongly with higher earnings and more job opportunities. Reading skills also correlate with increased voting, volunteerism, charity work, attendance at cultural events and even exercising and playing sports.

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"This is not a study about literary reading," Gioia said. It's a study about reading of any sort and "what the consequences of doing it well or doing it badly are." In an increasingly competitive world, the consequences of doing it badly include "economic decline."

Among the NEA study's limitations is its lack of specific data about online reading, a subject on which, Gioia said, research is not yet strong.

University of Maryland English professor Matthew Kirschenbaum, whose academic interests include electronic literature, organized a forum to discuss the 2004 NEA report. That report's weakness, Kirschenbaum said in an interview last week, was that it didn't account for "the different ways in which we read."

Kirschenbaum had not seen the new report. After hearing a brief summary, however, he didn't sound inclined to change his mind. "The fact that we don't read the same way that we read 50 or 200 years ago," he said, is not necessarily "symptomatic of a general cultural decline."

Gioia disagreed.

"The Internet is the most powerful informational tool ever developed by humanity, except perhaps the phonetic alphabet," he said. "But it does not seem to nourish the sustained, linear attention" that traditional print media do.

Last Friday, Gioia and Iyengar previewed "To Read or Not to Read" for a group of perhaps 50 publishers, editors and other interested parties gathered at the Mercantile Library in New York.

"It was a sobering presentation," said Knopf publicity director Paul Bogaards, who attended with Knopf Editor in Chief Sonny Mehta. Publishers have long been aware of negative reading trends, Bogaards said, but "haven't had the data."

"The response was one of concern," said Fordham University marketing professor Albert Greco, a publishing industry expert who was also at the NEA presentation. "Maybe we should be thrilled that half of the people are still reading," Greco added, "but this is a graying market."

HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman described herself as "skeptical but not dismissive" of the NEA's analysis.

Her company is "very much into the digital side of the business," Friedman said, and when it comes to a customer's choice of format, "I don't care. Reading is reading." She pointed to the data on young children's reading as a positive, noting that "we're seeing great growth in our children's business."

The NEA report comes without recommendations. This choice was deliberate, Gioia said, because "no one institution" can solve the reading problem alone.

"What we're trying to do is say: These are the facts. This is a framework to understand the issues. Let's talk about it," Gioia said. And the key question is: What are the consequences if America becomes "a nation in which reading is a minority activity?"