There's a library funding bill on this year's ballot.

[CrispyQ]

I was stunned to see comments on a local FB group disparaging libraries as relics of the past & irrelevant in today's digital world. I wonder if these people know how many digital publications the library has? This in a solid-blue, progressive area.

Google "reading level of US adult"

Nationwide, on average, 79% of U.S. adults are literate in 2022. 21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022. 54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level. Low levels of literacy costs the US up to 2.2 trillion per year.

HOW MANY AMERICANS READ BOOKS?

https://malwarwickonbooks.com/americans-read-books/
This post was updated on January 31, 2021.

snip...

If you’re convinced that the combination of television, video games, social media, longer work hours, and accelerated lifestyles has caused Americans to read fewer books, you’re right. Recent polls reveal that around one in four U.S. adults read no books at all last year—a proportion that is three times as great as the eight percent who read no books in 1978.

According to a HuffPost/YouGov poll asking 1,000 U.S. adults about their reading habits, 41 percent of respondents had not read a fiction book in the past year; 42 percent had not read a nonfiction book. The two groups overlapped, with 28 percent of respondents reading no books at all in the past year.

And recently the Pew Research Center reported that more than one-quarter of American adults (27%) hadn’t read a single book in the past year—nary a book between covers or on an e-reader of any type. In a separate study released by Pew, only seven percent of respondents reported reading e-books exclusively. Of the 76 percent who said they’d read at least one book last year, 69 percent read them between covers, while 28 percent said they’d used an electronic device.

Combining the three sources (HuffPost/YouGov, Pew, and Gallup), you can see that the number of non-book-readers has tripled since 1978.

This morning there was a story in Greatest about a GOP candidate who thinks books with divorced characters should be banned. When all this book banning started, I thought "Banning books doesn't sound good, even to non-readers." But now I wonder if they care?

[SheltieLover]

1. In red hellholes, the illiteracy rate is surely much higher!

Where is this library funding bill? Maybe xpost to that state's group with info on location?

Ridiculous!

Ty for sharing!