The Dallas Public Library has developed new ways to get more people into reading, providing several services to help residents increase their literacy.
One of these is a newsletter service that gives users suggested reading lists. There are 24 newsletter topics, including fiction, mystery, romance, horror, and travel.
According to the website, users can also fill out a questionnaire about their specific interests to receive personalized recommendations from a librarian in about a week.
According to Literacy Texas, Texas ranks 46th in the U.S. with an 81% adult literacy rate. In addition, a study in The Economist revealed that increasing literacy scores by just 1% relative to the international average could raise labor productivity by 2.5% and boost the country’s GDP by 1.5%.
Experts have further observed the benefits of increasing literacy on a national scale.
The Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy observed in 2020 that raising each American adult to a sixth-grade reading level would add $2.2 trillion to the nation’s income. Moreover, large cities such as Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York could benefit by as much as a 10% boost to their GDPs if reading comprehension increased to this level.
“America’s low literacy crisis is largely ignored, historically underfunded, and woefully under-researched, despite being one of the great solvable problems of our time,” British A. Robinson, president and CEO of the Barbara Bush Foundation, told Forbes magazine in 2020.
A national survey conducted in 2022 also revealed that reading habits in Americans shifted after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study monitored the reading habits of 1,621 adults and suggested that literacy and reading were declining in the U.S.
Results indicated that 48.5% of adults surveyed had not read a book in more than a year. Adults aged 45-54 had the highest rate of non-readers — almost 61% — and those 65 and older had the highest rate of print readers, about 45%.
Researchers in this study attributed the drop in reading rates to an increased focus on digital media, the declining popularity of reading, the cost of books, and the pace of the current world.