I'm kind of shocked that 60% of all US adult citizens did report reading a book during the year. That seems much higher than I would have expected.

It is a self-reported measure, and it's phrased "read or listened to"--I don't normally think of "listening to audiobooks" when I think about reading, and I can imagine how that might broaden the pool. Other sources (e.g. the NEA survey at [0]) seem to put print book readership closer to 50%.

Though at least one survey [1] points out the wide range of genres that count as books for this purpose: manga, the Bible/Torah/Quran, cookbooks...

[0] https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-... [1] https://gitnux.org/readership-statistics/