Over the past few years, the NEA has released a couple of reports — and — showing pretty much the exact opposite.

To be more specific about the increase, in 2002, 46.7% of adult Americans read a novel, play, poem, or short story over the past year. In the most recent study, that percentage has jumped to 50.2%.

As Motoko Rich points out in her a lot of people jumped on the last study for “criticizing the study for too narrowly defining reading by focusing on the literary side, and for not explicitly including reading that occurred online.”

In terms of this study, outgoing chairman Dana Gioia said “that Internet reading was included in the 2008 data, although the phrasing of the central question had not changed since 1982. But he said he did not think that more reading online was the primary reason for the increase in literary reading rates overall.”

Instead, he points to the popularity of Harry Potter, the Twilight series, and the like, along with the NEA’s own (headed by the ever-enthusiastic, David Kipen) as causes of this increase. (No mention of the role Open Letter books have played in increasing American readership, but I’m sure that’s just an oversight.)

Here are some specific findings from this new study:

The absolute number of literary readers has grown significantly. There were 16.6 million more adult readers of literature in 2008. The growth in new readers reflects higher adult reading rates combined with overall population growth.

Young adults show the most rapid increases in literary reading. Since 2002, 18-24 year olds have seen the biggest increase (nine percent) in literary reading, and the most rapid rate of increase (21 percent). This jump reversed a 20 percent rate of decline in the 2002 survey, the steepest rate of decline since the NEA survey began.

Since 2002, reading has increased at the sharpest rate (+20 percent) among Hispanic Americans, Reading rates have increased among African Americans by 15 percent, and among Whites at an eight percent rate of increase.

Fiction (novels and short stories) accounts for the new growth in adult literary readers.

Reading poetry and drama continues to decline, especially poetry-reading among women.

Nearly 15 percent of all U.S. adults read literature online in 2008.

In a world of mergers, downsizing, and shitty sales, it’s nice to get some news that’s at least a little encouraging.

“I’ve given up six years of my life as a writer,” Mr. Gioia, 57, said earlier in the week from his office in Washington. “I felt I had to go back to writing when I still have the kind of stamina to do it seriously.”

The winner of the presidential election in November will decide his successor, but whoever it is, Mr. Gioia said he was confident that the next chairman would have a smoother transition than he did. [. . .]

“When I arrived in Washington six years ago, the N.E.A. was a wounded institution,” Mr. Gioia said. “It had been rocked by controversies for nearly 20 years. Half the people had been fired, the budget had been pretty much cut in half, and people were worried about the long-term existence of the agency.”

“We had let the enemies of our funding dictate the national conversation,” he added.

On a related note, has a fitting joke article about the NEA funding the construction of a $1.3 poem:

WASHINGTON—The National Endowment for the Arts announced Monday that it has begun construction on a $1.3 billion, 14-line lyric poem—its largest investment in the nation’s aesthetic- industrial complex since the $850 million interpretive-dance budget of 1985.

“America’s metaphors have become strained beyond recognition, our nation’s verses are severely overwrought, and if one merely examines the internal logic of some of these archaic poems, they are in danger of completely falling apart,” said the project’s head stanza foreman Dana Gioia. “We need to make sure America’s poems remain the biggest, best-designed, best-funded poems in the world.”

Gioia confirmed that the public-works composition will be assembled letter-by-letter atop a solid base of the relationship between man and nature. The poem’s structure, laid out extensively on lined-paper blueprints, involves a traditional three- quatrain-and-a-couplet framework, which will be tethered to an iambic meter for increased stability and symmetry. If the planners can secure an additional $6.2 million in funding, they may affix a long dash to the end of line three, though Gioia said that is a purely optimistic projection at this stage. [. . .]

“We’ve already put 200 hours of manpower into the semicolon at the end of the first stanza,” said Charles Simic, poet laureate of the United States and head author of the still- untitled piece. “And I’ve got my best guys working around the clock to convert all the ‘overs’ in the piece into one-syllable ‘o’ers.’ I got [Nobel Prize winner Seamus] Heaney and [Margaret] Atwood stripping all the V’s and tacking apostrophes in their place. It’s grunt work, but somebody’s got to do it if this poem’s going to get done.”