I am trying to figure out how many people in the USA read books. I especially want to know how many people read specific genre’s of books. How many read fiction, non fiction…all the way down to specific books.
For example, how many people in the USA have read “The Da Vinci Code”?
So I started doing some research. First thing we can try to get is book sales. Here is a pretty good starting point:
Google Answers
I followed the instructions on the Google Answers page and called Ingram.
I found out that Ingram sold 148,781 copies of the copy of the Da Vinci Code with the ISBN 0385504209.
So using the google answers method, we might estimate that last year about 1.5 million copies of at least that version of the Da Vinci code were sold. Yet, my wife and I are reading a borrowed copy of the Da Vinci code…and this happens a lot. Each book is read by many readers…
So any guesses how we can estimate the number of people (in the USA at least) who have read the Da Vinci code? Or any other book?
WAG: Talk to as many people as possible who own the book and ask how many people have read their copy. Be sure to include libraries.
Publishers absolutely hate giving out true sales figures for books. You will have no luck approaching them.
BookScan does point-of-purchase information about book sales, but will not give out the information to individuals even if they offer to pay.
Ingram is a major distributor, but that doesn’t mean that it supplied The Da Vinci Code to the major chain bookstores, or to Amazon, or Wal-Mart or any number of other outlets. The Da Vinci Code has supposedly sold 25 million copies worldwide, so a mere 140,000+ is an insignificant percentage.
Passalong readership, as it is sometimes called, can sometimes be inferred from surveys of book reading behavior, but I don’t know of any to recommend.
The Romance Writers of America (RWA) do an annual survey of readership that concentrates on romance books, but does provide general percentages for other genres. Some of the figures are online here.
Generally speaking, however, numbers about the publishing industry and book readership are extremely hard to come by for anyone outside the industry.
A non-random survey is like any other type of anecdotal information: it is actually worse than useless, because it can cause you to think you know something when in fact you know nothing meaningful at all.
The sad thing is something like 25% of them think that it’s a work of non-fiction.
Haj