The New York Times sounds cheery about this news:

Fiction Reading Increases for Adults

But I have my doubts.

The scoop, the Times tells us, is this:

After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.

What’s changed?

The report, “Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,” being released Monday, is based on data from “The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts” conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.

This does not cheer me, as a writer, reader, and publishing professional. People who read one book in a year are not readers. I don’t know what to call them — occasional book consumers, perhaps — but they’re not readers.

Readers are people who can’t not read. Readers read one book a week, sometimes one book a day — not every day, of course, but a reader has had the experience of devouring an entire book in a day because he or she simply couldn’t put the book down.

A truly significant survey of American reading habits would ask how many books (or short stories, or plays, or poems) one reads in a year. It would ask about library use, book purchases, and whether one trades and borrows books with other voracious readers in order to read even more. It would ask whether one has haunted a bookstore looking for a particular book, whether one has ever preordered the next book in a series in order to have to wait not one moment longer than necessary to read more in an ongoing story. It would ask whether one has ever sold or given away books in order to make room for more books.

Those people are readers. Putting readers on the same par with people who read one poem in a year is beyond misleading — it’s a disservice to those of us for whom books are a passion and an obsession.