Can You Hear Me Now?

For her nightly reading assignment, my 9 year-old daughter sits on a chair in front of a collection of dolls and stuffed-animals (and usually a cat or two) and reads stories aloud for thirty minutes. It turns out that her audience is part of a pretty sweeping American trend. We love having someone read to us. In the last few years, our reading habits have been fairly static. About 75% of Americans have read a book in the past year and print books are still winning out over ebooks. The one notable change has been that more of us (across educational and geographic divides) are listening to audiobooks. Add this trend to the explosive growth in the podcast market, and it’s pretty clear that we really like to listen.