
The Book Riot 2013 Reading Habits Survey: The Results
Last month, in a flurry of survey results from outside sources and extended Methodology Corner sections of the Book Riot Podcast (if you’re not a listener, that’s when we discuss new studies about the world of books and reading and highlight their strengths, weaknesses, and takeaway points), we decided it was high time to collect some data from our own community. We wanted to keep it simple, so we asked four straightforward questions about your reading habits in 2013. We focused on print vs. ebooks in order to enable comparison with other studies. Many readers pointed out our decision not to include audiobooks, and we might revisit that in the future. We love audiobooks and believe they count just as much as books of any other format.
Some notes on methodology
- When ranges were entered (“45-55”), the middle number of the range (50) was used as the response.
- All words indicating approximations were removed, and the approximated number was used as the response. (“About 90” became “90.”)
- All greater than/lesser than indications were removed, and the indicated number was used as the response. (“90+” became “90.”)
Why? Because you can’t use words in a statistical data analysis, and I can’t possibly guess at what you mean when you say “more than 90.”
Note: As with all self-report surveys, the data is only as accurate as the respondents are truthful. We have no way to confirm the number of books participants actually read, and it’s reasonable to guess that some of the clustering around round-number responses (25, 50, 100, etc.) might be due to participants who did not track their reading making guesstimates about their totals instead.
Additionally, we should not assume that this sample is representative. The results here indicate reading habits of Book Riot readers who saw the survey and chose to participate. These individuals may differ in some meaningful way(s) from readers who were not online when the survey was distributed or who opted not to participate. Therefore, we cannot use this data to generalize to Book Riot’s community at large.
Ready? Let’s do this!
Total Respondents: 2721
The outliers–the few folks who skewed the data with their impressively high reading totals–make it hard to see what’s really going in the larger group. So here’s a look at the data, excluding the 208 readers who reported reading more than 151 books in 2013 (readers within one standard deviation of the mean).
On average, Book Riot readers did 69.34% of their 2013 reading in print and 28.17% of their reading digitally.
642 readers (26.45%) read exclusively in print; 71 readers (2.93%) read exclusively in ebook format.