Aliteracy

Aliteracy (sometimes spelled alliteracy) is the state of being able to read but being uninterested in doing so. This phenomenon has been reported on as a problem occurring separately from illiteracy, which is more common in the developing world, while aliteracy is primarily a problem in the developed world. In 2002, John Ramsey defined aliteracy as a loss of a reading habit usually since reading is slow and frustrating for the reader.

In a publication analyzing the 1972 International Book Year, an estimate was given that as many as 57% of the citizens of an unnamed European nation known for their production of important books did not read books, or that 43% were book readers. Estimates for other industrialized nations' active readers ranged from 33 to 55%.

Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, has stated that this trend away from the written word is more than worrisome, and that it's tearing apart culture. People who have stopped reading, he says, "base their future decisions on what they used to know...If you don't read much, you really don't know much...you're dangerous."

American historian Daniel Boorstin, in 1984, while serving as librarian of Congress, issued a landmark report: "Books in Our Future". Citing recent statistics that only about half of all Americans read regularly every year, he referred to the "twin menaces" of illiteracy and aliteracy. "In the United States today," Boorstin wrote, "aliteracy is widespread." In the United States, a 2008 study reported that 46.7% of adult Americans did not read a book not required for work or school during 2002.

Another alert to this phenomenon was a 1991 editorial in Fortune magazine by Stratford P. Sherman (with Laurie Kretchmar). It refers to a study by John P. Robinson, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, showing that the average American at that time spent only 24 minutes per day in reading. Samuel Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, is quoted on his preference for the ease of turning on the TV instead of reading a book.

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