The statistics might lie but men still should not hide behind their lads' mags

Internal links

Book buying is soaring. So why aren't people reading them?

There are lies, damned lies and statistics, scoffed the only Prime Minister to write enjoyable works of fiction, Benjamin Disraeli.

Well, here's a questionable set of figures, from Orange, which cries out for attention. I don't doubt the British (as a statistical abstraction) read shamefully little fiction and that books have to compete with every blinking sort of electronic distraction, or that – and here's a real story – women read infinitely more than men.

But look at one apparent "finding" in the research: the contrast between the meagre 11 minutes spent reading fiction every day with "three hours" passed listening to radio. It's comparing apples and oranges again. Radio (and, pretty often, television) acts as the sensory background wallpaper; whereas a gripping novel – even for a snatched quarter of an hour – becomes the sole focus of thoughts and emotions.

We could express that another way: reading with the concentration a book (rather than an article) demands is more like playing football than like watching it on the box. Now, the Football Association tells me about 3 million Britons play regularly. Assuming a (generous) 30 games per year for each player, I calculate the "average" Brit spends three minutes per week playing football; so reading fiction is almost four times as popular.

Hidden amid the headline-grabbing bullet-points (or pips?) lies a bitter truth that calls for a zestful reaction.

This sample shows that 40 per cent simply don't bother with books. This vast constituency of literate book-shunners is the prime target of the trade today.

Book retailers know well their long-term prosperity depends on reaching those whose idea of literature stops at a glossy magazine. A new body born of library-based initiatives, the Reading Agency, will try to promote books in general, rather than (as publishers do) their own titles.

But these millions of unbookish folk with enough education, money and time to make them worth converting can be more briefly described – men. With its discovery that women out-read men by roughly 2:1, the research shows up yet again the vast gender disparity in reading habits. And in fiction, the chasm is even wider.

Fitfully, libraries and schools are rising to this challenge with schemes aimed at infecting lads early with the book bug.

Sadly, perhaps another way to snare boys is to deepen the links between books and writers and the celebrity culture that now catches everybody's eye. If that means seeing more of Hugh Grant in a catastrophic hair-cut, it might be a (relatively) small price to pay.