Has reading become less popular? Or not?

I wonder, /book/.

Has reading become less popular? Are people reading less? Are good writers less successful today then they were 50 years ago and more?

Or maybe not? Movies - that's nothing new and not a "threat," people always had Opera for that, same expensive to produce, in your face, full of shit entertainment with rare, few between good examples. Never stopped writers from writing, readers from reading.

TV? But modern people spend less time at home then they do going to work, doing nothing at work, and going back home. Only THEN they watch TV before they go to sleep, and often people "watch" TV... while reading a book, right?

Graphic novels, any graphic novels, leave alone good ones, are rare compared to normal novels. I think maybe we have a thousand new novels for every new graphic novel. And most of the time they somehow are never good. Never ever good. Somehow. Nobody likes them, they're all fads, people know the characters, but only kids really read the books themselves.

Yet I wonder. I bet I missed quite a bit of stuff. I wonder, if reading has really become less popular. I somehow think that perhaps Shakespeare, too, thought reading has become less popular in his age, and so did Dostoyevskii back in the XIX century, and every author ever. I wonder. Stephen King is successful as hell and earns more money than anyone, and Harry Potter, I think the books earn more than the movies (neer read a single Potter book, don't know if they're any good; probably not). I don't know.

People are almost certainly reading less and it's very unfortunate.

There are a fair number of people who do still read, but the amount who know what a good book is are definitely the minority. On the other hand, books like Harry Potter and Twilight, while mediocre (well, HP at least, Twilight is utter shit), are still read by at least SOME people. While they certainly aren't nearly as good as many other titles available out there, at least people are reading something.

Also, on the subject of visual media and comics, I'd have to say that comics count as reading. Some of the stuff I've read I would consider to be very high quality which is almost all the stuff previously mentioned (Lucifer's another really good one). Some videogames are practically visual novels and while they take away part of the imaginative ability required to read a book, they are no less thought-provoking (Xenogears/saga). Even some FPS games, possibly one of the most mindless genres of videogames, can have good stories, i.e. Half-Life.

So, yeah, people read less, and many of the sub-cultures today even discourage it, but at least the practice hasn't become completely extinct.