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Older, poorer U.S. men less likely to read books: survey

November 23, 2016 3:12 PM EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Older men earning less than $30,000 a year are most likely to be among the 26 percent of American adults who say they do not read books, a Pew Research Center survey released on Wednesday showed.

The survey of 1,520 adults showed that those with a high school degree or less education are about three times as likely as college graduates - 40 percent versus 13 percent - not to have read a digital or printed book, or listened to an audio book, in the past year.

"Older Americans are a bit more likely than their younger counterparts not to have read a book," the study said.

Twenty-nine percent of adults aged 50 and older have not read a book in the past year, compared with 23 percent of those under 50.

A third of grown-ups with an annual household income of less than $30,000 are non-book readers, compared with 17 percent of the most affluent, or those making more than $75,000 a year.

Men are less likely than women to have read a book, by a margin of 31 percent to 21 percent. Hispanic adults are also about twice as likely as whites - 40 percent versus 23 percent - to report not having read a book in the past 12 months.

The details on American non-readers came from a telephone survey conducted from March 7 to April 4. The margin of error was 2.9 percentage points.

Results of the overall survey were released in September, and showed that the share of American adults who had read books had remained largely unchanged since 2012.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Richard Chang)



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