There isn't much need to suppress novels anymore. People no longer have sufficient attention span to even finish a 5 minute video and need to be fed bite-sized shorts. No need to kill the producer, consumers have been killed.
The role of censorship that the government used to have has shifted to companies like Visa, Mastercard, Amazon, etc. If you try and sell a spicy enough book, they will make sure nobody reads it, and the government can be completely "hands-off".
They can fail to process the customer's payment, remove your book from the marketplace, and ban your account. If you try to build your own marketplace, you won't be able to use any major payment processors.
Modern dissidents are building alternatives, but still there are roadblocks. All this to say, books are still very much being suppressed.
Refuting adopted positions on complex issues usually requires more than the five minutes allotted either in video programming format or in the conditioned mind you describe. Concision reinforces the conventional narrative as explained in this 5 minute video https://youtu.be/xIbfl7OQ0y4.
EDIT: I posted this as a joke, but the video is very interesting. Chomsky says that a need for concision favors conventional thoughts, because needing concision means you can only say things that don't need elaboration (ie only things everyone already agrees with).
This, plus: reading one book in a year can absolutely be done in less than 5 minutes of reading a day. I've seen books written exactly for this consumption pattern: very short, 1-3 page long chapters, with half being a recap of relevant chapters that came before.
Not to mention, "at least 1 book a year" is so peculiar a cut-off point that it sounds like it's deliberately constructed to obscure something. For example (possibly, I'm just guessing), the fact that choosing "at least 10 books a year" would see it going from "more than half" to "less than 5%"...
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.
