29% of children aged between 8 and 15 think 'reading' only relates to books, not the internet, magazines, newspapers or comics.
8 year-olds read, on average, 16 books a year.
15 year-olds read, on average, 3 books a year.
17% of 13 year-olds think you need scissors to open a book.
19% of 12 year-olds think you can read a book front to back or back to front.
6 people born in December taken at random will, on average, read six times as many books in their lives as somebody born in the South of England.
One in two people is 50%.
And some of those stats are true.
There are a lot of untruths and misleading stats often spread around about reading, especially the reading habits of kids. It seems to be a subject that creates fear or exasperation, or an emotion drifting somewhere between the two. I've been thinking about this quite a lot this week as I'm giving a talk on Thursday at an event called, 'Do Boys Read Books?'
Should be fun. I'll try to keep the made up statistics to a minimum, of course, but I do like to spin a yarn every now and again.
Meanwhile, I'm also appearing in a charity event in London on November 2nd, so check this out if you're interested:
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