Anywhere you turn, you hear people saying that nobody reads anymore.

Steve Jobs said it:

It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.

According to USA Today:

One in four adults read no books at all in the past year… Who are the 27% of people the AP-Ipsos poll found hadn’t read a single book this year? Nearly a third of men and a quarter of women fit that category. They tend to be older, less educated, lower income, minorities, from rural areas and less religious… “Fiction just doesn’t interest me,” said Bob Ryan, 41, who works for a construction company in Guntersville, Ala. “If I’m going to get a story, I’ll get a movie.”

Aha! But then again, movies aren’t doing that well, says Michael Wolff:

[R]eality shows and YouTube are killing the Hollywood story… Hollywood is getting larger and larger fees from licensing its characters (born of those tortured three acts) for video games, the more video games become the entertainment model, the less patience my son and his friends will invariably have for conventional story lines.

And yet, more articles and books are written than ever before and all the more people want to write a book. I know at least five friends who are either writing a book or thinking about writing one (although, those two are far apart, it’s like my thinking about running the NY Marathon again … I’ve never run it, just thinking about it again). I’m thinking about book ideas all the time.

Learning to read is a great step in human development, and my son, 5, is a great example of that. He’s proudest when he’s reading. And reading anything.

So, buy that book today. Any book. Really. And then read it. It’s fun.

“I just get sleepy when I read,” said Richard Bustos of Dallas.

Still. Try it.