"Reading at Risk," a report published in the United States this month by the National Endowment for the Arts, deplores the decline of reading. Now, fewer than half of American adults read fiction, with the rate of decline especially sharp among those who are 18 to 24 years of age. Newsweek (7/19) notes that, oddly enough, publishers have responded to this decline by issuing even more titles, an increase of 58 percent from 1993 to 2003.
In Japan, too, book sales have been going downhill -- for seven years in a row -- with returns of unsold books approaching 40 percent last year. Meanwhile, publishers, desperate to somehow attract readers, are resorting to putting out more titles with smaller print runs. Presently, the number of new books in Japan exceeds 75,000 a year, or more than 200 a day.
Are the young in Japan still reading or have they, as many lament, been lured away by Internet surfing, video game playing, and DVD watching?
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